1. An apologetic Roman Catholic priest in the U.S. was sentenced to prison for stealing more than $800 000 from his parish to finance vacations, country clubs, and fancy clothes.
2. A suicide-prevention activist died of suicide by a deliberate drug overdose.

Immediately, one will notice the irony in each of these two articles.  First, there is the priest, entrusted by the community to charity and service, who was overcome by greed.  Greed, in a sense, can be thought of as an overexpression of the fundamental human need for power.  Every person has a set of basic needs such as food and shelter.  However, there are other needs that are expressed by the cognitive mind.  The need for power is a way of manifesting competency and social influence over others.  Freud might say that this priest's need for power became too much entwined with his Id, the component of the mind which breeds instinctual motivations such as sex.

Second, we have the anti-suicide activist who died of suicide.  Hard to understand?  Not entirely.  Freud would argue that when one experiences anxiety, one must find ways to reduce that anxiety.  Perhaps this activist had been suffering from mental illnesses brought about by hardships and an obsession with suicidal tendencies, that she was ridden with anxiety.  Sometimes, the way to rid oneself of a negative attitude, according to Freud, is to behave in a way that is cmpletely incompatible with that attitude so as to repress it.  In other words, act in the manner opposite to what you dislike.  So for example, do you feel depressed by your low university grades?  Then why not go around telling your classmates how stupid people are that don't study.  You get the idea.  In Freudian terms, this is an example of the defense mechanism of reaction formation.

One of my past psychology professors once told us about the utopian promise of psychology, which basically says that if you can understand why people do what they do, then you can have mastery over yourself and the influence of other people.

I'm still working on it.

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