Yesterday (Friday) late morning, I went to see a Ph.D. of psychology at a four-year state college, to get "guidance" on a course I'm taking there. It's one of those 499/899 "independent study" things, good for three credit hours, and it's the third time I've done this since 2005, shortly after all that mischief by Doug's ex-wife.
And I had to pay some bucks yesterday to make it the.....fourth time.
I'm getting an "A" on this third time, although the professor appears to think I should be less casual and sloppy in analyzing the primitives.
My attitude of course is that hey, I'm doing this just for fun, so no big deal, but I did promise to be more exact, more painstaking. We'll see how that goes.
The topic is "sociology of primitives on the internet," with the primitives of Skins's island being the primary--and in fact only--case study.
The problem with this is that there is no way one can determine which conclusions are correct in real life, and which ones aren't.
People can be very different on the internet, from real life.
But anyway, everything's based upon the premise that the primitives are telling the truth about how they really feel about things, and how they really feel about things can give important clues about the way they are in real life.
It's just intellectual recreation, and those of us who don't watch television or listen to radio or music or go to movies, well, we deaf need something to fill our heads too.
Remember, my first college degree was in British history, and so in retrospect, that was intellectual recreation too, rather than practical stuff.
And the good professor of course gets paid for this.
And I'm not a particularly demanding student.
Anyway, so we discussed narcissism among the primitives.
At my request, we omitted consideration of female primitives, because being a man, it's not likely I understand women well, and besides, while narcissism can severely cripple a male, a little bit of it--please notice the "a little bit"--is to be expected in women anyway.
Myself, I suspect that of all the primitives, Pedro Picasso is the most narcissistic.
The standard definition of narcissism is "an arresting of development at, or a regression to, the infantile stage of development, in which one's own body is the object of erotic interest." In other words, excessive admiration of oneself.
This pertains not only to the physical body, but also to one's character, values, and opinions, this idea that one is aesthetic in these things, too. (Such as imagining one has more brains, or more virtue, than one actually does.)
But I could be wrong. I've been wrong before. Maybe it's another primitive.
edited to correct mispelling in title; sorry for the inconvenience