A Brief Discussion on Psychology

I have been doing a few months of rough research on psychology, with relatively detailed study and reflection on certain areas and disorders. I have some insights, as well as some systematic thinking, and it is time to organize them.

This article mainly contains three major parts:

• My macro-level understanding of psychological problems

  • My basic classification
    • Basic cognition and orientation
    • Modes of regulation
    • Mechanisms of formation
    • Domains of expression
  • My interpretation
    • Basic cognition and orientation should be judged by action, not just subjective thoughts
    • Narcissism and inferiority
    • Understanding and acknowledgment are the beginning of healing
    • “Getting better” is more than understanding and acknowledgment
    • How to measure scientifically?
  • Examples from my own life
    • The three stages of learning
    • The attention problem
    • Aversion to alcohol and games, and how it changed

• My thoughts on the problems with psychological theories

  • My view of theories/concepts
  • Why are psychological theories so disorderly?
  • The necessity of theoretical layering
  • Is there a “modern version of psychoanalysis” replacing the old psychoanalysis?
  • The Tinbergen four-question matrix

• Appendix — A general overview of psychology

  • Overview / What psychology studies / The most important layering
  • Historical context / Core branches
  • Clinical psychology, counseling psychology, and psychiatry
  • How to judge the strength of evidence for a theory
  • Major contemporary integration directions / Recommended learning paths / Key readings / The boundaries of self-study

When I have the chance later, I will try to combine theories and case analyses from different bloggers and textbooks, critically analyze the strengths and shortcomings in those cases, compare them with my own systematic understanding, and try to summarize some commonalities, as well as common erroneous conclusions and logical fallacies. But that is not the content of this article.

My macro-level understanding of psychological problems

My basic classification

One. Basic cognition and orientation

• What is the meaning of being alive?

• Why am I willing to endure pain?

• What am I willing to pay a price for?

• What do I pursue?

• What do I fear?

• What do I dislike?

Two. Modes of regulation

How do I handle shame, anxiety, anger, sadness, and guilt?

1. Expression

   • Speak it out, ask for help, communicate, cry, admit needs.

2. Solving

   • Analyze the problem, make a plan, change the environment, take action.

3. Acceptance

   • Acknowledge reality, allow emotions to exist, do not rush to eliminate feelings.

4. Avoidance

   • Procrastination, numbness, scrolling on the phone, fleeing from relationships, denying the problem.

5. Defense

   • Intellectualization, rationalization, defensive narcissism, projection, attack, ingratiation, devaluation, splitting.

Three. Mechanisms of formation

• Biological foundation: genes, neurodevelopment.
• Early relationships: caregivers’ responsiveness, attachment, sense of security, humiliation, neglect, control, support.
• Later experiences: school, peers, romantic relationships, work, major events, illness, loss.

Among these, sociocultural factors not only influence parents/caregivers and indirectly affect early relationships, but also indirectly influence later experiences.

Four. Domains of expression

Psychological patterns ultimately manifest in real life. Whether a pattern becomes a problem depends not only on whether it causes pain, but also on whether it produces sustained functional impairment.

• Intimate relationships: Can you trust, express needs, handle conflict, and maintain boundaries?
• Family relationships: Can you differentiate, refuse, take responsibility without being engulfed?
• Studies/work: Can you act, cooperate, withstand evaluation, and handle failure?
• Self-evaluation: Is it stable, or does it depend excessively on external feedback?
• Body and stress: Are there issues with sleep, appetite, fatigue, tension, or somatization?

My interpretation

• Part one (basic cognition and orientation) and part two (modes of regulation) constitute the basic foundation of our psychological-behavioral patterns.
• Part three — genes, early relationships, and later experiences — are the reasons we have these psychological-behavioral patterns.
• Part four — relationships, work, stress, etc. — are the manifested results.

A separate note: states like narcissism / inferiority do not belong to any single category among the above four. Rather, they are the emergent result of how a person’s basic foundation (long-term operation of pursuit / fear / aversion) and modes of regulation interact with the external environment, and they in turn influence the domains of expression. So they are not unfolded within the previous four categories, but discussed separately later in the section “Narcissism and inferiority.”

Basic cognition and orientation should be judged by action, not just subjective thoughts

A person’s description of themselves does not necessarily match their actual psychological structure. There are several reasons: people misunderstand themselves; they explain themselves with more presentable words; when faced with shame, fear, or defense mechanisms, even “seeing oneself” is hard, let alone admitting it.

So in judging what one pursues, fears, or dislikes, simply asking “what do I think I am like” is useless. You have to look at what you do repeatedly.

What is truly reliable are repeated patterns:

• Where do I repeatedly direct my time, attention, and energy?
• What do I repeatedly avoid?
• On which matters do I repeatedly overreact emotionally?
• What roles do I repeatedly play in relationships?
• In what ways do I repeatedly protect my self-esteem?
• What do I repeatedly regret, yet keep doing?

Behavior does not necessarily equal real desire, but recurring behavior must serve some psychological function — perhaps helping me avoid shame, lower anxiety, maintain self-esteem, gain a sense of security, sidestep conflict, or avoid having to confront some more painful truth.

So self-understanding is not asking “what kind of person do I think I am,” but: do my actions support that claim?

”What do I pursue”

“Pursuit” sounds positive, but it is actually a neutral word. When someone says they pursue career, love, freedom, growth, wealth, or influence, on the surface these all look like goals, but their psychological functions can be entirely different: some people are pulled along by interest, value, and the urge to create; others are fleeing from shame, worthlessness, abandonment, or a sense of losing control.

I think the most practical way to judge a pursuit is via two classification axes: motivational direction and source of reward.

The first classification axis: motivational direction

Approach pursuit: being drawn toward some value, interest, or possibility. Even if the process is hard, you feel “I am moving toward something.”

Avoidance pursuit: on the surface you are pursuing something, but in essence you are running from something — running from shame, worthlessness, abandonment, or emptiness. Even when you reach the goal, fear merely quiets down for a while.

The two can look identical from the outside: both work hard, both pursue partners, both accumulate achievements. But approach expands a person, while avoidance contracts them. Approach is hard to break completely even when it fails; avoidance is prone to collapse the moment it fails.

The second classification axis: source of reward

• Intrinsic rewards: from the experience itself — competence, flow, connection, the satisfaction of creating, the clarity of solving a problem. These hold up even without anyone seeing them. Intrinsic rewards can be further divided into:

1. Sensory intrinsic: from the body and sensory experience itself — for example, food, exercise, music, comfort.
2. Exploratory intrinsic: from curiosity, discovery, and understanding — for example, figuring out a problem or exploring a system.
3. Mastery intrinsic: from skill improvement, feeling that you are progressing under some standard (mainly one set by yourself).
4. Creative intrinsic: from turning ideas into reality — for example, writing articles, making games, designing tools.
5. Coherence intrinsic: from being consistent with your own values — for example, honesty, responsibility, holding boundaries, doing the long-term right thing.

Note that intrinsic and extrinsic are not cleanly separated. Some intrinsic rewards originate externally. For instance, a child might originally just casually ask questions, but if he later encounters:

• stories of scientists;
• encouragement from teachers or parents about curiosity;
• a positive social narrative about “exploring the world”;
• the romanticization of intelligence and discovery in books, film, and games;
• important others saying “you are very thoughtful”;

then he may slowly internalize “exploration” into his own reward system. At first it might be: others think curiosity is great, so I want to be that kind of person too. Later it becomes: I genuinely enjoy understanding the world itself.

This is called the internalization of extrinsic value. But once internalized, it really can become intrinsic; it isn’t fake.

The key distinction is: if right now no one praises you, no one is watching, no one is rewarding you, and you still feel satisfied by understanding, creating, mastering, or expressing in itself — then it has already taken on intrinsic quality. But not every “internalization” is genuine internalization.

There is something called introjection. It means: external demands seem to have entered my heart, but they are actually still like a built-in overseer.

For example:

• I must have curiosity, otherwise I am vulgar.
• I must love learning, otherwise I do not deserve respect.
• I must pursue growth, otherwise I am useless.
• I must be independent, otherwise I am weak.

