Before Psychology

Psychology was a fascinating new science when I was growing up.

I remember my father's excitement when he first encountered the concept of inferiority complex (probably in the Readers Digest).

That's what I have! he announced, suddenly understanding himself. When you grow up without a father, like I did, that's what happens. You get an inferiority complex.

Inferiority complex became one of his favorite expressions... He wore it with pride... Understanding made it easier to bear.

I'm not sure my mother ever took a psychology course. In any event, she never referred to it - and she never embraced psychology as a personal tool of self-understanding. In later years she was haunted by remorse, remembering my young brother's tears when she left him from Monday to Friday with her mother, who lived a two-hour drive away, during a period of time when she (a teacher) couldn't find a babysitter near our home.

I still think of how he cried and clung to me, she said. (What could I say?)

Well, that's the past. I told her. You can't do anything about it now.

Maybe confessing it helped, as she never mentioned it again.

I first encountered psychology in my first year English literature course at university. As our prof focused almost entirely on deeper levels of mind and motive - subconscious desires, Freudian slips, hidden fears, phallic symbols... - we asked each other:

Where does he find all that stuff? Is it really there? Or is he making it up?!

Literature (and life) suddenly became more complex...

And so it remains: Trying to understand the psychological reasons for what is happening around me (and inside me) is simply the way I look at life.

How would I view life differently if I had lived before psychology?