Statement of Purpose

Below is my application essay—ie statement of purpose—for graduate school. I’ve received some questions about it, so I figure I’d post it for everyone to see. Also, while rereading it, it’s clear it was never intended to be my purpose for school, though I didn’t know it at the time. Rather, it’s the purpose for Animus. The integration of psychology that I speak of is Man's Guide to Psychology, and my articles, podcasts, therapeutic process, and magazines are a demonstration of what the integration of psychology is.

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I began to lift weights when I was 16-years-old. It soon became a passion of mine, not because of how it challenged my body, but because of how it challenged my mind. The number of repetitions I performed wasn’t determined solely by a physical strength—it was also determined by an internal strength. The fatalism of the weight room taught me that my mind was powerful.

Though this was my first, conscious experience with psychology, the subject wasn’t broached again in my life for another several years. As a guy who loved working out, I first became interested in biology. When I got to molecular genetics, however, I realized biology isn’t a science unto itself—rather, it’s based on chemistry. Then, during a memorable meeting with my organic chemistry professor, I learned exactly how chemistry is based on an even more fundamental science. So physics, it seemed, as the foundation of chemistry and so biology, was the heart of knowledge.

The more abstract my thought became, the more the pieces fit together.

Then came philosophy. I dabbled in the subject in high school when I read Nietzsche, as is the predilection of a brooding young man. But it wasn’t until college, when I took a course on Plato—which I felt viscerally attracted to—did I come to understand philosophy as the broadest of all subjects. Though not a natural science like biology, chemistry, or physics, it literally goes beyond physics with metaphysics. “This is it,” I thought, “the fundamental subject of knowledge.” The gravity of this realization made my dedication to philosophy a natural decision.

And so it was. Over the next several years, philosophy became my life. I only thought an idea mattered if it could be taken in a philosophical direction. I referenced Aristotle in my columns at the college newspaper. And I started a philosophy club, the camaraderie of which fully questioned my ideas and transformed me into a purposeful thinker.

Through my immersion in philosophy, I felt my intellectual development flourish, but it left me feeling unbalanced. Something was missing.

My obsession diminished all other aspects of my life. Friends, school, and even sleep took a back seat to it. Rigidity buried itself deep within my psyche. For the first time since my high-school efforts in the gym, I got in touch with the abyss that is psychology. Once again I was constrained—not by the physicality of a bench press, but by the psychology of my thoughts.

I found my way out of this wasteland through work and travel, but that period of my life still amazes me to this day. How did I become completely seized up? And why? I had embodied all the life lessons from high school sports about hard works and positive attitudes, but those had reached their limit. I thought I was prepared for life, but there was something going on in between my ears that I didn’t understand. I had somehow convinced myself that I was unable to make choices. Even if I could make choices, they wouldn’t matter.

Philosophy explains ideas, but it doesn’t explain what to do with ideas, how they affect us, and how we use ideas to relate with others. These issues constitute psychology. It’s the deepest and broadest of all subjects because it encapsulates our philosophy, and so physics, chemistry, and our biology. It’s an area I didn’t understand, so it made me its prisoner.

The psychological field, perhaps because of its breadth and depth, is not yet a completed field like physics and chemistry. It is in the stage of observing and gathering material from which a future field will emerge. The current period of psychology is comparable to the pre-Socratic period of philosophy. As such, psychology has not yet found its Plato to organize its material and integrate its fundamental principles. Until it does, we will all be its prisoner.

I believe the integration of psychology and its application in the clinic will be the Platonic shift that transforms psychology from a fledgling to a fundamental philosophy. Carl Jung—who I consider to be the Socrates of psychology—is indispensable to the advancement of the field, but there are few, palpable models through which we can understand his ideas. Laboratory studies—the pre-Socratics of psychology—are essential to the advancement of the field, but they are not a conception of what psychology is. They are unable to see the trees as a forest.

An integration of psychology is not something that can be graphed, measured, or weighed. The integration must be testable and falsifiable, of course, but I believe the answer necessitates a feat that could only come from the mind of a human, from a human’s psychology.

It’s my intention, therefore, to do for psychology what Plato did for philosophy—to explain the same number of phenomenon in fewer laws. The ancient Greeks were concerned with change and multiplicity, and so too are modern psychologists. What are the fundamental mechanisms behind psychological change, and how do they relate with other mechanisms in the psyche?

The principles of psychology would open the door to a different kind of therapy, a fully inclusive style of therapy. We all of course have unique experiences, but when we look at the human psyche with correct perspective, there is a sense in which we are all the same. This abstraction has been the course of advancement in all fields, and there’s no reason psychology would be any different.

The psychology program offered at [BLANK} University, with its emphasis on both research and the application of research in the clinic, is the environment in which a unification of psychology will be cultivated. To contribute to this environment, I offer my experience in both the sciences and the humanities. Through a fundamental view of psychology, we may even develop a more complete picture of how these two seemingly disparate disciplines are related.

Philosophy found its Plato. Psychology needs to find its Plato as a complement. This won’t take the work of one person, but of many individuals, and it would be an honor to simply be a part of it.