心理学
Combating Cult Mind Control 豆瓣 Goodreads
作者: Hassan, Stephen Inner Traditions 1990 - 10
A former cult member, now a counselor helping those affected by destructive cults, Hassan exposes the troubling facts about cults' recruitment, their use of psychological manipulation, and their often subtle influence on government, the legal system, and society as a whole."This updated paperback edition includes a new preface by the author and an expanded bibliography and resource list."
2023年1月3日 已读
The church I went to is a nondenominational church. They met from house to house. They had their own Bible. They had a very large amount of internal literature written by past leaders, I've been wondering a lot: are they cult or not?
As I read through the book , I found that many experiences I had are very similar. They may or may not be cult, but there is definately something wrong with their practices:
1. They recruit people, strong, brilliant, and smart people in a subtle way. Or you can say, they cultivate people into smart ones. The members include ivy-league graduates, PhDs, university professors, and staff. They recruit people using the company interns, student organizations, and events. I was initially an intern in their company. Then I was invited to their meeting one day, and a BBQ gathering another day. Eventually, I joined them. How can you resist warm, smart, and brilliant people with deep insight into life?
2. They changed every aspect of my life, clothes, food, diet, where to live, and how to live. I gradually become very dependent on them. They have "brothers house", "sisters house" and "couples house". Because I live with them, unavoidably, I was impacted in many ways in my life. What's worse is that "I'm willing to learn" because they seem to be smarter, happier, and stronger. They took me to go to goodwill and get clothes, my own style was said to be "too childish" in their eyes. They promote healthy diet "plant-based food", so we usually don't eat meat and processed food. I was assigned to share my room with another lady. In the beginning, I didn't have a car, and now I moved into their house so I was far from the city bus line, I had to depend on them to send me to school and pick me up. Therefore, I shared my schedule with them. Sometimes I still wanted to remain some sort of independence, like if I missed the schedule with them, I would call an Uber. But many other times I would be told to "rely on them more because we are families". In the end, when I do things on my own, for example, if I fix my car without letting the leader know, who's expert in cars, I would feel guilty because it implied that "I didn't take them as my family".
3. Their teaching emphasized self-denial. Over-addressing this can be used to wipe out the original identity of a person and create a false new one. "I'm crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Jesus Christ lives in me". "I am not my own, I am not my own, I belong to Jesus, I am not my own." We sing hymns like this a lot. The melodies of the songs are happy and joyful, implying that it's a good thing to "be not yourself". They have a theory of "body, soul and spirit", and there's a book called "breaking of the outer man" and "releasing of the inner man". Therefore, outward things like your knowledge, strength, wisdom, and emotions need to be "broken" so that you no longer use them solely for your own purpose, but "use it for God". "we are merely God's channels, God's oracles". A widely used example in the Church is that we human beings are like Gloves, without God, we are nothing but a shell, so we need to fill it with many other things. Whenever we suffer or got rebuked, the teaching is "whoever wants to follow me shall take up the cross". Members are hinted not to trust himself, but people around him, because a person cannot see himself clearly, and the way to know God's will is to 1) look at the environment, 2) look at God's words, 3) look at group members' reactions.
When I got out of that environment, who I am gradually came back. I start to know what I like and what I don't like. I have my own hobby and my own style. It is wonderful to be myself again.
4. They divide the world into insider and outsider. Even though it's not put into words, it seems like, the world outside the church is corrupted, full of evil and deception. Even among the religious groups, other churches seem to be not "spiritual" enough, focusing too much on the format than reality, or merely entertainment, or too out-of-date.
5. They got involved in members' life too much. For example, how a person studies, works, how they deal with relationships with parents, how they deal with marriage problems, how parents teach kids. People's attitude shall be open and receiving always. The leader often criticizes American's independent attitude as "pride". "Americans always think, who are you dare to be my boss". People who were once offended and left by their offensive words are considered "too shallow" and not able to take the meaning behind the words. For example, the leader once told a story, an ex-member was told to lose some weight and they were offended and left. The leader said "he was offended?! I can't believe he was offended like this!" Another example is that, when I left the church, the leader said I was like the prostitute in the Bible, selling myself to the world. And he said, "young people today are too shallow to understand, see, she was offended". I knew what he meant by saying these, but I also think rude words like this shall never be said to a young lady.
