Most psychology vocabulary reaches people second-hand. Transference has come to mean falling for your therapist, projection is a way of ending arguments, the shadow is a weekend of journal prompts, and there is a wheel of twelve archetypes that Jung never drew. The fourteen pages below each start from the same place: what the term […]
A senior engineer is promoted to lead a team. Within a month she is convinced the decision was a mistake that will shortly become obvious to everyone. Her manager, who has worked with her for four years, tells her she is excellent at this. It changes nothing, and the reason is worth understanding. Her manager […]
The pyramid implies a sequence: physiological needs, then safety, then belonging, then esteem, then self-actualisation at the summit — each unlocking the next. Consider what that predicts. A person in financial precarity should not be pursuing creative work. Someone whose housing is insecure should not be writing, composing or building anything that does not pay. […]
A developer sits down to work on a feature. The task is “improve the onboarding”. She has four hours, Slack is open, and she is not sure what finished looks like. None of the three conditions is present. The goal is not clear enough to know whether any particular action is progress. There is no […]
A woman in her late thirties describes it as having started on an ordinary Tuesday. Her father’s funeral had been four months earlier and she had, she thought, handled it. Then she was in a supermarket and found herself unable to see the point of the next forty years. Nothing about this fits an anxiety […]
He has gone quiet after an argument. Nothing dramatic — he has stopped replying to messages and has said he needs some space. To him this is self-evidently reasonable: he is upset, he wants to think, he will be fine tomorrow. To her it is unbearable, and the reason is not that she is unreasonable. […]
A woman finds one colleague almost unbearable. He is, in her account, always angling — positioning, managing upward, never quite straight with anyone. Two other people on the team describe him as fine. The gap between her reading and theirs is the first signal. The second is that she thinks about him outside work, composes […]
A man of fifty-two has done everything correctly. The career is solid, the family is intact, the house is paid down. What he cannot explain is why the whole arrangement has started to feel like something he is maintaining rather than living in. There is no crisis to point at. That is part of what […]
A man turns down a job that looks good on paper. He cannot say why. The salary is better, the work is interesting, and he has been complaining about his current role for a year. A cognitive scientist would look for fast automatic processing — something registered during the interview and weighed below awareness. The […]
Ask three people from different places to describe a figure of wisdom and you will get three different pictures — a robed elder, a grandmother, a particular teacher from school. The images share almost no surface detail. What they share is structure: someone older who knows something you do not, whose knowledge is given rather […]