The end of hibernation

There I am, back from hibernation.

Winter brought snow, cozy moments in the winter garden, and good laughs with family and friends. Then I found myself getting back to reality, which was (and is) filled with countless hours in the office, liters of coffee, and delicious cupcakes. At the same time, the international community is welcoming and provides some indispensable leisure opportunities and comfort.

Rarely, however, reflection on a life I chose to lead is possible. I know that it’s somewhat derisory to say that there’s a lack of time, particularly since I’m an absolute believer in and practitioner of efficient time management.  Needless to say that for the important things in life there shall always be time. It’s all a matter of priority. However, when your priorities are relatively widely spread, time may indeed work against you (IVB!). Ergo I’m happy to finding a moment for reflection.

In terms of academics, I’m a happy person. Two of my (highly excellent, peripherally boring) review papers have been accepted for publication. At the same time, one got rejected and I need to work on three further papers’ revisions. It’s quite odd that I still want to write now. Be that as it may, the most proximate plan is to finally put my precious survey online. After approximately twelve times of inputting it, I need to do it all over again. The highly sophisticated website won’t allow any mistakes and makes you start all over again once you miss a coma or other trivialities that are of high importance. Research is fun!

In terms of sociability, life is good. I am constantly meeting interesting people, who understand all the pressure and pain a PhD-to-be is going through. At the same time, they do appreciate the apparent cultural differences that make the British quite peculiar (or that make us “foreigners” quite odd). I learned that networking, even on an almost entirely academic scale, is one of the most precious gifts a PhD project entails. It is all about sharing, whining and laughing and taking it easy. A friend’s smile will always brighten up your day. A friend’s frown, on the other hand, will produce frowning on your behalf. The goal is sharing emotions, sharing life.

Apart from the emergence of new people, old people bid goodbye. This, for myself, is something that may cause serious damage to equilibrium and self-perception. It appears that the world is not always the perfect little place one dreams it is. Potentially, it is necessary to leave the safe and secure place that is called my little world and view life more critically. Once the pink bubble bursts there’s no way back. Even if there was some secret path back to pink, this path will be paved with blue stumbling blocks. Those call for more critical, sometimes cynical, reflection. The apparent loss is not only a loss of an external person, but it is a loss of a petite part of the internal person, yourself. It appears rather naïve to claim that a loss is a gain in growth. Maybe it’s a question of time. There we are again, with time working at a high pace. Sometimes what you need to do is to ask for a time-out.  

42 means you barely passed.

Now that I have about fifty psychology students to take care of, I may claim myself to have become something like a tutor. How exciting! As a friend put it: It’s exciting to have people’s futures in your hands. Apparently, I do.

Initially, I’ve been excited to be able to share some of my pseudo-professional knowledge and likewise learn from what young and fresh people’s minds have to offer. And then…

…disillusionment set in.

I’ll tell you how this happened. I got a bunch of papers to mark. So far, so good. Until I started reading. Some of my students are bright, potential researchers. Others have turned my inherent positive attitude upside down. Once you read reports lacking the most basic language skills, not to mention a lack of logic, you sit there frustrated and disillusioned, thinking about anything that may cheer you up.

42 means you barely passed.

When I used to study, I needed a 60 to pass. Anyways, apart from the limited academic standards which, as I learned, are common standard in undergraduate education in the UK, getting a 42 appears to be more difficult than you might have guessed.

Fortunately, my kids have me. They will pass. And I plan to teach them how to get their methods right. And their references. And their error bar charts. (Hopefully this story will find an end once they hand in their next reports.)

In need of a shrink?

Let me tell you about my latest visit to the shrink – or rather, to the Sherwood Institute which specializes in breeding shrinks.

It is an atmospheric place with lots of cozy couches, reminiscent of classical psychoanalysis. It houses a fireplace and it is located in an antique British building, which is in no way inferior to Freud’s eventual London residence. The natives of that place appear to blend in with the scenery, adding up to its distinctive and impressively familiar appeal. As a visitor you are welcomed by open faces, attentive and courteous, munificent with hospitality.

The intern library, situated in subterranean cellars, does not even shy away from presenting with specialist literature on spiritualism.

Training is offered in different forms of psychotherapy and counseling, including gestalt, person-centered, cognitive-behavioral and integrative psychotherapy, based on an assemblage of professional practice and academic research.

As is the case with other European countries, turning into a shrink comes at a cost in the UK. Inevitably this cost is not trivial. Apart from pecuniary costs, these costs extend to psychological costs and sacrifices on behalf of the future shrink.