This looks like inner drive because no one is forcing you, but in reality external evaluation has been swallowed in and become an internal judge. This is not mature internalization but more like a “built-in version of external rewards.” Personally I think this should be classified under extrinsic rewards, discussed below.

• Extrinsic rewards: from external symbols — being praised, envied, needed, ranked highly, confirmed through money or material things. These can only be cashed in when “someone is present” or “scores are present.”

Being driven by external rewards is not in itself a disorder. Humans are social animals, and being seen, affirmed, and responded to are basic needs — in Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, relational connection is one of the core psychological needs. External rewards can be further divided into several categories:

1. Relational extrinsic For example, being needed by a partner, valued by family, responded to by friends, depended on by children. This is not vanity, but the human need for connection.
2. Evaluative extrinsic For example, wanting to be recognized, respected, envied, or to win against others. This is not inherently problematic, since people live within social evaluation systems, but it more easily becomes entangled with self-esteem compensation and shame defense.
3. Instrumental extrinsic For example, money, position, resources, opportunities, identity labels. They may be very practical and necessary, and should not be moralized. One must distinguish between wanting and wanting at any cost, between moderate trade-offs and endless wanting.

There is also another question: are these external rewards nutrition for me, or transfusion?

• Nutrition: better with it, fine without it; self-worth does not depend on it.
• Transfusion: collapse without it; must constantly be replenished.

Summary

Note that these two axes are not binary on/off, but proportions. For instance, my pursuit of badminton skill might be 30% from external recognition and 70% from the experience itself — for example, I’m happy when I hit a great shot and don’t need anyone else’s praise; meanwhile this pursuit has almost no avoidance component, the evidence being that I have no negative emotion when I lose.

So judging a pursuit is not throwing it into a single quadrant, but estimating the mixed proportions on these two axes. What matters is which component dominates, and whether any imbalance is so severe that it crushes the other parts. I reflect on which part I should reduce and which I should increase if I want to become better.

Going further, with the help of theory and logic we can analyze: of this pattern, what proportion is determined by genes, what proportion by early relationships, and what proportion by later experiences? It is hard to arrive at a precise answer, but it lets us see the causes more clearly and makes it easier to address the problem.

One more point: although early relationships have significant influence, many people online attribute every behavioral pattern to the so-called “family of origin,” and they make two errors:

1. Ignoring other influences and forcibly making it a single attribution — perhaps a limit of cognitive ability or brain capacity;
2. Acting as if there is no room for change in oneself, dumping all of one’s negative emotions onto one’s parents.

I have seen many people whose families of origin were terrible yet who lived decent or even good lives. How are they explained? I do not deny they may be a minority. The point is that the family of origin is an unchangeable cause; understanding this cause is not so that the parents can apologize and admit fault — if your parents could objectively see their mistakes and apologize sincerely, then your family of origin would no longer be the problem. Rather, it is so that those who blame everything on themselves can find some peace: maybe 30% of your problem is genes, 30% is early relationships (family of origin), and 30% is later experiences. Of those, perhaps less than 10% can be directly attributed to you. But change in the present is possible — the genetic part cannot be changed, the part determined by early relationships is hard to change, the part determined by later experience is also not easy, but the chance to change is always there.

Wanting ≠ Liking is the composite outcome of these two axes

Berridge separated motivation into wanting (the urge that drives one toward something) and liking (actual enjoyment), and found that they can be dissociated — what you strongly want is not necessarily what you enjoy.

This is actually a byproduct of the two axes above. If something keeps making me want it, leaves me empty after I get it, and then I want it again, it is usually a combination of avoidance-driven motivation and external reward source: I am not drawn to it, I am using it to suppress anxiety; I am not really enjoying it, I am cashing in for an external comfort. So strong wanting and weak liking are not the cause of an illness, but a result — a signal that lets me, in reverse, identify problems in motivation and reward.

Judging a pursuit

Looking at how lofty the goal is is useless; we have to see what role it actually plays in real life:

• If no one sees and no one praises, would I still want to do it? (Source of reward)
• Am I moving toward some value, or moving away from some fear? (Motivational direction)
• Am I willing to bear long-term costs for it, or do I only want the short-term emotional relief it brings? (Wanting vs. liking)
• When I cannot get it, do I feel regret, or does my self-worth collapse?

A person’s pursuit usually contains both approach and avoidance, and a mix of internal and external rewards. The question is not to eliminate the avoidance half entirely, but to clearly see which half is dominant: am I really moving toward the life I value, or am I using a presentable-looking goal to protect myself from facing a deeper fear?

”What do I fear”

Fear is not weakness, nor is it merely a negative emotion. Its basic function is to protect a person: keeping us away from danger, loss, humiliation, abandonment, and loss of control. The problem is that what people fear in real life is often not the surface object itself, but the threat it represents.

Fear has two outlets: one is avoidance, where I move away from what I fear; the other is avoidance pursuit — I’m afraid of not being approved of, so I work hard to do approval-worthy things; this is the issue discussed above. I believe: what we call anxiety is largely a long-term, low-intensity, continuously running form of avoidance pursuit, and the long-standing inner conflict it produces. Because avoidance pursuit is generally not driven by inner motivation, it is hard to feel reward/joy in the process, yet we are “compelled” to pursue it because we fear that parents, teachers, classmates, leaders, or coworkers will say we are not good enough — this long-running conflict, miserable both inside and out, is a key factor in anxiety.

Below I focus on the causes behind fear. Understanding fear cannot stop at “what am I afraid of”; we must also ask: what is the surface object, and what real threat does it represent?

For example, fear of failure. On the surface, it is a fear of one task not succeeding, but underneath it may be fear of shame, fear of losing value, fear of being negated by parents, fear of being looked down upon, fear of one’s “image as an excellent person” collapsing. Failure itself is just a fact, but in some people’s psychological structure, failure is automatically translated into “I am no good,” “I do not deserve to be loved,” “I have no right to exist.” This is no longer task anxiety; it is self-worth being threatened.

From the perspective of learning theory, fear is easily formed through conditioning and reinforced through avoidance. A person is afraid of conflict, so each time they fall silent, ingratiate, or sidestep the issue; short-term anxiety drops, and the brain learns: “avoidance works.” In the long run, avoidance lets fear grow larger and larger, because it deprives one of new experiences: when I express disagreement, the relationship may not collapse immediately; when I fail once, I may not lose all my value immediately. Without these counter-examples appearing, the old prediction always seems right.

Fear of evaluation is another typical example. On the surface, it is fear of how others see me; underneath it is often fear of shame. Shame and guilt are not the same thing — guilt is “I did something wrong”; shame is “I as a person am wrong.” So someone with intense fear of evaluation truly fears not a single criticism, but that this criticism activates a deeper self-judgment: I am not good enough, I will be seen through, I will be excluded.

Fear of abandonment is more directly related to the attachment system. In Bowlby’s attachment theory, important relationships are a person’s secure base. If responses in early relationships were unstable, neglectful, controlling, or full of emotional blackmail, then in adulthood one becomes hypersensitive to relationship signals: a partner replying late, sounding a bit cold, or not affirming love in time can all be experienced as danger. At such moments what truly frightens the person is not a message, but the prospect that “I am about to be abandoned again.”

Fear of losing control is often tied to uncertainty. Some people must plan, explain, predict, and control everything — not because they are truly rational, but because the unknown feels dangerous to them. Control to a certain degree is competence; excessive control is a defense against anxiety. It can make a person look strong, while inside lies someone who cannot bear surprise, dependence, or vulnerability.

Fear of death and meaninglessness is more fundamental. People are not only afraid of dying, but also afraid that their lives have no weight, that all their efforts will end up meaningless. Existential psychology and Terror Management Theory have both reminded us: behind much daily anxiety may lie a deeper anxiety about finitude. A person desperately proving themselves, accumulating achievements, and chasing influence may not just be wanting to win — they may be fighting against the fact that “I will eventually disappear.”

So judging what one fears cannot rely solely on the object of fear; one must look at what it protects and what it constrains:

• What I fear — is it real loss, or is it the collapse of self-worth?
• After I avoid, did the problem shrink, or did the fear grow?
• Does this fear come from the present, or from some past relational experience?
• If I no longer avoid, what is the worst psychological consequence?
• What I really cannot bear — is it failure, rejection, and conflict themselves, or the shame they bring?

