PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology/Yale

One other thing on Freud--just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, "Why can't you marry your mother or your father?" Now, that's actually a difficult question to ask--to answer for a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said--then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, "If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be?" imagining he'd make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, "I would marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts." [laughter] Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us. [laughter]

--Professor Paul Bloom, Session 4, Foundations: Skinner

It was purely by serendipitous chance I came across Yale's open course lectures. I was actually looking for a free audiobook download online, for something like Jane Austen's Persuasion or Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Instead I found professor Bloom.

A piece of iceberg. He meant the top part. Daddy was telling me on the phone that what can be seen may be deceptive. This talk was apparently linked to my applying to college, but I don't see the connection. A piece of iceberg--hopefully this is an encouragement.

Dimensions

     I will just say then: I have seen the children.
     I have seen and talked to them.
     There. What are you thinking at the moment? ... But I want to tell you ... they exist. I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got across to whatever one they are in. 

From Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness

He is not a criminal. Lloyd is only criminally insane. The only mystery I had yet to figure out in the back of my mind was whether he killed the children. 

He did. He used pillows to stifle them. And Sasha--he was a tricky one because was smart--he tried to escape. So for Lloyd to say that he saw the children in another "Dimension"--does that justify anything for Doree?

Doree intended to see Lloyd, to talk to him about the children and their "Dimensions" in her undisguised, truthful self. In the very end, however, she decides not to go to London. She decides to bring a young man's life back instead. Perhaps she finally finds the Dimension she belongs to.  

Too Much Happiness

In the bookstore I considered buying Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. It was on the top of a very tall shelf. I  reached for it on the ladder and carefully considered the weight of its pages. There on the ladder I read the first pages of the last chapter. Of course I could tell it was going to be a good story. But I did not buy it and I did not regret it. Because three weeks ago I got it from my favorite teacher.