A wide array of philosophic topics.

I will have my own favorite links list here soon, for now this will suffice.

A very good, clear, concise introduction to the early 20th century philosophers who influenced certain German psychiatrists to bring existential philosophy into their medical practices. Today, existential thought is no longer found in psychiatry, but as far as medical fields go, it is increasingly being found in some small segments of clinical psychology who find the mainstream models of mechanism and behaviorism to be insufficient models from which to approach the emotional problems of intellectual, highly-educated people. Because the common approaches simply do not work on people with advanced intellectual capacities, a different model has to be used. In this case, existential philosophy turned into a kind of phenomenological psychotherapy (i.e.: the cross-over between existential philosophy and clinical psychology has created a new field called existential psychology) seems to be a far more efficacious approach when dealing with people of above-average intelligence. However, when we look at what clinical psychology has done with existentialism, we see that they have taken exclusively to the theistic existentialists, and have completely ignored the atheistic ones. This is a problem for atheists who would like to delve into existential psychology without the theology. (The first existentialists were almost all atheists, except for Kirkegaard, whom the theological schools often wrongly claim is 'the first existentialist'.)

The books above are a good place to start for an introduction to the existential philosophy that underlies my theoretical orientation. Naturally, I am not in agreement with all parts of the thought of every existential philosopher, in fact, existentialism proper is filled with philosophers who vehemently disagree with each other, yet they share the common thread of attempting to discover and explain in words the nature of the core of the human. Many of the existential philosophers that have become trendy to read in intellectual urbania and suburbania I think are short-sighted because they are following the Hegelian phenomenological tradition of seeing the rational mind as the primary part of the human, when actually it is secondary and in subservience to the passions as David Hume so eloquently, thoroughly and undeniably explained during the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, their thoughts are far beyond the infantile theories found in the medicalism / mechanism / materialism that dominates popular culture today. It is useful to compare and contrast the thoughts of existentialist philosophers, because they are all a very good alternative to the prevailing bio-mechanistic mindset that traps people into being helpless to ignorant psychiatrists and clinical psychologists who are stuck in the mediaeval mechanistic view of the human organism. (The terms 'clinical', 'psychiatric' and 'medical' are synonymous with the term 'bio-mechanistic', which means their theories and 'treatments' therefrom, are based on the mediaeval idea that 'deviant' behaviours are diseases in the same way that Parkinson's Disease is a decay of the body's neurological circuitry. Medicalists have been cutting brains open for the past 300 years, looking for lesions, medical evidence of disease, yet are unable to find any diseases in the brains of people who display behaviours deviant from the 'acceptable' social order. Rather than abandon their theories and create new ones based on the fact that they cannot find evidence to support their theories, instead they cling like frightened children to their beloved medical theories and claim that diseases of the brain do not appear as lesions, but are 'chemcial imbalances', a theory that became popular in the 1960's, and though it too has been disproven by dozens of scientists who study the brain, it is still being clung to despite contradictory empirical evidence. Why? One simple reason: The pharmaceutical industry is the biggest industry in the US (bigger than the oil industry) and it stands to profit immensely from insisting that there is such a thing as a 'chemical imbalance' in the brain which causes 'emotional disorders' and 'mental diseases', even though they have no bloody clue what a chemically balanced brain looks like (which obviously means they can't know what a chemically imbalanced brain looks like if they don't have a balanced one to compare it to, yet somehow this obvious fact is ignored by the general public who has far too much faith in Medicalism). Amazing that so many millions of people can be so easily subdued into compliance and fervent belief (religious belief in the case of the doctors trained in the Medical Model, or Medical Myth as it is called by the doctors who were trained in it, practiced it and found it to be bogus, then renounced it and went on to more sophisticated, efficacious and holistic approaches in the healing arts) in this social construct created by Medicine, that is, created by the dominant force in our culture today: the materialistic / mechanistic / medical view of humanity.

A relatively neutral definition of depth psychology, which is another term that can be used to describe my analytic work. The article is incomplete in that term 'psychology' as used in this article, includes only clinical psychology, and excludes philosophical psychology. Philosophical psychology also has its own set of 'depth psychology' theorists who postulate the existence of an 'unconscious' and theorize on how it affects human behavior, but only clinical theorists are listed in the above article.

A historical summary on the anthropological uses of the term 'fetish'.

A historical summary of clinical theories on sexual fetishism.

An article that summarizes various popular theories on the reasons why some people are sadists or masochists. It is interesting to see various attempts at answering the question "why" about SadoMasochism. Personally, I think they are all mistaken, though there may be a tiny little grain of truth in a couple of them, but overall we can see that they are all subscribing to the Mechanistic mindset that is the zeitgeist of our times, and is not likely to die anytime soon I'm afraid. The lifetime of each zeitgeist is usually a few hundred years. (We are about 400 years into the current zeitgeist, but it is a very strong one. The rain will have to turn to molten steel to burn to the ground our current structures all over the earth before a new zeitgeist can arise out of the ashes of the old adolescent one.)