6. They despise logical thinking. Logical thinking is considered of "tree of knowledge of good and evil." We know that eating this fruit "you will surely die", die spiritually. People who graduated with Ph.D. degrees are often criticized as "having a large brain but no spirituality".
7. They took members' time purposefully. One member once told me that the leader said he would like to take all the time of us so that we are not wasting time on worldly things. They had long meetings of 4 hours, weekend activities, weekday night readings, etc.
8. They said members are free to go, but actually not. I left the church twice. The first time, I failed to leave because I initiated it and I still had strong guilt of leaving. They said to me, "why do you think you can just come and go?" But the second time, I saw how wrong they treated me and other members. When I asked to leave, they condemn me saying I "cut the relationship". And I was pictured as an evil person who lied to everyone just to gain benefit from the Church and rebuked with words such as "demon-possessed" "Cain".
9. They pressured the whole church to join missionary work. it is described by the leader that there's no truly good literature outside that Church, therefore we needed to do literature work. There are two approaches: 1) conventional approach 2) new media approach. Therefore, for the fist approach, we spent a lot of time transcribing meeting audio recordings into text. For the second approach, we set up a website, edit videos, host events,
10. They practiced "hot seat" a lot. They usually sit in a circle in meetings, and when someone made a mistake that's considered severe in the leader's eye, he will announce it in front of everyone. It is not until I was in that position of being singled out that I realized how stressful it is.
心理学
心理学与生活 豆瓣 Goodreads
8.9 (42 个评分) 作者: [美] 理查德·格里格 / [美国] 菲利普·津巴多 译者: 王垒 / 王甦 等 人民邮电出版社 2003 - 10
《心理学与生活》是美国斯坦福大学多年来使用的教材,也是在美国许多大学里推广使用的经典教材,被ETS推荐为GRE心理学专项考试的主要参考用书,还是被许多国家大学的“普通心理学”课程选用的教材。这本教科书写作流畅,通俗易懂,深入生活,把心理学理论与知识联系人们的日常生活与工作,使它同样也成为一般大众了解心理学与自己的极好读物。
作为一本包含着丰富的教育思想和独特教学方法的成熟教材,原书中所有元素——如由600余条词汇及解释组成的“专业术语表”,2000余条“参考文献”,以及近1000条的“人名和主题索引”等等,对于教学、研究和学习都十分宝贵,此中译本完整地翻译和保留了这些资料。
