PSY 230 H – Personality and its Transformations – View Course Page It was issues of personality and its transformations that thrust psychology into the forefront of popular consciousness during the twentieth century. Psy230H addresses these intensely interesting topics. The first half of the course deals with classic issues of psychology. The psychoanalytic thinkers — Freud, Jung and Adler — are placed in a context of pre-experimental religious and ritual thought, devoted to the transformation of habit and interpretive schema. The existentialists, phenomenologists, and humanists — concerned with the relationship between the individual, meaning and health — are discussed from the perspective of philosophy and political science. The constructivists are dealt with from a viewpoint that is simultaneously developmental and ontological. The second half of the course deals with issues of modern experimental psychology, from a more biological standpoint. Issues of motivation and information-processing are considered from within a standpoint that is essentially cybernetic: how do human beings operate in the world? What are their goals, their ends and means? What role do emotions and fundamental motivational states play in adaptation to the environment? How might personality traits and disorders be understood, from within such a framework?

Self-Deception – View Course Page The very existence of self-deception remains subject to debate, despite its apparently “normative” nature, and the immense effort devoted towards its explication. The consequences of self-deception, assuming its existence, appear no less ill-specified: classical theories of morality and personality place it at the very core of the process that generates psychopathology, while the increasingly mainstream view of social psychology appears to be that self-deception – at least in “optimal” doses – makes people happier, empathic, creative and more productive. When an issue remains contentious, despite diligent efforts to address it, it is very likely that it has been poorly conceptualized – very likely that the spoken and unspoken presuppositions that underlie its current formulation are ill-defined or simply wrong. We will, in consequence, lay out these presuppositions, alter them where necessary, and reformulate the idea of self-deception, using information derived from cybernetic theory and modern neuropsychology, buttressed by knowledge of relevant narrative, mythological, and philosophical thinking.