Fear itself is not the enemy; it is usually protecting something important. The real question is: has this protection mode become outdated, and is it now narrowing my life? Self-understanding is not mocking one’s own fear, but seeing clearly what we have come to experience as a threat.

”What do I dislike”

Pursuit often disguises itself — for instance, as love, ambition, responsibility, self-discipline, or kindness; fear also often disguises itself — as rationality, indifference, freedom, or lack of interest; aversion likewise often disguises itself — as principle, taste, sense of justice, high standards, or “authenticity,” and is more easily cloaked in moral correctness. When I dislike a certain kind of person, behavior, lifestyle, or expression, on the surface it looks like a value judgment, but underneath there may be a mixture of fear, shame, trauma, projection, and group prejudice.

So to understand aversion, one must at minimum ask two kinds of questions:

First, what is the motivation behind my aversion? Is it protecting my values, or protecting me from seeing myself?

Second, what is the object of my aversion? Does it accurately point at something genuinely problematic, or has it spread from a specific behavior to innocent people, things, and groups?

Below I unfold this in three steps: first, look at the categories of aversion by source/nature; then dissect each with the two questions of motivation and object; finally, give a self-check list.

Major categories of aversion

By source and nature, common aversions roughly fall into a few categories:

• Biological aversion: rot, contamination, disease, blood, certain smells and bodily secretions trigger aversion because they are linked to risk of infection. Rozin and others’ research on disgust points out that disgust originally has to do with body, contamination, and disease defense, but later extends to moral and social judgment — people transfer the bodily sense of “dirty” onto moral judgments like “this person is disgusting” or “this behavior is disgusting.”
• Moral aversion: triggered by violation of value boundaries — for example, the aversion felt toward deception, betrayal, exploitation, abuse, or humiliation of the weak. This kind of aversion is not a bad thing; without it, people would become numb to harm.
• Traumatic aversion: tied to past painful experiences. A person dislikes a certain tone of voice, a certain expression, a certain intimate gesture, a certain way of being controlled — not because these things are absolutely wrong in themselves, but because they activate old wounds. The body responds before reason: nausea, stiffness, urge to flee, urge to attack.
• Shame projection: people project the desires, vulnerabilities, aggression, dependence, and shame they cannot acknowledge in themselves onto others, and then dislike them. On the surface it looks like a value judgment or a matter of taste, but underneath it is maintaining the self-image “I am definitely not like that.”

Each kind of aversion has its own motivation and its own object. The next two sections unfold using these two questions.

First question: motivation — the reason behind aversion

Behind every kind of aversion, there is something being “protected” — value boundaries, past wounds, self-image, in-group superiority, and so on. The question is not “do I have a reason to feel aversion,” but “what is this aversion protecting on my behalf, and what is it making me unable to see?” Aversion with transparent motivation (biological aversion protecting the body, moral aversion protecting values) is usually not a problem; what most warrants questioning is the kind of aversion that wears moral clothing while actually serving as cover for hidden emotions.

Take an example: shame projection. Projection is not an all-purpose explanation, and it should not be abused to mean “you are whatever you dislike.” But it does point to a fact — people project the desires, vulnerabilities, aggression, dependence, and shame they cannot acknowledge onto others and dislike them. Signals worth seriously questioning are: overreaction, rigidity, generalization, accompanied by strongly distancing oneself — “I could never be that kind of person.”

To be more concrete: a person who especially despises “weak people” may be unable to acknowledge their own weakness; one who especially despises “people who want attention” may be unable to admit they themselves want to be seen; one who especially despises “losers” may be unable to face their own fear of failure; one who especially despises “people who depend on others” may be unable to admit their own dependency needs. On the surface it is a moral judgment or matter of taste; in fact it is protecting the self-image “I am not that kind of person.” At this point, the question worth asking is not “am I the same as him,” but: why does this thing make me react so strongly? Do I have to put it onto other people to keep myself feeling clean, righteous, and strong? This reverse maneuver — throwing away one’s vulnerability and using aversion to maintain one’s self-image — is exactly one of the typical forms of defensive narcissism discussed below in the section “Narcissism and inferiority.”

Second question: object — what exactly the aversion is aimed at

Asking only “why am I averse” is not enough; we must also ask “what exactly am I averse to.” Take opposing deception: the object can be “that specific deceptive behavior,” “the person who lied — his whole person is untrustworthy,” or “people of that type are all dishonest.” The first is a clear boundary; the second is already dehumanizing; the third has already become prejudice. A reasonable value-based aversion, if its object is not properly distinguished, will turn from protection into collateral damage.

This is also where aversion is dangerous: it makes it too easy to stop thinking. As long as I say “this thing makes me sick,” I no longer need to keep understanding it, no longer need to distinguish facts, motivations, situations, and degrees, and no longer need to see the other person’s complexity as a human being. So aversion slides from “value boundary” toward “dehumanization” — not “this behavior is problematic” but “people of that type are dirty, low, and should be excluded.” The slide is smooth, but very dangerous. So mature aversion should be aimed as far as possible at specific behaviors, specific harms, and specific mechanisms.

Take an example: group prejudice. When the object of aversion is not a specific behavior but some abstract group, one must be especially vigilant. Research in social psychology on prejudice, stereotypes, and in-group/out-group all points to the same thing: people explain their own group’s flaws as situational and explain the out-group’s flaws as essential. Of course, opposing specific harmful actions, institutions, or ideologies within a group is not the same as prejudice; the problem of prejudice lies in equating a group label directly with an individual’s essence. The more abstract, group-based, and essentialized the object, the more we should be wary of ourselves: what I oppose — is it some specific harm, or is it a label with all the details erased?

Summary

So judging one’s aversion cannot stop at “do I have a reason to dislike this”; one must dissect both motivation and object:

• Am I averse to a specific behavior, to a whole person, or even to an entire category of people?
• What was the object I originally disliked? Has it now spread to similar but innocent objects?
• Is this aversion protecting a clear value boundary, or making me stop trying to understand?
• Is this aversion protecting a current boundary, or protecting a past wound?
• Do I have to belittle the other person in order to maintain my own sense of superiority and security?
• In what I dislike, is there a part of myself that I dare not acknowledge?
• If the same behavior occurred in someone I like, would I be equally averse?
• Does this aversion make me want to set boundaries and stop harm, or to humiliate and exclude the other person?

Aversion sometimes protects values, sometimes protects trauma, sometimes protects shame, sometimes protects prejudice. It is the sharpest, and also the most dangerous. A relatively mature value judgment is not “I no longer dislike anything,” but the ability to distinguish: what I oppose is the harm itself, or am I using opposition to others to escape from seeing myself, or am I transferring aversion of an abstract type of behavior onto a specific behavior/person?

Narcissism and inferiority

What is narcissism? I think there are two kinds — first, healthy narcissism, and second, the defensive narcissism mentioned above under the “defense” category in “modes of regulation.” Healthy narcissism is the outward expression of stable self-worth, with these core features:

• Stable self-worth, which can be maintained without continuous external confirmation
• Inner pursuit of self-development and improvement
• Normal need to be seen and appreciated — not pathology, but a basic need of social animals
• When negated, the ability to distinguish between “this thing didn’t work” and “I as a person am no good”

Inferiority is a state when self-worth cannot be sustained: estimating oneself low on some dimension of ability or value.

Note: the source of inferiority is not only “objectively unmet needs.” More common is the introjection mentioned earlier — swallowing other people’s or society’s high standards as a built-in overseer, so that no matter how well one performs in reality, it is never enough. This explains why “by relatively reasonable consensus standards, he/she is already doing well, but still feels not good enough” — it is not that they underestimate the objective gap, but that the introjected standard is itself too strict. We earlier distinguished guilt from shame: guilt is “I did something wrong”; shame is “I as a person am wrong.” Inferiority/shame are similar — inferiority is an underestimation of ability or some dimension (“I’m bad at math,” “I can’t speak as well as others”); shame is the moment one reaches the level of disliking/loathing oneself. A person can feel inferior without feeling shame. Moderate inferiority and moderate shame are normal.