Becoming a psychologist, becoming a therapist, is not merely a decision. It is a way of life. It is an ideology, which does not ask for a decision to adopt it, but for a fluid development to embrace it. How else could a person consent to listening empathically to a stranger pouring out his heart, disclosing his greatest fears and desires, dormant up to then, offering his absolute attention and giving away his professional and most humane aid?

The story does not end at realizing altruistic ideals. Potentially even more substantial is the innate need to understand how the human mind works. For a psychologist it is indispensable to uncover how his own mind works, why he thinks the way he thinks and why he feels what he feels. The psychologists’ altruism is nourished by his egoism. In fact, there may be a little narcissist hiding in a psychologist which becomes transferred to the person who seeks his professional help.

Ergo a shrink needs a shrink. Correspondingly, a therapists’ education in the UK entails seeing a therapist. As obvious as this may seem at first glance, it appears less so when compared to standard practice in Germany.

Apparently, only by better understanding himself can the psychologist progress towards understanding the other.

Psychology appears as a journey which necessitates the willingness to open up. The greatest challenge is self-reflection.

To work or not to work - The power of procrastination

Permanent head damage inevitably leads to the PhD‘s favorite pastime activity: Procrastination. If you take a closer look you may wonder whether “pastime” really belongs in that sentence. Not necessarily.

Sometimes it does take quite some effort to bring yourself back to focus. Sometimes you’ll be desperate for coming up with important stuff such as doing your laundry or washing the dishes, all for the purpose of delaying anything that has the slightest bit to do with your project. You may feel like a cat that apprehends water anxiously, with a fierce look in its eyes and its fur and tail erect.

How do you persuade yourself to get back to business?

Take an essential break. Do something for your body. Call your mother. Procrastination is essential to getting back to normal, to reverse the supposed permanent head damage. Get back to a state of mediocrity for once.

But bear in mind your deadlines! It doesn’t seem to be the smartest thing to do to wasting the evening away with everyday profanities when you know that the next morning you need to be sophisticated again. This does not mean that I don’t appreciate improvisation. In fact I’m a big fan of it. Instead, even improvisation must be grounded upon something more than merely speaking your mind. If you want to improvise, you must mentally prepare yourself for doing that. You must set the stage for the act of acting, actually. Don’t merely rely on your rhetorical skills in charming the pants off your audience. Charisma is indispensable, but it won’t necessarily do the job, particularly when you’re faced with an audience that you cannot really predict. Particularly when it’s an audience that doesn’t consist of males only.

So there’s nothing left to do but to put yourself in the adequate state of mind for both delivering sophisticated results and improvising where necessary.

Now I need to come up with some more essential household choires. 

PhD = permanent head damage

So what is a PhD, actually?

I asked a like-minded friend and his answer was: Didn’t you know that PhD stands for permanent head damage?

Now when I listen to other friends’ accounts, I learn about all the academic blackouts they’ve experienced. Once I’m in the office, I merely have to look at their faces to realize that something weird’s happening in those brains. It goes from laborious deliberation to Eureka moments, sometimes followed by an apparent loss of focus, so that the initial ingenious idea is gone with the wind.

Constant focus, or the inveterate search for it, may lead to a vacuum, ensuing in a state of hollowness. To overcome this, PhDs will be desperate to find distraction. Coffee breaks seem appropriate. They, however, may lead to symptoms traditionally associated with addictions… And there we go again, with the mind wandering off.  

Sometimes you’ve got to be silly in order not to lose your head.

Welcome to PhD prison

Imprisonment is the deprivation of freedom. You are deprived of freedom when you cannot do what you want to do. If you cannot take a weekend off because you have to work, you are deprived of your freedom. When the reason for this is your PhD work, you are kindly welcomed to PhD prison, the place to be.

As a PhD student, you’re supposed to love the research you’re doing. You’re supposed to be absolutely enthusiastic about your literature, your participants and your stats. But guess what: That’s just one side of the coin. Once you’re involved in producing output, the whole process of accumulating your data and information can become somewhat of a hassle. Not only do you try to put together the required data, you’ll find yourself trying hard to make sense of it, to structure and organize it and to present it in a comprehensive fashion. In either of these stages, it can happen – indeed it may be inevitable – that you get stuck. Once you get stuck, there is little chance for you to break free even if it’s just for a tiny break because your conscientiousness won’t let you.

