I trust most of you are aware of the Milgram experiment (or the most well known thereof), but if you haven't, there's a Wikipedia link right there, just ripe for clicking! It's a pretty oft-cited defense of the power of authority/peer pressure/obedience etc., but the more I read about it, the more it seems like we're all missing the point. Hasn't anyone taken into consideration that the people subjected to this experiment have no doubt noticed that their experimenter is himself willing to subject other subjects to 45o volt shocks?

I think it may have been pure brute selfish fear, a better-him-than-me thing, that motivated these poor subjects, way more than just the human desire to acquiesce to authority. I mean, the experimenter clearly thinks it's okay to dangerously shock people. There's nothing that would suggest he would stop at dangerously shocking any dissenter in the experiment.

My psychology text has cleverly anticipated my excuse response by citing predictions, percentages, studies, surveys, and basically good hard raw facts and proof, that prove that no matter how much people deny that they would have done it, they would have definitely done it.

Though my text has discredited me before I even opened my mouth, I do think I would have refused to administer any more shocks until the experimenter at least made a threatening move or comment. And threatening means... threatening. Not, 'you have no choice but to continue'. That isn't a threat, it's an arguable statement that begs to be asked for clarification. But while this may be just my gut reaction/excuse for disassociating myself from these subjects, I feel like, yes, I would have done it in that case, but it wouldn't have been out of fear of disobeying authority. It would have been out of a fear OF GETTING SHOCKED WITH 450 VOLTS OF ELECTRICITY.

I am simultaneously playing 10 games of Scrabble and completing an application to be formally readmitted to school. Playing Scrabble at the same time enables me to not totally freak out about having just chosen a career path essentially at random. I mean, it's not as though I chose it out of a hat; if I had done that I could just as well have chosen physics (the only class in which I've ever tried as hard as I can and still gotten a D) or, I don't know, accounting or journalism or something.

I chose psychology, because all the way through my anthropology degree, I was reading psychology books, asking psychology-related questions, and generally unsuccesfully trying to tug my degree towards another one without realizing what I was doing. I was spread-eagled between zoology and psychology, and instead of choosing one or the other, I just chose the middle.

And honestly, it's not like I chose an actual career yet, because there's thousands of ways you can go with psychology. And most of those ways, thankfully and contrary to popular belief, do not involve me sitting in a cramped office with a stranger on my couch pouring every tiny detail of his life out to me while I sit there with my clipboard out trying to be engaging and sympathetic, and also writing at the same time.

Whenever anyone at work has asked me what I'm studying and I tell them, they sort of grimace. It's a familiar grimace. Yuck. Therapy. Couches. Repressed memories. Dream-telling. Oedipal complexes. Hundred dollars a session. Recalling child abuse. Icky.

And I have to explain to them that not only is that not what I'm going for, but that's hardly what anyone's going for anymore (except for the hundred dollars a session, I guess). Hasn't the Freudian wave been out for decades now? Aren't we through with everything, sticks to snakes to pencils, representing penises? And dreams being expression of secretly repressed desires?

If I were to be a therapist at all, I'd want to be a problem-solver, but mostly I'm interested in how people behave when they have more or fewer choices, and also in psychosomatic (idiopathic, as they say in some medical circles) pain and disease. These two lines of thought don't cross, but I'm sure I could make them cross. You can make anything cross.