Defensive narcissism is the reverse maneuver when shame becomes unbearable. The mechanism is: fragile self-worth → triggered shame → using grandiosity, devaluing others, and pursuit of admiration to prove in reverse “I am not like that” — surface narcissism, inner shame.

• Treating external rewards as transfusions rather than nutrition: the dose of praise must keep increasing; collapse on cutoff.
• Strong wanting and weak liking: constantly wanting to be looked up to; once looked up to, soon empty again.
• Pursuit dominated by avoidance: surface pursuit of achievement, essence pursuit of “not being looked down on.”
• Excessive aversion toward objects like “weakness, dependence, attention-seeking” (see above, “What do I dislike — shame projection”) — throwing out the vulnerability one cannot acknowledge.

When it reaches the level of core/toxic shame or narcissistic personality pathology (NPD), that is another topic. I have done quite a bit of research on it and may discuss it later.

Understanding and acknowledgment are the beginning of healing

The meaning of understanding is: I begin to know that my pain is not random; behind my reactions, avoidance, defenses, and relational patterns there are usually causes. They may have once protected me, only that the cost is now too high.

The meaning of acknowledgment is: no longer using so much “psychic energy” to deny, rationalize, blame others, or blame myself. I can begin to admit:

• I really am afraid.
• I really am ashamed.
• I really am jealous.
• I really do need others.
• I really am aggressive.
• I really am avoiding.
• I really did get short-term benefits from some painful patterns.
• I really do bear part of the responsibility for my own relationships and life.

But understanding and acknowledgment are only the beginning, not the end. Real change still has to land in action — which is what the next section discusses.

”Getting better” is more than understanding and acknowledgment

Understanding and acknowledgment are important, but they cannot automatically change psychological patterns. Often a person is not “failing to grasp the truth”; rather, the body, emotions, and old experiences do not believe this truth.

For example: a person knows intellectually that “refusing someone will not break the relationship,” but when actually refusing, the body still tenses up, the heartbeat speeds up, they worry about the other being unhappy, they want to immediately explain, apologize, compensate, or even just say yes. The problem is not at the cognitive level, but in a deeper predictive system — the body still predicts “refusal = danger = relationship will break = I will be abandoned.”

So change is not about stuffing a new reasoning into one’s head, but about letting the person obtain new lived experience. A person must actually refuse a few times, see the relationship not break immediately, see the other person perhaps just a bit disappointed but still in contact with them, see that even with anxiety they can get through it — only then will the body slowly update old predictions.

This is also why most psychotherapy is not just explanation but inevitably enters action. CBT’s behavioral experiments, exposure therapy’s exposure exercises, behavioral activation, ACT’s value-based actions — they are essentially doing the same thing: letting people enter new actions while still carrying old emotions, then using the new experience to revise the old pattern.

Old patterns are persistent because they were once “effective.” Ingratiation may have once helped me reduce conflict; avoidance may have once helped me dodge shame; over-control may have once helped me grasp safety in a chaotic environment; not expressing needs may have once helped me reduce the pain of rejection. These patterns did not appear out of nowhere, nor will they vanish from a single “I’ve figured it out.”

Real change usually goes through several steps:

1. Figure yourself out This means using the questions above to examine and question yourself in order to know yourself better.

2. Take a small enough new action Not picking the hardest one to start with, but starting from low-risk scenarios. Refuse an unimportant request, express a slightly different opinion, submit a non-perfect version, voice a small need to a relatively safe person.

3. Allow the body to be uncomfortable Anxiety is still there during action, shame is still there, the heartbeat is still there — this is not failure. Precisely the point is to let the body discover within the discomfort: I did not immediately die, the relationship did not immediately collapse, others did not immediately abandon me.

4. Observe real feedback Not jumping straight into self-blame and rumination after action, but seriously looking: how did the other person actually respond? Was the situation really as bad as I predicted? Even if there was unpleasantness, did I handle it?

5. Repeat enough times A single new experience can hardly cover years of old experience. Bodily learning requires repetition — it is not persuaded by reasoning, but is slowly persuaded by repeated experiences of “I did it, the danger did not occur as expected, or it occurred and I could bear it.”

So “getting better” is not no longer being afraid; it is fear no longer fully determining behavior. Before: I am afraid, so I must please, avoid, control, fall silent. After: I am still afraid, but I can carry the fear and still express, refuse, try, draw close, and bear consequences.

This is critical. Many people think the marker of change is “I act once I’m no longer anxious,” but reality is often the opposite — first act with the anxiety, and after acting the anxiety system slowly learns it doesn’t have to sound the alarm every time. Waiting until you are not afraid at all to act, that day usually never comes.

But action is also not violently forcing yourself. Truly effective action should be tolerable, gradual, and connected to values, rather than throwing yourself into the most feared scenario suddenly to prove you are strong. If the intensity of action exceeds what you can bear, it will instead reconfirm “the world is dangerous, I really can’t handle it.” So change requires courage, and also design:

• Fear of refusal — start by refusing small requests; do not start by clashing intensely with the most important person.
• Fear of evaluation — first show a less-than-perfect work; do not directly expose yourself to the harshest evaluative environment.
• Fear of conflict — first express a slightly different opinion; do not use a years-long suppressed eruption to prove you can express.
• Fear of intimacy — first share a little real feeling; do not immediately hand over all your vulnerability.
• Fear of failure — first allow a small failure to happen, and see whether it really means a collapse of self-worth.

The purpose of action is not to guarantee that outcomes will always be good. In reality, some people will indeed be unhappy because I refused; some relationships really cannot bear boundaries; some attempts really will fail. Change is not making the world entirely safe, but letting me discover: even when others are unhappy, even when relationships fluctuate, even when I fail, I will not necessarily collapse.

Here is something cruel but important: some relationships can only be maintained when I do not refuse, do not express, and do not change. Then the stability of such relationships was always at the cost of sacrificing me. Action exposes reality and also filters relationships. It does not just make me stronger; it also lets me see more clearly: which relationships can bear the real me, and which can only accept a compressed version of me.

So understanding and acknowledgment are starting points, and action is the process of updating the system. Reasoning lets a person see the direction; action lets the body obtain evidence. A person truly gets better not just because they have analyzed all the problems clearly, but because they repeatedly make slightly different choices in reality, and let those choices become new experience, new prediction, and a new sense of self. When your understanding reaches a higher floor and the practice it guides also rises, you discover: what bitter days I used to live through!

How to measure scientifically?

After all this, mostly from my own perspective, from the perspective of science, how to measure objectively is a headache, because people deceive, and they also self-deceive — and the latter is even hard to detect with a polygraph.

I personally feel one should approach it like a detective solving a case: interview enough relevant people for their views and recollections, find objective preserved evidence, cross-compare to derive the most logically consistent factual inference, then plug it into the existing reasonable classification system and theory for analysis to reach a conclusion. But this is obviously unrealistic. Yet if in the future there is a personally customized AI that monitors a person’s behavior, chat records, and so on, perhaps something like this could be achieved.

Examples from my own life

The three stages of learning

Stage one: avoidance pursuit

When I was little, my family disciplined me strictly; studying well was the only standard — if your grades were good, you were good in every way. This demand, “you must score well or you don’t deserve recognition,” became a built-in overseer — exactly the introjection mentioned above: it looked like “I myself want to study well,” but in essence external evaluation had moved in and refused to leave.

Was this caused by genes? Genes do not directly encode a cultural construct like “place importance on exam scores” (the practice of exams as we know them is so recent that human genes have not had time to update for it), but genes do shape some underlying temperament traits like anxiety tendency, sensitivity to recognition, and stress resilience, and those determine how easily I could be crushed in an environment of “score = the only standard” and how easily external demands could be introjected. Was it caused by early relationships? Of course, very much so — if my parents had not made grades essentially the sole standard for evaluating their child, I might not have so disliked study and been so anxious about poor grades. But aren’t parents largely also a result of being poisoned by the same sociocultural forces? This is precisely what I discussed earlier under “pursuit” — extrinsic pursuit and the influence of sociocultural factors.

