People often turn to therapy for answers about themselves, their lives or their relationships, but one psychologist says we need to get more comfortable with saying, “I don’t know” –– and that includes therapists too.
Aaron B. Daniels, an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University with a decade plus of experience as a practicing therapist, wants to know what happens when we encounter something that seems unknowable. Do we retreat from that feeling and look for easy answers? Do we dive headfirst into the unknown and change in the process? Most of all, what would it mean for therapists and clients to embrace the unknown, “the inscrutably alien” as he calls it, and dare to be a little more ignorant?
In the new essay collection, “A Phenomenology of the Alien,” Daniels and his collaborators wrestle with all of these questions, citing Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as much as they do movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the books of cosmic horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
Through science fiction, real accounts of alien abductions and even smart houses, the authors want to get us thinking about how the strange, truly mysterious moments in our lives might defy explanation and seem meaningless until we give them meaning.
The collection was also produced with copyediting by students in Daniels’ Psychological Humanities at Northeastern University workgroup.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
