This paper delineates the psychological structure and behavior pattern of the idealistic personality.  This is a person who in childhood, due to the exigencies of his inherited biological issues, used his mind to invent an idealized self; a self he believes is an ideal alternative to his problematic body and experiences obsessive-compulsive desire to become that ideal self. In every situation he finds himself in he seeks what is ideal and tries to live up to the ideal. He does this as if he is a slave to the ideal self-construct and in the processes loses the ability to seek…

  The prescription of 'APC' pills to treat the political migraine of Nigeria's democracy which has been troubling it since 1999, when codeine, panadol, phensic, even with their combinations has not worked for the country. The attempt to use APC could help with some serious efforts in clearing the wreckage in the system before usage. Meanwhile, Nigerians commend the wisdom of leaders of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), (still in doubt), to come together to form a new political party, All Progressive Congress, (APC), after clearing some housekeeping obstacles…

This paper’s thesis is that beginning with the dawn of Trans-Sahara slavery Africans learned to go capture their people and sell them to Arabs and later to Europeans. As a result, Africans developed lack of value for their lives and the lives of their fellow Africans. This self-disregard is now part of the African culture and psyche and contemporary Africans are socialized to internalize it.  Consequently, Africans do not see their people as those that they ought to work hard or. The paper says that Africans must systematically be taught to love themselves and to work for their fellow Africans…

Achebe’s straight telling of stories without analyzing why the characters in his stories did what they did, I think, is what made his writing irritating to me; I like writers who try to figure out why human beings do what they do, that is, writers who provide psychological explanation of the human phenomenon.  Why Chinua Achebe Annoyed Me  Ozodi Osuji  My antipathy to Chinua Achebe is well known.  The man simply annoyed me; I was so irritated by his writing that whenever I read one of his novels I would go into a funk. The rational part of me kept…

If you are around new age religionists you probably hear members say that our thinking produces the world we see.  A course in miracles says that perception is projection, that the world we see with our physical eyes is the outward mirror of our thinking. We think and our thinking is pictured for us to see, that nothing we see in our world is not the product of our thoughts. Along this line of reasoning our thinking is also said to produce the world we see in our nightly dreams. At night we sleep and see a world that looks…

Each of us believes that he or she has a self. So, what exactly is the self? We shall answer this question from many levels.  We shall begin at the empirical level, the human personality and then work our way to higher levels of the self, the part that is not empirical and not seem by people but that people believe is there. The self that the individual is conscious of is his self-concept, aka personality.  He is also aware that he is more than his personality, after all he knows that the term personality is derived from persona, mask.…

Some human beings are here to perform the function of telling their people and people in general the truth about them. Such persons, truth Sayers, are seldom appreciated for their function; indeed, the usual thing is to destroy them. Be that as it may, truth Sayers must perform their appointed function for on their role depends the wellbeing of mankind. I saw Igbos suffering from the delusion of grandeur that they are a special people. They actually believe in that psychosis. I undertook to disabuse them of that insanity and risked their rejection.  My job is done and I move…

In my previous article on the controversy between Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili and the reputation managers of the federal government over an offending sentence in Mrs. Ezekwesili’s UNN Convocation on January 24, 2013, I pointed out some errors or mistakes made by Mrs. Ezekewesili and then emphasized that they are not usual among economists and in public policy. I also noted that the offending sentence does not warrant the attack on the person of Mrs. Ezekwesili by Mr. Maku and Dr. Okupe. Clearly, the controversy has overshadowed the central messages of the lecture and the lessons the current administration and all…

Appreciating the ridiculous low self-regard in contemporary Africans, manifested in Africans tendency to insult each other and steal from one another, this paper asks whether the over one thousand years Africans spent in slavery is the cause of their obvious low self-esteem?  Did The Slave Experience Cause Africans Low Self Esteem?  Ozodiobi Osuji  For over a thousand years (from about 900 AD when Arabs began buying Africans) to about 1900 when both American and internal African slavery finally ended, Africans roamed around their continent capturing and selling their people to whoever wanted to buy them as slaves. It seems to…