And before graduate school, learning was for me a typical case dominated by avoidance pursuit. By contrast, basketball was for me dominated by intrinsic reward. Note: it is not that learning had no inner drive — my unbalanced strength in math and physics is a typical example. I had no interest in science itself (probably due to dullness plus lack of guides), but I still drew on the achievement of solving problems as a source of intrinsic reward, which barely kept my science grades from being too bad. Humanities relied almost entirely on my mother making me memorize. But overall, avoidance pursuit was the dominant factor in my learning at that stage. Likewise, basketball was not entirely without external drive — playing well also gave you “face” among classmates — but picking up a basketball and standing on the court already gave me a quite pleasant mood: maybe the brief joy from escaping study, maybe dopamine from exercise (sensory intrinsic reward), or the mastery intrinsic reward from improving basketball skill. These played the dominant role.

Stage two: intrinsic-reward driven

In late college and early graduate school, by various coincidences I watched Zhang Yu lecture on math, Lin Hsiu-hao lecture on physics, the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and read some good Zhihu answers — and only then did I realize that science is so interesting! At this point, learning shifted for me to being primarily driven by intrinsic rewards, and because I had read philosophy books in early college and engaged in philosophical reflection, I had let go of much of my avoidance pursuit toward learning. I rarely studied or worked for the sake of others’ evaluations or views.

Stage three: new conflicts and re-understanding

Ironically, however, after switching to intrinsic-reward driven learning and developing deep understanding of science and some technologies of interest, my exam performance got worse — because I disdained understanding the question-setter’s thinking, the exam syllabus, problem-solving strategies, and so on, and there was some unwillingness in me.

At the time I did not understand why: because I had let go of much avoidance pursuit toward learning, my craving for external symbols like grades and GPA dropped, manifesting as not spending time on understanding the question-setter’s thinking, the exam syllabus, and problem-solving strategies, and ultimately manifesting as worse exam scores — because exams test more than just depth of understanding of subject knowledge.

When I was in stage one, learning was just a task to me, and my expectation for utilitarian outcomes was a transaction: however much time I spent working/learning (something I didn’t want to do, but had to in order to survive and live), I should get a corresponding return. So I could fully accept that part — after all, I didn’t do much, and the return was more than enough. But in stage two, I felt I had put in many times more effort, yet the return was even less, and I was once angry, anxious, doubting life and the world. It took me many years to realize: my input was based on a standard I assumed for myself, while the return follows the rules of reality.

For instance, one of my standards was: how much you contribute to human science is how much you should be rewarded in the scientific field, and vice versa. I can understand that this quantity is hard to assess, and allocation easily has bias, but in reality you can have negative contribution and yet a brimming reward. This crushed me — exactly because I had not understood: the standard “however much you contribute to human science, you should be rewarded accordingly in the scientific field” — even though it is one of humanity’s publicly proclaimed “pursuits” — almost no one actually pursues it (assessing scientists’ pursuits by their actions against this standard, the overlap is extremely low), and the rules of reality have never been based on this thing. So of course rewards have almost no correlation with it.

This negative emotion is mostly the aversion discussed earlier, stemming from a feeling of “being deceived,” because society’s publicly proclaimed pursuits are almost all idealistic rules, and idealistic rules do have some merit, and people like me easily internalize them as a reward mechanism. Then in society we find it isn’t like that — why didn’t the textbooks say so, and why didn’t anyone say so when I was little? This reward mechanism originally came with external expectations, which then went unmet, but had been internalized as a reward mechanism, and the feeling of being deceived kept appearing in this contradiction, until it was projected as aversion toward a certain category of person.

This is not to speak up for self-interested people. Looking at it objectively, self-interested people really are unhelpful for the overall and long-term development of society. But the aversion itself is not particularly necessary; the previous paragraph mainly explains the source of this aversion.

The attention problem — anxiety, release, and progress

I have always had procrastination and an attention deficit. I didn’t even know about the concept of “attention” before, let alone diagnosis and treatment, and just kept being anxious.

Then in early college I read philosophy books and engaged in philosophical reflection, which let me let go of much avoidance pursuit toward learning, and my anxiety was much reduced — but problems remained, mainly two:

1. Even with things I enjoy doing (driven by intrinsic rewards), the process inevitably has boring parts, and I find it hard to continue at those parts;
2. My different interests easily switch among one another, but when this happens too easily it is very troublesome. For example, I’m interested in physics, and graduate school requires research on solid-state physics, and during this process I found there were parts of relativity I didn’t understand, so I spent many days researching that instead of what was more relevant to my research direction. This is not because I had no interest or no inner drive, nor because I cared about external evaluation. I have agonized over this kind of problem many times.

Many years later I learned that attention deficit is the joint result of high heritability + neurodevelopment + environment — that is, it is mainly caused by biological foundation. Knowing this freed me of much anxiety and distress about it, and ironically, with much less internal friction, I was able to control my attention more easily.

Aversion to alcohol/games, and how it changed

Aversion is also prone to object expansion. That is, what I originally disliked might be a specific behavior, but then this emotion migrates onto related objects, scenes, identities, and groups. For example, what I really dislike is forcing people to drink — because forcing people to drink violates boundaries, coerces obedience, and pushes relational pressure onto people. But if I do not separate the object clearly, I might extend the aversion from “forcing drinks” to “alcohol,” then to “people who drink,” and finally to: as soon as someone drinks, I automatically think they are low, undisciplined, dangerous, or disgusting. Yet a person who drinks moderately, doesn’t force others, and doesn’t harm anyone — and a person who likes milk tea, coffee, or sweets — may essentially just have life preferences. The real problem is the violation of boundaries, not alcohol itself, and not all people who drink.

This object expansion is very common: I dislike showing off, but I may inadvertently harm everyone who presents themselves; I dislike control, but I may inadvertently harm everyone who offers a suggestion; I dislike hypocrisy, but I may inadvertently harm all manners and social strategies; I dislike weakly evading responsibility, but I may inadvertently harm everyone who expresses vulnerability; I dislike the falseness brought by ingratiation, but I may inadvertently harm all who are gentle and considerate of others’ feelings.

The same goes for games. In years past, a substantial proportion of society held that games were “spiritual opium.” Without analyzing those people’s psychological problems, under that public sentiment I myself believed the same from a young age and played games with guilt. Plus, I knew people who liked playing games and at the same time smoked, drank, dated early, fought, and held some questionable values, which deepened my aversion to games. A good game is, like a good film/novel, art, not spiritual opium. As for poor-quality games, like trash novels, you cannot use poor-quality games to negate the entire form. It took me many years to grasp this point.

My thoughts on the problems with psychological theories

My view of theories/concepts

A person who understands science does not blindly believe any scientific theory, much less worship it. Especially psychology-related theories, which often involve complex human behavior and contextual variables; verification, replication, and extrapolation are more easily limited, so they require even more dialectical examination.

Let me share how I look dialectically at problems, viewpoints, and theories.

When I encounter a domain that is almost unfamiliar, I divide it into two cases: One: I am not very interested. In this case, I try to tell myself:

1. I do not understand, so my view on this is most likely a subjective feeling caused by emotion, values, etc. I will lower my confidence in my own judgment and not rush to form a strong opinion;
2. If this view does not provide an information source, an argument process, or a boundary of applicability, I will temporarily lower its credibility. Such possibly one-sided takes I will not directly accept, especially when the person putting them forward provides no information source or chain of logical reasoning.

Two: If I have interest in entering this domain, or in evaluating, analyzing, or learning about this information, I will first do two things:

1. Use AI, Wikipedia, and relevant textbooks to cross-compare overviews of the field: theoretical frameworks, history of development, what theories and practices exist, their differences and limitations, and whether they have any logical contradictions with the basic scientific framework or among themselves.
2. I search for the positive and negative reviews/explanations of the theory or major category behind this information — these can be videos or blogs. I combine the rigor of expression, objectivity, whether there is theoretical support or information sourcing, then cross-compare their views. Although they appear to contradict each other, in fact they may differ by perspective and by assumptions, so I might gain a more objective and macro view, rather than seeing one person hyping someone/thing/concept and immediately, with preconceived bias, thinking that person/thing/concept is correct and not to be questioned.