I fell victim to this tragic fate. Once I finished a literature review on cybersex addiction, I started off doing the same for online gaming addictions. Doing this reinforced me dwelling on my own addictions, CCC. Coffee, cake and cigarettes are the way to go when you need to digest 60 studies and put them into one coherent, concise and comprehensive piece of academic work within a week. And it makes you get through those busy Sundays, in which you’re desperate to fight the effects of last night’s entertainments while forcing your brain to work to its (semi-)fullest capacity. The fruits of this imprisonment are publications in peer-reviewed journals. Yeah, baby! This may be worth sacrificing a weekend. By the time of official publication I may be a doctor… That’s as scary as it can get.

In the end, PhD prison demarcates the victory of the super-ego over the Id. And I am as bold as to claim that the PhD’s super-ego is inevitably superior to his Id. I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt by mentioning that I phrased it the other way round initially – a Freudian slip?

equal, but different

Made of flesh and blood, endowed with potentially capable brains, men and women are equal.

Look at the main clause: Doesn’t the men’s priority in mentioning them first, which is common practice not only in English language, already imply that we are different? Is it not rather the case that neither our flesh and blood nor our brains are equal?

Take the following instance as being symbolical for the general discrepancy between theoretical equality and practical difference in women and men. The supposedly egalitarian world of academia is not exempt from (implicit) gender segregation. The truth is that although half of the girls in some German states reach higher education entrance qualification compared to only one third of boys, the former make up only five percent of the professorship. This fact is referred to as institutional racism in higher education by Rangasamy, where discrimination is apparently not as implicit as it may be assumed to be. The question that may be immediately raised is that of why? Why are women being discriminated against in a context where equality is cherished, at least theoretically? Is it because of traditional gender roles, which my granddad would bluntly summarize in the long-established idea of women’s duties restricted to the fields of Kinder-Küche-Kirche, meaning that they are confined to a domestic space including their kids, the kitchen, and, as social meeting place, the church? Don’t get me wrong, my gramps is very progressive and egalitarian, particularly when it comes to the unwritten but still manifest gender roles in Poland, a country that is much more traditional than some other Western European country. Still, this mere idea of segregating women into a particular “female” space and thus secluding them from anything that belongs to higher education, critical thinking and higher occupational positions, is worthy of notice. If females do get a good position, they often have to work twice as much and will still earn about twenty percent less although they have exactly the same qualifications and competencies.

Apart from academia, women and men are different when it comes to the pursuit of sex. Even now. From an evolutionary perspective, it appears logical that men are the active part seeking to spread their genes anytime anywhere, whereas females take a more cautionary approach in making sure that their offspring is being cared for by a loving and nurturing partner. This may explain men’s higher desire for sex and women’s emotional involvement in relationships to a certain extent. But this won’t be the whole story about why men have been openly practicing their sexuality since the year one, whereas women’s desire went fairly unnoticed until researchers like Kinsey scientifically investigated female sexuality for the first time in the 50’s. It appears that the whole difference in sexual desire experienced by males and females does not merely rest on some immutable biological factors, but a great deal of it can be traced back to cultural factors, memes, if you will. A logical consequence of cultural segregation of females from their physical selves and sexual desires is their eventual quest for liberation. Since in real life it’s still difficult for a woman to overcome unwritten taboos in this respect particularly when it comes to practices which are deemed deviant, they may seek adventures and fulfillment in alternative spheres, one of which is the virtual. Not surprisingly, scientific studies show that it’s females, a marginalized group with regards to the pursuit of sexual behaviors, who engage in cybersex and who engage in it compulsively. It appears that if there’s no real world outlet, it can be found in some dark corner of a chat room or anything comparable. What may be even more interesting is the scientifically validated fact that it is particularly females who will go and meet their virtual sex partners in real life and they are much more likely (significantly more likely, for that matter) to do this relative to their male counterparts.

To phrase it in the words of a friend, the moment, when women and men are equal appear in mutually experienced and shared love. However, this moment may soon be over when one of them loses their faith in the relationship for however irrelevant the reason may be. And there we are, back again at the imbalance, the difference that appears, viewed from another perspective. The difference may grow in scope and impact because egocentricity, the innate survival instinct, takes the space of commitment.

So why do we claim to be equal, when, in the end, we’re so different? And anything but equal? Let me quote again: “because in love at some point in space and time we are equal”. Possibly that’s exactly the equality that both men and women are seeking, without compromises, without established gender roles, beyond the transcendentality of academia, the profanity of life and physical desires.