The ultimate goal is to produce claims about strata of mental life that may have escaped notice previously. Experiences I have analyzed thus far include the paradoxical surprise that an object is real, first noted by Freud, that people sometimes feel when they see an object they have felt sure existed but have never seen. Similarly, people often feel compelled to verify first hand scenes of recent events whose occurrence the people have never questioned. Both the meaning of thoughts such as Freud's and the basis of the lure of the real are provoking and less obvious than they might appear. I have begun to investigate choice in children and adults, with the eventual aim of addressing the question of what it is to be free and at one with oneself.
Many adults cherish free choice and yet have difficulty choosing.
They seem to be at odds with themselves and hence are not free, despite their sometimes bountiful options. Work in progress is exploring the basis of adults' perplexity and attempting to trace its potential antecedents in childhood. Currently I teach courses on developmental psychology and on Freud. Piaget's construction of the child's reality . Reflections on a paradoxical response to the real .