When I enter a domain I have cultivated for many years — having, by the logic and behavioral pattern above, remembered and understood many theories, figures, and viewpoints, and having relatively objectively understood many aspects of these (some theories are crude and empirical; some are imprecise but closer to the essence of things; some have been rigorously experimentally verified — which requires understanding what counts as rigorous experimental verification — and some have not, or only have small-sample verification) — then on the basis of this existing knowledge framework, I make a layered judgment about new viewpoints.

When I see evaluations of a person, I reflect: a person is multifaceted, and no one can be deified. Especially with public figures, who may be seriously misinterpreted, there is no need to take any evaluation of public figures too seriously — it is just people projecting their own values and desires. Concerning public figures’ specific deeds, apart from overall background and life trajectory, which are relatively hard to flip black-and-white, specific details are easily flipped, distorted, and quoted out of context. Understand: agreement or disagreement is largely the result of one’s preconceived impression of this person, plus projection of certain views and values. It is basically meaningless. I cannot avoid this phenomenon, but there is no need to fight hard to refute it, or one should be aware: many times, fierce defense is not just for the facts themselves; it may also be defending one’s value identity and emotional projection. When I want to refute, I can reflect: am I clarifying facts, or protecting some self-identification?

Why are psychological theories so disorderly?

Psychology has no overarching theory like Newtonian mechanics or the periodic law that can explain all psychological phenomena. It is more like medicine: medicine also has no single theory that explains all diseases; rather, different problems use different models.

• Infectious diseases are mainly explained by the theory of pathogens.
• Diabetes is mainly explained by metabolic and endocrine models.
• Cancer needs genetic mutation, immune escape, and cell proliferation models together.
• Autoimmune diseases need immune dysregulation models.
• Hypertension usually requires vascular, renal, neuroendocrine, and lifestyle factors together.

Psychology is the same. Different psychological problems should be explained at different framework levels, rather than expecting one theory to cover all phenomena.

• Fear and avoidance are well explained by learning theory.
• Depression usually requires cognitive, behavioral, social, and biological models together.
• Personality issues often need development, attachment, psychodynamic, and personality-trait models together.
• ADHD is better suited to neurodevelopmental and executive-function models.
• Group prejudice is better suited to social psychology and cultural psychology.

The necessity of theoretical layering

Neuroscience/biological psychology is the material foundation of psychological activity, but I think that even if neuroscience develops to the point of qualitatively explaining patterns of thought, it is almost impossible for it to become the sole theory of psychology. The reason is: phenomena at different levels usually require their own theoretical frameworks. Lower-level theories can in principle derive higher-level laws, but in practice it is very hard to use them directly for quantitative analysis of higher-level phenomena.

Three examples.

Newtonian mechanics and relativity. Relativity is more accurate, but within the precision usually required for engineering practice we still use Newtonian mechanics, because using relativity to solve everyday dynamics/kinematics problems requires excessive computation and is hard to grasp intuitively. This is the case of “lower level more accurate, higher level more usable.”

Hardware and software. Software is ultimately executed by hardware. In theory, as long as one fully records all voltages and register states during hardware operation, one could “reconstruct” what the software is doing. But in practice no one does this — because higher-level “meaning” is not in lower-level states: you can record every register and still not read out “this is a sorting algorithm” or “this is a login flow.” To describe these, you must switch vocabularies (variables, functions, intentions). This is the case of “fully knowable at the lower level, but higher-level meaning cannot be read out from the lower level.”

Large language models and tensor operations. Vectorizing concepts and doing tensor operations is the “essence” of large models, but at present there is no convincing theory that can start from tensor operations to explain large models’ behavioral patterns. This is the case of “fully clear at the lower level, but the higher level remains a black box.”

These three examples all show: even if the lower-level theory is in principle correct, it must first be abstracted into a black box, from which it gives the most basic qualitative laws, and only with these laws as new basic assumptions can one quantitatively analyze higher-level phenomena. Returning to neuroscience and psychology: brain neural development and connection formation are indeed the material foundation of psychological behavior, but even if one day we can qualitatively explain thinking the way quantum mechanics explains the periodic table, it is almost impossible to directly perform quantitative psychological analysis at the neural level. We will still need to abstract the material foundation into a black box and build upward from the qualitative laws it provides.

The hard part of psychology is: the kind of revolutionary theory equivalent to neuroscience’s “quantum mechanics” or “relativity” has not appeared at all, and there is not even a hint of it. Considering that the complexity of brain neurons is far higher than that of large models, and we still lack a theoretical explanation of large models’ behavior itself, this seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.

That said, although the basic assumptions of psychology need not be derived from neuroscience, they cannot contradict the qualitative conclusions in neuroscience and biology that have been amply validated by practice. For example: an individual’s gene sequence almost never changes after birth; large-scale restructuring of the central nervous system is very limited. From this we can infer that part of psychological-behavioral patterns can hardly be changed — only, at present it is hard to clearly tell which parts are mainly affected by genes, which by brain development, and which by post-developmental environment.

By the same token, this can in reverse falsify some extreme theories: empirically we can observe real changes brought by learning, relationships, and psychotherapy, so “all behavioral patterns are almost unchangeable” is wrong; but the stability of genes and the nervous system also entails that “almost all behavioral patterns can be changed” is equally wrong. Theories or claims that lean toward either extreme can basically be ruled out directly.

This is also why basic theoretical frameworks are useful for filtering information: once you understand the underlying qualitative laws, with some logical derivation you can identify a fair amount of obviously fake information at a glance.

Just as scientific progress: with old theories, negate the parts that are logically falsified or shown false in practice, retain the parts that are confirmed, and put a question mark on the parts that can be neither falsified nor confirmed; then combine new practical results and logical derivations to integrate new theories that explain more phenomena in a logically self-consistent way.

Is there a “modern version of psychoanalysis” replacing the old psychoanalysis?

No. By analogy with physics:

• Newtonian mechanics is corrected by relativity at high speeds and strong gravity, while still being approximately valid at low speeds and macroscopic scales.
• Psychoanalysis is not absorbed entirely by some larger theory; rather, it has been disassembled, revised, partially retained, and partially discarded by modern psychology.

It is more like the “humoral theory” in the history of medicine: humoral theory once explained disease, character, emotion, and bodily states; later, it was not replaced by a “new humoral theory,” but by immunology, microbiology, genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, and pathology, each replacing it in different domains.

Psychoanalysis is similar. It once tried to offer systematic explanations for dreams, symptoms, personality, childhood, sex, the unconscious, relationships, and the therapeutic relationship. But modern psychology has not produced a “general replacement”; it has split these problems among multiple more specialized theories.

Within psychoanalysis, several local modernizations have appeared (object relations, relational psychoanalysis, mentalization theory), but these reconstructions are themselves not unified. They form a fragmented group of revisions, not a new unified theoretical system.

• Developmental psychology has replaced/revised parts of psychoanalysis’s account of child development and early experience.
• Cognitive psychology has replaced/revised parts of psychoanalysis’s account of the unconscious and thinking.
• Learning theory and CBT have replaced/revised parts of psychoanalysis’s account of symptom formation and treatment.
• Neuroscience and psychiatry have replaced/revised parts of psychoanalysis’s account of severe mental disorders.
• Modern psychodynamics has retained and revised parts of psychoanalysis’s account of relationships, conflict, defense, and personality.

The Tinbergen four-question matrix

Some theories mainly explain proximate mechanisms — how something happens now; others mainly explain individual development — how it forms over a lifetime. So we can have a division roughly like the following table. Note that the table only divides up modern psychology’s many fields and does not cover historical theories.

