![]() ![]() ![]() That inquiry into life’s meaning and purpose resulted in an acclaimed professional career that, over many years, garnered him much praise and attention as a founder of the popular and growing field of positive psychology and as the “father of flow,” which refers to the optimal psychological state when one is fully immersed in an activity. He’d witnessed that wartime trauma himself-his own family suffered the loss of his two older brothers-and it instilled in him a deep desire to study psychology and understand what a meaningful life can be. ![]() ![]() It was a coping mechanism, the man said, a way of finding order in the inexplainable chaos of war.Ĭsikszentmihalyi had no idea that the lecturer that night was Carl Jung-but hearing Jung stayed with him long after he moved to the United States at the age of 22. He spoke about how the psyches of Europeans had been so deeply traumatized by World War II that they projected UFOs into the skies. The man he heard that night didn’t talk about aliens from outer space. It sounded entertaining to him, he told a TED audience in 2004. The lecture was on the topic of flying saucers. BACK IN THE 1950s, when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was 16 and traveling in Switzerland (but with no money to enjoy skiing or even go to a movie), he heard about a free lecture in Zurich. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |