On psychology and myths

When psychology tries to interpret the events of an individual's life, what it gives is not a "scientific explanation" but something more akin to literary interpretation. You get a "mythology" of your life; mythologies are not concerned with "accurate description of events" like science does. They are concerned with the moral of the story; why you are the way you are. When you try to explain your life through psychology then, just like in myths, your story will be full of heroes, evil entities, trauma, victims, and what feels like destiny: people often try to impose a sense of destiny on their behavior through psychology i.e. “I will always feel lonely because I wasn't loved enough as a child,” or “I will never achieve this or that because I have this or that mental illness.”

Just like in myths where the hero is entangled in a woven web of events that is destined by the gods, in psychology, the individual is entangled in a woven web of instincts, complexes, and unconscious drives which psychology subtly and implicitly convinces us that it is as much destiny and fate as if the gods themselves wove them. It is no coincidence that Freud used Oedipus as a namesake for a psychological condition: just like when the mythological Oedipus tried to evade fate and failed, so does the psychological Oedipus (the patient, and the individual).

Freud's psychoanalysis is full of mythological symbols and explanations. his idea of the id might as well be identified with the religious devil. This happens for a reason: what psychoanalysing does is that it creates a "story" or a "myth system" that tries to explain "the deeper meaning" of an individual's life. In other words: it shows the moral of the story of a person's life.

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That's where psychology becomes dangerous: precisely because its explanations of our behavior and personality is ingrained with a sense of destiny and fate; that we are the way we are, and do what we do because of some psychological determinism.

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حَسب نيتشه ومما فَسرتهُ، إنَ التمَسُك بالذات قد يَهدِر المَرء دون إلماح هذهِ الجوانب:

- يجب أن يختبر المَرء نفسهُ، ويَكِفَ عن حُب الإمرة.
- نحنُ شهود و قُضاة ذواتنا، علينا ألا نركن لأي شخص.
- إنَ أحب الأشخاص إلينا قَد يكون سِجننا.
- الوَطن فكرةٌ تُضعِف كيان الذات، لأنَ أعز الأوطان تبحثُ عما هو نقصُ حاجتها.
- العِلم قد يُدمر ذواتَنا، لأنَ تصديقه على دوام يجعل ذواتنا محل إختبار "الطب كمثال وتجاربه".
- إنَ شهوة البُعد والبحث عن الذات في الغُربة خَطِرة.
- الإستقلال يبدأ حينَ نعرف كيف نُميز.
- إنَ الوثوق بالفضائل يُحطمُ الهَدف الذي تريدهُ منا كُلياتنا، أي ذواتنا قد تقع في إغواء الجُزئيات.

Alice in Wonderland,
by George Dunlop Leslie

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فإذا أمَرتُكُم بالسَيرِ إليهم في أيّام الصيف، قُلتُم: هذه حَمَارّةُ القَيظ¹، أمهِلنا يُسَبَّخ عنا الحَر. وإذا أمَرتُكُم بالسيرِ إليهم في الشتاء، قُلتُم: هذه صَبَارّةُ القُرِّ²، أمهِلنا يَنسَلِخ عنا البَرد، كُلّ هذا فرارًا مِنَ الحرِّ والقُرّ؛ فإذا كُنتُم مِنَ الحَرِّ والقُرِّ تفرّون فأنتم واللهِ مِنَ السَيفِ أفَرُّ!

¹حَمَارّةُ القَيظ: شِدّةُ الحَر.
²صَبَارَّةُ القُر: شِدّةُ البَرد.

— علي بن أبي طالب (ع)

As one who felt himself in a position to make judgments about the ailments of culture, Nietzsche must have struggled with ambivalence toward a world that was capable of producing him and his philosophy as well as the philosophies of Christianity, anarchism, and Socrates.

What Nietzsche seeks to do as a thinker, I believe, is to prepare us for change. He shows that humanity has a history, that it has been (de-)formed in a particular way, and that the end of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world offers the possibility of another beginning.

— Laughing at Nothing

— دعبل الخزاعي