Framework	Mechanism: how it happens now	Development: how it forms over a lifetime	Adaptive function: why it is useful	Evolutionary history: where it came from
Cognitive psychology	●●●	●	○	○
Learning theory and behavioral science	●●●	●	○	○
Emotion science and emotion regulation	●●●	●	●	●
Motivation science and goal systems	●●●	●	●●	○
Developmental psychology	●●	●●●	●	○
Personality psychology	●●	●●	●	○
Social psychology	●●●	●	●	○
Cultural psychology	●●	●●	●	●
Evolutionary psychology	●	○	●●●	●●●
Stress, trauma, and resilience	●●●	●●	●	○
Neuroscience/biological psychology	●●●	●●	●	○
Computational psychology and predictive processing	●●●	●	●	○
Network psychopathology and dimensional models	●●●	○	○	○
Evidence-based clinical and transdiagnostic mechanisms	●●●	●	○	○
Modern psychodynamics	●●	●●	○	○

Symbol definitions:

• ●●●: primary explanatory scope
• ●●: important explanatory scope
• ●: connectable, but not core
• ○: usually not what it primarily addresses

Appendix — A general overview of psychology

Overview

Psychology is not a single theory, nor does it only study psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, personality testing, or “reading other people.” More accurately, psychology is a group of empirical sciences studying mental processes, behavior, development, individual differences, social relationships, and abnormal psychology.

A useful overview must avoid two extremes: one is reducing all psychological phenomena to neurons and genes; the other is detaching from biology, statistical evidence, and experimental methods, explaining everything only through narrative. The truly difficult thing about psychology is precisely that it must simultaneously handle multiple levels — biological, cognitive, emotional, personality, relational, sociocultural, and developmental-historical.

What psychology studies

• Mental processes: perception, attention, memory, language, thinking, reasoning, decision-making, consciousness.
• Emotion and motivation: emotion generation, emotion regulation, reward, fear, stress, desire, goal pursuit.
• Learning and behavior: conditioning, reinforcement, habit, skill learning, behavior change.
• Developmental processes: cognitive, emotional, personality, and social development in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
• Individual differences: personality, intelligence, temperament, ability, susceptibility to psychopathology.
• Social relationships: attitudes, attribution, conformity, groups, intimate relationships, power, culture.
• Abnormality and adaptation: psychological disorders, stress, trauma, addiction, personality issues, psychotherapy and rehabilitation.
• Applied settings: education, organizational management, health, medicine, human-computer interaction, law, sport, consumer behavior, etc.

The most important layering

Psychological phenomena can be understood at different explanatory levels. Different levels do not replace one another; they each explain different problems.

Level	Concerned questions	Typical disciplines/methods
Biological level	How genes, the nervous system, hormones, brain regions, and neurotransmitters affect mind and behavior	Biological psychology, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, psychiatry
Cognitive level	How people perceive, attend, remember, predict, reason, and decide	Cognitive psychology, cognitive science, experimental psychology, computational modeling
Emotion/motivation level	Why people fear, anger, become addicted, procrastinate, pursue goals, or avoid failure	Emotion psychology, motivation psychology, affective neuroscience
Individual development level	How early experience, attachment, education, peers, trauma, and growth change individuals	Developmental psychology, personality psychology, attachment research
Sociocultural level	How others, groups, institutions, class, culture, and language shape mind	Social psychology, cultural psychology, cross-cultural research
Clinical application level	How symptoms form, are maintained, assessed, and intervened upon	Clinical psychology, counseling psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy

The most error-prone place in learning is using a theory at one level to explain problems at all levels. For example, explaining everything by childhood experience ignores genetics and current environment; explaining everything by neurotransmitters ignores meaning, relationships, and learning history; explaining everything by personality labels ignores situation and behavioral plasticity.

Historical context

The history of psychology is not a list of names, but an evolving sense of the question “how to explain mind and behavior”: from conscious experience to observable behavior, from behavior to internal representations, from individual to relations and culture, from a single level to bio-psycho-social integration.

• Late 19th century: from philosophical speculation to experimental measurement. The core question is: can mental experience be measured like natural phenomena? Wilhelm Wundt established the laboratory of experimental psychology, representing the experimental psychology and introspection tradition; Gustav Fechner developed psychophysics, studying the relation between physical stimuli and subjective sensations; Edward Titchener developed structuralism, attempting to analyze the basic elements of consciousness; William James represented functionalism, emphasizing how mental activity helps individuals adapt to their environment. This stage separated psychology from philosophy, but also left problems: introspective reports are unstable, and analysis of conscious elements is hard to use to explain the unconscious, behavior, development, and clinical symptoms.

• Late 19th to early 20th century: from research on consciousness to the unconscious and the meaning of symptoms. The core question is: why do people behave in ways they themselves do not understand, and do symptoms have psychological meaning? Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis; representative theories include unconscious conflicts, defense mechanisms, dream interpretation, and personality structure; Carl Jung developed analytical psychology; representative theories include the collective unconscious, archetypes, and individuation; Alfred Adler developed individual psychology; representative theories include feelings of inferiority, compensation, the striving for superiority, and social interest. This stage challenged the assumption that “humans are transparent rational subjects” and pushed forward clinical psychological interpretation, but many classical theories lacked clear measurement, falsifiability, and reproducible evidence.

• 1910s–1950s: from subjective consciousness to observable behavior. The core question is: how can psychology free itself from subjective introspection and untestable interpretation, and become a more rigorous experimental science? John B. Watson represented methodological behaviorism, holding that psychology should study observable behavior; Ivan Pavlov proposed classical conditioning; Edward Thorndike proposed the law of effect, laying the foundation for learning theory and behaviorism; B. F. Skinner developed operant conditioning and radical behaviorism. Behaviorism increased methodological rigor with stimuli, responses, reinforcement, and learning rules, but left the problem that language, memory, reasoning, meaning, planning, and subjective experience are hard to explain by overt behavior alone.

• 1930s–1960s: from isolated reactions to wholeness, development, personality, and context. The core question is: can behavior and perception be broken into simple elements, and can individuals be understood apart from developmental history and social context? Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka represented Gestalt psychology, emphasizing holistic perception and organizational principles; Jean Piaget proposed the theory of cognitive developmental stages; Erik Erikson proposed the theory of psychosocial developmental stages; Kurt Lewin developed field theory and group dynamics; Gordon Allport advanced personality trait research. This stage filled in the perspectives of “holistic structure, developmental stages, personality differences, and social field,” but many theories were still at the macro level, with mechanisms and measurement standards needing later refinement.

• 1950s–1970s: from behavior to internal representations, the rise of the cognitive revolution. The core question is: if we only study overt behavior, how can we explain language, memory, attention, problem solving, and reasoning? George A. Miller represented the information-processing approach and research on working-memory capacity; Jerome Bruner advanced cognitive psychology and discovery learning; Noam Chomsky used generative grammar to critique behaviorist views of language; Ulric Neisser systematized “cognitive psychology” as a field. The cognitive revolution restored research on internal mental processes, making “representation, processing, model” core vocabulary, but it also left new problems: cognitive models can be too abstract and easily underestimate emotion, body, motivation, social relations, and cultural background.

• 1960s–present: clinical theory moving from single explanations to multi-school interventions. The core question is: where does psychological pain really come from — incorrect cognition, emotional avoidance, relational patterns, family systems, traumatic experience, or social environment? Carl Rogers represented client-centered therapy and humanistic psychology; Abraham Maslow represented hierarchy of needs and self-actualization; John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth represented attachment theory; Salvador Minuchin represented structural family therapy; Murray Bowen represented family systems theory; Heinz Kohut represented self psychology; Aaron T. Beck represented cognitive therapy; Marsha Linehan represented DBT; Steven C. Hayes represented ACT. This stage expanded the clinical toolbox, but the issue is that schools’ narratives easily compete with one another; efficacy evidence, applicable populations, and mechanisms of action need to be assessed separately.

• 1980s–present: from psychological-level explanations to integration of biology, genetics, culture, and society. The core question is: how do mental processes implement in brain, body, genes, evolutionary pressures, and cultural environment? Michael Gazzaniga advanced cognitive neuroscience; Antonio Damasio represented research on emotion, somatic markers, and consciousness; Jaak Panksepp represented affective neuroscience; Robert Plomin represented behavioral genetics; David Buss represented evolutionary psychology; Richard Nisbett represented research on cultural differences and social cognition. This stage brought psychology closer to a multi-level science, but also left “reductionism” and “explanatory gap” problems: brain mechanisms, genetic influences, and cultural experiences cannot be simply substituted for one another.

