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Christian Psychologist

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Psychologist with a Theology Degree & Hypnotic Touch
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Two Instincts

Life Instinct: a force for survival and propagation, encompassing sexual drives, self-preservation, and basic needs like thirst and hunger​

Death instinct: a fundamental, unconscious drive in all living beings toward self-destruction and a return to an earlier, inanimate state

- Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud, 1920

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Be fruitful and multiply
From dust you come, to dust you shall return
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- Genesis 1, 3​​

Revised Standard Version

Three Temptations

3 The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” 4 And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’”

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6 and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.... 7 If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.” 8 And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”

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on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; ...  12 And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’”

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- Luke 4

Revised Standard Version

 

​0-3 months: awareness of need gratification, hunger for pleasure, lack of distinction between subjective and objective worlds. 

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4-12 months: thinking people are either "all-good" or "all-bad". Desire to merge with "all-good" and fear of "all-bad" 

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1-3 years: need to see the "gleam in parent's eye" to develop self-confidence and object constancy. 

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- Preoedipal Child Development, ​Psychoanalysis and Hypnosis, Erika Fromm 1996

Desert And Mountains
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Four Stages of Love

​Love of Self

​Man loves himself for all his pleasures and will. Three concupiscences: loving oneself as an end in itself

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Love God for Self

​Man begins to love God when he becomes aware of his own misery. He realises he needs divine help to escape it.​

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Love God for Himself

While turning to God out of need, the soul soon begins to feel that living with God is sweet: she begins to love Him for Himself, alternating between self-interested love and pure, disinterested love.

 

​Love of self for God

One loves God with disinterested love, so one loves oneself only for God's sake: "Iste est tertius amoris gradus, quo jam propter se ipsum Deus diligitur. Felix qui meruit ad quartum usque pertingere, quatenus nec seipsum diligat homo nisi propter Deum"​​

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- On Loving God, Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th Century

Love of Self

A person loves him or herself only for one's sense of well-being, gratification, and pleasure. The pleasure principle dominates the mind. ​

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Love other people for oneself

​A person becomes aware of the limitations in oneself. One takes pleasure in other people for their similarities to oneself and seeks help from others to avoid unpleasure. 

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Love other people for other people

A person no longer resents the demarcations between oneself and others. One develops a sense of admiration and enthusiasm, while also maintaining positive self-esteem and self-confidence​​

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Love oneself for other people

​A person learns to sacrifice for the love of other people, to be the object of other people's love. Such as being a good husband for one's wife, looking after one's health to provide for one's children, learning to be a good person to be children's role model. 

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- My psychological interpretation of St Bernard.​

Cum in amplexu et osculo Patris et Filii, mediam quodam modo se invenit beata conscientia. - The Mystical Theology of St Bernard, Etienne Gilson

My Beginning

​My journey into psychology was born on my 8th birthday with a set of children's encyclopaedias as a present, which kept me company on lonely evenings. The sections about philosophy and psychology left their imprints.

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Through the teen years and early 20s, I enjoyed the beauty and elegance of physics and mathematics, but also struggled with unknowable emptiness and depression, until: 

 

I crossed the threshold of a Cistercian monastery and found peace. Its humility cured my restlessness, and its stability calmed my angst. My life started a conversation with Life Itself.

Wuyuan Antony-John Jia
BPsych(Hons), GradDipTheol, GradDipPsych, BEd, BSc, Cert III Aged Care

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