If you happen to fall under the spell of Libra, don’t surrender too quickly. Let them flirt with you for a while. Even if they push towards a relationship, imagine that it’s just the scales tipping to compensate for your cooler attitude. Libra has so much fun pursuing relationships that they will love you for dragging out the anticipation. Read the rest of this entry »

Libra, seventh house, Venus

Part of body

The bladder, kidneys, lumbar region, haunches to buttocks, adrenal glands, lumbar nerves and blood vessels.

Potential ailments

Kidney and bladder disorders, eczema, lumbago, abscesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the most recent research conducted on the brain - the organ that produces human mental activity - proves that the man currently uses only a small part of its capacities.

Construction of the human brain is based on two hemispheres; one specialized in logical reasoning, the other responsible for intuitive understanding. Experiments have shown that, if the two hemispheres are separated, they are no longer able to communicate with one another, one functions are taken over by other hemisphere. It’s like the human body could adapt to survive, like “should know” that it needs both types of knowledge, both the rationale, and the intuitive.

Some experts consider that, during his prehistory, one man held the sixth sense, the telepathy. It says that only education and objective conditions adapting to human survival would have reduced the importance of relationships and cerebral thinking, like all human faculties that have been left to dawdle, telepathic sense (mental communication), atrophied. Read the rest of this entry »

Our emotional lives are often described in terms of a quest — we search for the right partner, for love and fulfillment. Conversely, we might speak of losing someone close to us, or losing love itself. It is hardly surprising, then, that our dreams use imagery of discovery and loss, often in a literal sense, to mirror the highs and lows of our emotional experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

The Virtual Dream

A man and a woman are arguing. The man wants to spend a month traveling alone — a long—held ambition. As they argue, the man backs into a table, Read the rest of this entry »

Wind speed is conventionally measured according to the Beaufort Scale, which ranges from (when smoke from a chimneygoes straight up) to 12 and upward (when hurricanes rip the roofs from houses). It is fun to measure your dreams against the following Beaufort Scale of eroticism, and to discuss the score of a particular dream with your partner.

1. Anxiety dreams in which the symbols seem non-sexual — for example, dreams of pennilessness or speaking in public.

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Although we are not always willing to admit it, there comes a time in every relationship when we find ourselves attracted, perhaps even tempted, by someone else. Of course, acting on this impulse causes a world of trouble that may damage your relationship irreparably, but sometimes the thoughts and feelings alone are enough to breed guilt and hurt — even fantasies can bring with them the specter of broken trust. To make matters worse, this is the one issue that most couples find almost impossible to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

Few experiences are as emotionally taxing, if not outright traumatic, ending of a relationship. Even when it is our own decision to call things to a h the situation is nearly always fraught with pain; and often this is mixed with conflict and bitterness.

At times of parting, dreams can bolster our strength and renew our hopes for the future. If the relationship was truly flawed, you might even find that your dreams seem to rejoice in the prospect of a rescued future. Images of liberation, open spaces, exhilarating physical exercise, or magical transformations, can all be taken as signs that you or your partner have taken the right step. If no such images appear, one approach would be to attempt to conjure them into your dreams by affirmations prior to sleep. Using this method you can stimulate revitalizing dreams of perseverance, emotional stability, and empowerment. Affirmations can work well in triads — for example, you might say softly to yourself before drifting off to sleep: “I seek the wisdom to recognize my path_; I seek the courage to follow my path_; I seek the strength to persevere on my path.” The same affirmations would be appropriate at various stages in the parting process: you could use them before making the final break, or to see you through a series of painful discussions, as well as when trying hard not to contact your ex-partner.

The death of a parent can affect us for longer than we consciously realize, mingling confusingly with other emotional situations. This case study shows how dreamwork can help to clarify the long-term hurts that bereavement inflicts.

Mary was the newly married wife of a police officer, who broke her vow that she would never fall in love with a cop. She knew all too well the dangers of her husband’s job, because her father, a police officer for 30 years, was killed in the line of duty. But love for Jay finally triumphed over Mary’s reservations. Unfortunately, her anxiety returned early on in their married life, to the extent that she began to experience periods of panic — she feared that her husband, like her father, would one day not return from work. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of us seem rather fascinated with crimes and criminals. I’m not basing this statement on any scientific evidence, but have you been to the video store lately? Movies about crimes and those who commit them dominate the shelves. The evening news, primetime television shows, and practically all other forms of popular media keenly focus their camera lenses on crime.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe we focus on crime because of its powerful impact on the lives of everyone involved, from the victim to the perpetrator. Maybe it’s just a morbid curiosity. One thing is for sure though, whether we’re fascinated by it or not, crime affects everyone. Statistics show that one out of three people will be a victim of crime at least once this year. Crime has been a hot topic for politicians because of these appalling crime rates in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of parents remember their child’s first words. When their little one utters the words momma or dada, their hearts usually melt. Ball usually doesn’t get the same reaction.