• 2000s–present: from categorical diagnosis to mechanism, model, and reproducibility. The core question is: are traditional diagnostic categories reliable, are psychological research findings reproducible, and can mental disorders be explained by mechanistic models? Karl Friston represented the free-energy principle and predictive coding; Andy Clark represented the predictive-processing approach; Denny Borsboom represented network psychopathology; Thomas Insel pushed the RDoC framework; Roman Kotov and others advanced HiTOP; Brian Nosek represented open science and the reproducibility reform. This stage tried to revise old frameworks with dimensions, networks, computational models, and open science, but many of these directions remain at the research frontier and cannot directly equate to mature clinical tools.

Core branches

Branch	Core question	Entry-point keywords
Research methods and psychometrics	How psychological phenomena are defined, measured, and validated	Experimental design, validity, reliability, statistics, scales, meta-analysis
Biological psychology / neuroscience	How brain, nervous system, and body support mental activity	Neurons, brain regions, neurotransmitters, hormones, plasticity
Perception and attention	How people extract information from the environment and selectively process it	Vision, hearing, attention, consciousness, illusions
Learning and memory	How behaviors, habits, knowledge, and skills form and change	Reinforcement, conditioning, working memory, long-term memory
Cognitive psychology	How people understand, reason, imagine, judge, and solve problems	Representation, language, concepts, decision-making, cognitive bias
Emotion and motivation	How emotion and goals drive behavior	Emotion regulation, stress, reward, fear, achievement motivation
Developmental psychology	How the mind changes from birth to old age	Attachment, cognitive development, socialization, adolescence, aging
Personality and individual differences	Why people stably differ from one another	Big Five personality, temperament, intelligence, personality disorders, heritability
Social psychology	How others and groups influence the individual	Attribution, attitudes, conformity, prejudice, groups, intimate relationships
Cultural psychology	How culture shapes cognition, emotion, self, and relationships	Individualism/collectivism, cultural scripts, cross-cultural differences
Abnormal psychology	How psychological disorders are described, classified, formed, and maintained	DSM, ICD, symptoms, course, comorbidity, risk factors
Clinical / counseling psychology	How to assess and intervene on psychological pain and functional impairment	Assessment, therapeutic alliance, CBT, dynamic therapy, family therapy
Health psychology	How psychological factors affect physical health and disease management	Stress, sleep, pain, adherence, behavioral medicine
Educational psychology	How learning, teaching, and growth occur	Motivation, feedback, learning strategies, developmental differences
Industrial and organizational psychology	Human behavior in organizations and at work	Recruitment, performance, leadership, teams, burnout
Human factors and engineering psychology	How to design systems that better fit human cognitive limits	Usability, attentional load, errors, human-computer interaction

Clinical psychology, counseling psychology, and psychiatry

These three fields are often mixed together, but their cores differ.

• Clinical psychology: focused on assessment of psychological disorders, psychotherapy, psychometrics, and intervention research.
• Counseling psychology: more often deals with life adjustment, relationships, career, stress, and developmental difficulties, and also handles some clinical issues.
• Psychiatry: a branch of medicine, focused on diagnosis, pharmacotherapy, neuromodulation, and medical management of mental disorders.
• Contemporary clinical mechanism and intervention frameworks: focused on how symptoms form, are maintained, and are changed, including exposure, behavioral activation, cognitive reappraisal, emotion regulation, skills training, mindfulness, acceptance, family and systems interventions, etc.; see modern_psychology_theories.md.

DSM and ICD are clinical diagnostic classification systems; RDoC and HiTOP are more research-oriented frameworks and dimensional classification attempts. They help organize knowledge but are not the final explanation of the nature of psychological disorders.

How to judge the strength of evidence for a theory

When studying psychology, do not only ask “does this explanation make sense”; also ask “what evidence does it use to support itself.”

Type of evidence	Approximate strength	Things to note
Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, multi-center studies	Relatively strong	Still need to look at study quality, publication bias, and effect size
Randomized controlled trials, longitudinal studies	Relatively strong	For clinical research, look at sample, control group, and follow-up
Reproducible experimental research	Medium to strong	Lab effects do not always generalize to reality
Large-sample correlational research	Medium	Correlation does not equal causation
Case studies, clinical experience	Suggestive but relatively weak	Good for generating hypotheses, not for directly proving theories
Pure theory, philosophical interpretation, symbolic interpretation	Intellectual value does not equal empirical evidence	Beware of post hoc explanations and unfalsifiability
Mass-market tests, short videos, label-style personality classifications	Usually weak	Useful for self-reflection, but avoid treating them as diagnoses

The more a theory tries to explain “everything,” the more cautious one should be. A good psychological theory should usually be able to specify its scope of applicability, boundary conditions, testable predictions, and counter-examples.

Major contemporary integration directions

1. Bio-psycho-social integration: placing genetics, neural, cognitive, emotional, personality, relational, and social-environmental factors within a single framework.

2. Cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience: using brain imaging, neurophysiology, lesion studies, and computational modeling to understand cognitive and emotional mechanisms.

3. Computational cognitive science and computational psychiatry: using Bayesian models, reinforcement learning, prediction error, and network models to describe perception, learning, decision, and psychopathology.

4. Developmental science and behavioral genetics: studying how genes, temperament, early environment, parenting, peers, education, and social pressure jointly shape individuals.

5. Dimensional and transdiagnostic frameworks: RDoC, HiTOP, and transdiagnostic treatments focus on symptom dimensions, mechanisms, and comorbidity, rather than relying solely on traditional categorical diagnoses.

6. Return of culture and social context: more research emphasizes that psychological laws are not entirely universal; culture, class, institutions, language, and technological environment shape the mind.

7. Open science and reproducibility: pre-registration, open data, meta-analyses, direct replication studies, and stricter statistical methods are correcting psychology’s problem of overpublishing positive results.

8. Digital mental health and AI intersection: digital phenotyping, online interventions, wearable devices, natural-language analysis, and AI-assisted assessment are advancing, but privacy, ethics, bias, and clinical reliability remain core issues.

Recommended learning paths

1. Start with research methods and psychometrics: otherwise you can easily be carried away by school narratives, personality labels, and case stories.

2. Then learn basic psychology: perception, learning, memory, cognition, emotion, motivation, development, personality, social psychology.

3. Fill in the biological foundation: nervous system, brain structure, neurotransmitters, hormones, genetics, neural plasticity.

4. Enter abnormal and clinical psychology: understand symptoms, diagnosis, comorbidity, course, treatment evidence, and functional impairment.

5. Then look at therapeutic schools and psychoanalysis: treat them as clinical understanding and intervention traditions, not as the foundational framework of all psychology.

6. Finally look at frontier theories: predictive processing, computational psychiatry, network psychopathology, RDoC, HiTOP, neuropsychoanalysis are all worth attention, but distinguish “research frontier” from “mature conclusions.”

Key readings

General / introductory

• OpenStax — Psychology 2e
• Peter Gray & David Bjorklund — Psychology
• Henry Gleitman, James Gross, Daniel Reisberg — Psychology
• Keith Stanovich — How to Think Straight About Psychology

Research methods / measurement

• Beth Morling — Research Methods in Psychology
• Paul C. Cozby & Scott Bates — Methods in Behavioral Research
• Lee J. Cronbach — classic papers on psychometrics, reliability, and validity

Cognition / neuroscience

• Daniel Reisberg — Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind
• Michael Eysenck & Mark Keane — Cognitive Psychology
• Mark Bear, Barry Connors, Michael Paradiso — Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain
• Eric Kandel et al. — Principles of Neural Science

Development / personality / social

• Robert Siegler et al. — How Children Develop
• Dan P. McAdams — The Person
• David Funder — The Personality Puzzle
• Elliot Aronson, Timothy Wilson, Samuel Sommers — Social Psychology
• David Myers & Jean Twenge — Social Psychology

Abnormal / clinical / psychotherapy

• Ann Kring et al. — Abnormal Psychology
• David Barlow et al. — Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach
• Judith Beck — Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond
• Glen O. Gabbard — Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice
• Nancy McWilliams — Psychoanalytic Diagnosis

The boundaries of self-study

Psychology notes can help one understand oneself and others, but they cannot replace professional diagnosis and treatment. Especially when ADHD, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, trauma, addiction, depression, anxiety, and psychotic symptoms are involved, treat the notes as a framework for understanding, not as a tool for drawing conclusions about oneself or others.