Latest essay Psychology
On Shame
Shame can organise a life around anticipated rejection. Habitual concealment then begins to feel like personality, making it difficult to recognise what is being protected.
Read the essayWriting by Roman Sutherland
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Essays on belief, identity and how we interpret experience.
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25 essays · Newest first
25 essays
On Shame
Shame can organise a life around anticipated rejection. Habitual concealment then begins to feel like personality, making it difficult to recognise what is being protected.
On Dissociation
An examination of dissociation through changes in the connections between memory, emotion and identity, considering the possible protective role of separation and its costs over time.
On the Decay of a Nation from Within
Bezmenov’s account of ideological subversion provides a starting point for examining how careless language and failing trust can weaken political life from within.
It is what it is. What even is, is?
Dreams prompt a question about waking experience: how could we establish that the reality we inhabit is the final standpoint from which to judge it?
On the Examined Life
A fictional dialogue with Socrates examines the assumptions beneath ordinary beliefs and asks how we can act responsibly without treating uncertainty as arbitrariness.
On the Paradox of Remaining
A personal reflection on how concern about suffering and injustice can weaken motivation when the problems seem larger than any available response.
On the Isolation of the lived Philosopher
The distinction between studying philosophy and living by its questions becomes personal through reflections on conviction, everyday conduct and social isolation.
Accountability Becomes Inevitable
A speculative account of what happens to identity and accountability when connected digital records make a person’s past continuously available for judgement.
Empathy, Weaponised.
In group conflict, shared emotion can carry interpretations and moral certainty before the underlying claims have been examined. What happens to empathy in the process?
What is it about reality that disappoints you so much?
A dialogue considers the frustration of a species capable of reflection repeatedly causing harm, and whether the technologies it builds will change that pattern.
Nousophy: Beyond the Four Letters
Two different MBTI results prompted an examination of typology, leading toward a proposed model of interacting tendencies, stress responses and recurring patterns of behaviour.
Let the Thought Finish
A delayed reply becomes a practical exercise in following a thought through interpretation and emotion before reviewing the assumptions behind its conclusion.
The Name That Explained You Begins Producing You
Giving a pattern a name can change what we expect and notice, allowing a description of past behaviour to begin directing future responses.
Starting Over, Repeatedly
Revisiting old Facebook posts prompts a reflection on development experienced as repeated replacement, followed by efforts to reconnect earlier versions of the self.
How to Win Arguments
Examining an argument’s premises can expose where its conclusion outruns its reasons, while also threatening the personal meaning that makes it worth defending.
The Cost Of Seeing Yourself Clearly
Self-observation can unsettle the habits and explanations a person relies on to function. This complicates the assumption that greater clarity will always help.
Give Me Something to Make Sense Of
A walk past trees bent by wind prompts questions about normality, the influence of environment on behaviour, and the mind’s demand for explanation.
When Free Will Stops Explaining Evil
The free will defence of evil is questioned through an argument about how biology, trauma and social conditions constrain the choices for which people are held responsible.
Narcissism as a Closed System
A proposed account of narcissism focuses on resistance to shame and accountability, examining how protection from uncomfortable feedback can restrict reflection and damage relationships.
The Unfinished Self
The dragonfly’s development supplies a metaphor for unfinished human capacities, questioning whether apparent confusion or scattered interests always mean that growth has stalled.
The Self You Think You Chose
Preferences often become apparent through experience, raising a question about how much of self-discovery involves choosing who to become and how much involves noticing.
Narcissism Is Self-Deception That Outlived Its Purpose
Protective stories about suffering and failure are followed into a proposed account of narcissism, where preserving identity comes to depend on resisting revision.
We Are Algae, Rendered at Maximum Resolution
A naturalistic argument follows physical processes through chemistry, life and consciousness, treating humanity as part of the world it tries to explain.
The Paradox at the Origin of Everything
Questions about the universe’s origin become an argument about the limits of causal reasoning when applied beyond the conditions in which we ordinarily use it.
The Trolley Problem of the Self
The trolley problem becomes a metaphor for choices between past attachments, present stability and possible futures, with attention to what the metaphor leaves out.
From the notebooks / 13 pieces
Aphorisms
Short statements, with room to examine what follows from them.