The Professional School of Psychology is home to the Institute for Public Policy and Psychology. This institute has been established to further investigations in the challenging fields of cultural and political psychology. Focus is being placed on such topics as the assumptive worlds of psychopathology, the bias of research on social biases, and the creation of societal myths regarding noted political figures. This institute is also home to the Don Quixote Project which has to do with the narcissism and trauma to be found in contemporary organizations and other social systems.
The Psychopathology ProjectÂ
At the present time, the following essays have been published regarding the assumptive worlds of psychopathology:
Many years ago (during the late Middle Ages), the Spanish novelist, Miguel de Cervantes, was living in a world of transition. The era of romance and courtly love was coming to an end, with a new world of rationality and modernity on the horizon. Cervantes offered a profoundly moving portrait of this transition in Don Quixote de la Mancha. Don Quixote was an elderly man and minor aristocrat who was caught up in a world of illusion and fantasy-being unable to face an emerging world that seemed to be devoid of romance.
In many ways, we are now facing in the first decades of the 21st Century a world that is similarly in transition. As members of families, organizations and societies that are being threatened at a fundamental level, we are forced like Don Quixote to choose being reality and illusion. The choices we make between these two paths impacts not only on our own lives and careers, but also the lives and careers of the men and women with whom we work and interact. This project concerns the choices with which we are faced and the consequences inherent in these choices.