The dominant position in psychology on the development of language is that language is innate and gradually unfolds as the child’s brain develops. This doesn’t mean that children are born with a language, but that they’re born with the innate mental capacity to learn and grasp the rules of the language community they’re born into. Parents can facilitate language development by providing a supportive and stimulating environment and prompting children to use their words to communicate their needs and desires. Read the rest of this entry »

With successful resolution of the conflicts of each previous stage, children enter into a more quiet time of psychosexual development called latency. The libido loosens its grip on the personality, and the impulses cease to dominate. Kids find more freedom to explore and expand on the skills they’ve gained from each subsequent stage. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when you thought that all of your personality traits had been described, Freud comes up with his third stage: the phallic stage. I’ve explained your orally fixated gum-smacking officemate. The pile of clothes on the floor of your room will never look the same after learning about the anal stage. But I’ve promised you sex, and it’s time to deliver, well sort of. The 3- to 5-yearold child is focused on the erogenous stimulation of the genital area, the penis and vagina specifically. In the phallic stage, gratification begins with autoeroticism. That means masturbation to the rest of us. But our need for satisfaction soon turns toward our parents, typically the parent of the opposite sex. As our sexual satisfaction expands, we find ourselves within the realm of one of Freud’s most controversial and strange contributions to the study of personality, the Oedipus complex. Read the rest of this entry »

All babies have to grow up some time, and when they do, they graduate to the erogenous focus of the anal stage, Freud’s second stage of personality development. Think pleasure, your relentless libido striving for satisfaction. Think defecation. Say what? That’s right, Freud emphasized the control over defecating as the pleasure center from 18 months to 3 years old. The central conflict for toddlers is control! Kids in this stage want the ability to poop whenever they want and wherever they want. Like in their pants! But the reality that they have to hold it creeps in, conjuring images of long trips in the family car, “Are we there yet? I have to go!” Read the rest of this entry »

Every year around the same time I get sick. It never fails. Come October,I’ve got a cold. Is it the weather? Is it a cosmic curse? Somewhere along the line I made a connection between my getting sick and stress. When I was in school, it was the stress of midterms. Now, it’s the stress of the holidays. Something different stresses out each of us, and some of us can even get physically ill as a result.

Psychologists have worked hard over the years trying to figure out what stresses people out. Within the last 20 years or so, they’ve started to use their knowledge of human behavior and mental processes to learn more about what makes people sick and how people cope with illness. In this chapter,I introduce the concepts of stress and coping and the growing field of health psychology. Read the rest of this entry »

There may be as many interview techniques in the psychological world as there are individual psychologists out there. Everyone has a different way of getting at the relevant information. So what is the relevant information? As I state in the previous section, most encounters begin with a discussion of the presenting problem. Very few people who come to a psychologist describe their problem according to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th Edition, (DSM-IV) criteria. Complaints are often vague or convoluted. Early communication problems between the psychologist and the patient are not necessarily because people don’t understand themselves. They’re often due to the fact that the doctor and patient have different vocabularies to describe the same problem. You say toMAYto, and I say toMAHto. You say you can’t sleep, eat, or stop crying, and I say you’re depressed. Read the rest of this entry »

What if the office manager waits until the end of the year at the office Christmas party to reinforce the timely workers? Chances are they would have forgotten all about the incidents and accepted the gift, while not experiencing any its reinforcing effects.

Research by G. R. Grice and K. W Spence has shown that reinforcement must occur immediately, or as quickly as possible, following the desired response. If you wait too long, the connection between the response and the reinforcing consequence is lost. Thorndike’s cats would have never gotten out of those crates if they were given a food voucher to be redeemed on their next visit to Cat Food Deluxe. Read the rest of this entry »

Does a plant grow toward sunlight because it wants to? Would a little rebellious plant, the black sheep of ferns, grow toward the shade just to be different? A plant couldn’t perform this feat even if it wanted to. Plants grow toward the sunlight because they can’t help themselves. They need sunlight in order to survive. That’s an instinct.

An instinct is an automatic, involuntary, and unlearned behavior that occurs in response to a specific trigger, or stimuli. Numerous examples of what we consider human instincts can be found in phrases that we use every day: the maternal instinct, the survival instinct, the killer instinct, the gut instinct, and so on. Instincts motivate us in the sense that we do what we do because we have to do it. It’s something we do automatically and involuntarily. Read the rest of this entry »

After you decide to do something about your unhealthy lifestyle, what can you actually do? When the decision to change has been made, you can do a couple of things to get the ball rolling. Health psychologists or other health professionals can design interventions that help you change and maintain that change. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, a person commits a crime, sometimes horrific and sometimes not, and his lawyer, whether it be a high-priced celebrity lawyer or his public defender, says that he was “insane” at the time the crime was committed. Most of us are familiar with this defense strategy. We’ve seen it in the movies, and we’ve seen it in real life. What counsel is arguing following a conviction or stipulated verdict (”Yeah, okay, my client is guilty as charged”), is the defendant is not guilty due to having been insane at the time of the commission of the alleged crime.

An insanity plea is a legal concept that states that a defendant is not legally responsible for the crime due to being insane at the time it’s committed. Read the rest of this entry »