津巴多普通心理学 豆瓣
Psychology: Core Concepts, 5th Edition
8.7 (15 个评分) 作者: [美] 菲利普·津巴多 / [美] 罗伯特·约翰逊 译者: 王佳艺 中国人民大学出版社 2008 - 7
北京师范大学心理学院教授张厚粲
耶鲁大学心理学博士 芝加哥大学 终身教授 奚恺元 专文推荐
斯坦福大学著名心理学家、美国心理协会(APA)前主席
畅销书《心理学与生活》作者菲利普·津巴多扛鼎之作
连续15年成为最畅销的普通心理学教材
被哈佛大学等近300所国际知名大学广泛采用
《津巴多普通心理学》(Psychology: the Core Concepts)已连续五版成为最畅销的心理学教材。它以一种非常生动有趣的写作设计和安排,如“生活中的心理学”、“应用心理学知识学习心理学”、“亲自实践”等板块,阐述了心理学的核心概念和关键问题——给予学生掌握心理学导论的激励与工具。
主要特色:
正如这本心理学的副标题“核心概念”所提及的一样,作者聚焦于大多数老师所认同的那些心理学核心概念——而这些概念对学生学习心理学导论往往又是最重要的,同时又把那些与心理学核心概念毫无关联的内容摒弃,从而让学生更加集中精力学习、掌握和运用心理学的核心科学原理。
每章中的关键问题会激发你想象本章或这一部分所涉及的主要内容,即核心概念。实际上,核心概念往往给这些问题提供了简单的答案,并帮助学生更好地理解心理学这个错综复杂的庞大画面。围绕“关键问题”和“核心概念”设计的章末知识总结是旨在帮助学生简要地回顾该章所涉及的主要内容,强化所学知识。
各章每个部分末尾为学生设计了理解测试题。这些测试题可以帮助学生迅速判断自己是否掌握了每章相关部分的主要内容
亲自实践:这些参与型的活动能够更好地向学生展示相关的心理学知识。在这些活动中,有许多都取自我们自己的教学实践,其中包括确定视觉盲点的位置,演示心理定势,确定工作记忆的容量,确定个人的控制源,应对智商测试,以及演示令人惊讶的社会心理学实验。
生活中的心理学:心理学之所以能够吸引广大学生,其原因之一就是它所涉及的知识与生活密切相关。本教材在各章每个主要部分的末尾都会介绍相关心理学知识在生活中的应用。
运用心理学知识学习心理学:在每一章的末尾,将会告诉学生如何运用本章所学的知识学好心理学。
连接箭头:本书还有另一个特点:如果某章涉及其他章节的重要内容,那么就会在页边空白处用箭头标明该内容在其他章节中的位置,以供学生参考。箭头下的参考信息不但可以告诉学生本书其他部分还有哪些相关的内容,而且可以帮助学生理清相关知识点的脉络,让他们感到心理学的知识点往往是密切联系的。
文化和性别:几乎每章都会有一个与文化或性别相关的概念。作者并不想在一些角落里把这些话题随意带过,而是将它们完全整合在课文之中。
推荐书籍和视频:在每章章末都有与本章内容相关的推荐图书,其中既有非常经典之作,也有最新研究成果;此外,作者还推荐了一些电影,这些与本章内容丝丝入扣的电影——其中不乏欧美大片——不仅可以为读者带来精彩的视觉享受,而且还能从影片中学习到心理学知识。
与其他心理学教材相比:
本书的一大优势就是作者。津巴多教授的名字会出现在任何一本普通心理学教科书中,他对于心理学研究贡献是巨大的。而且津巴多还讲述了自己在斯坦福读研究生时的一些有趣研究经历。并且对学生的职业发展提出了自己的建议。这对于跃跃欲试的年轻人无疑具有很强的激励作用。
本书的另一大优势就是参与性强。你可以看到,厚厚的一本书可以浓缩为几十个问答,即“关键问题”和“核心概念”。特别值得一提的是,每章末尾的“推荐书籍和视频资料”这部分,虽然书中列出的书籍学生不太容易读到,但是列出的大部分影片还是能够找到的。所以,在阅读这本教材的一大乐趣就是按图索骥,观看作者推荐的一些电影。这些电影不但精彩,而且与相关章节的主题丝丝入扣。看电影学心理学一定是一种快乐的学习方式。
逃避自由 豆瓣
8.8 (38 个评分) 作者: [美] 埃里希·弗罗姆 译者: 刘林海 国际文化出版公司 2002 - 8
精神分析学说是奥地利精神病医生、心理学家弗洛伊德在20世纪初创立的。弗洛伊德最初是作为神经病学家和精神科医生来从事研究的。其研究对象主要是歇斯底里症患者。他发现歇斯底里症的根源主要不是由于生理的原因,而是在于深刻内在的心理因素。他将这种存在的心理因素归结为儿童期被压抑的性意识,并由此创立了“无意识性本能学说”,认为神经症的发作就是性意识的长期压抑最后总爆发的结果。弗洛伊德将他的发现加以总结,形成了一种全新的、最富创见的心理学说,并将这一学说全面推广到哲学、社会、宗教、文化领域,形成了一个庞大的思想体系。
埃里希·弗罗姆一直致力于研究现代人的性格结构及有关心理因素和社会因素相互作用的问题。这本《逃避自由》是这项研究的一部分。目前的政治发展及其对现代化最伟大的成就——个性及人格的独一无二性的潜在威胁,使他决定中断大范围的研究,集中精力专门研究对现代文和社会危机最要紧的一个方面,即,自由对现代人的含义。