Psychology & Philosophy

Interactive Presentations

A series of graphical, interactive presentations exploring foundational thinkers in psychology and philosophy — from ancient and medieval philosophy to depth psychology, phenomenology, process thought, and aesthetics. Built as single-file Reveal.js deployments — no build step, no dependencies beyond CDN.

Presentations

01

Carl Jung

The architecture of the psyche — archetypes, the collective unconscious, individuation, psychological types, alchemy, synchronicity, and the legacy of Analytical Psychology. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Archetypes Collective Unconscious Individuation
Launch
02

Sigmund Freud

The foundations of psychoanalysis — the unconscious, dream interpretation, psychosexual development, defence mechanisms, Eros and Thanatos, and the structural model. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Psychoanalysis Dream Theory Defence Mechanisms
Launch
03

Carl Rogers

The person-centred approach — the actualising tendency, unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence, the fully functioning person, encounter groups, and student-centred learning. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Person-Centred Core Conditions Humanistic
Launch
04

Alfred Adler

Individual Psychology — the inferiority complex, striving for significance, style of life, social interest, birth order, and fictional finalism. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Individual Psychology Inferiority Social Interest
Launch
05

Viktor Frankl

The search for meaning — logotherapy, the will to meaning, the existential vacuum, paradoxical intention, the tragic triad, and self-transcendence. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Logotherapy Existential Meaning
Launch
06

Jean Piaget

Genetic epistemology — schemas, assimilation and accommodation, the four stages of cognitive development, constructivism, and moral reasoning. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Cognitive Development Constructivism Schemas
Launch
07

Erich Neumann

The origins and history of consciousness — the uroboros, the Great Mother, stages of ego development, centroversion, the hero myth, and the creative unconscious. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Depth Psychology Great Mother Consciousness
Launch
08

Joseph Campbell

Myth, meaning, and the hero's journey — the monomyth, the four functions of myth, archetypes in narrative, "follow your bliss," and the power of myth. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Hero's Journey Monomyth Mythology
Launch
09

Friedrich Nietzsche

The psychology of the depths — the will to power, master and slave morality, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, the death of God, and amor fati. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Will to Power Übermensch Perspectivism
Launch
10

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The novelist as psychologist — the underground man, the divided self, crime and conscience, freedom and the Grand Inquisitor, and redemption through suffering. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Divided Self Conscience Freedom
Launch
11

Jordan Peterson

Maps of meaning and the psychology of belief — order and chaos, dominance hierarchies, the Big Five, neo-Jungian myth interpretation, and the self-authoring programme. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Maps of Meaning Big Five Order & Chaos
Launch
12

Immanuel Kant

The critique of pure reason and the limits of knowledge — the Copernican revolution, phenomena and noumena, the categories, synthetic a priori, the categorical imperative, and the sublime. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Transcendental Categories Moral Law
Launch
13

G.W.F. Hegel

The phenomenology of spirit and the dialectic — Aufhebung, the master-slave dialectic, absolute spirit, history as the progress of freedom, recognition, and the concrete universal. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Dialectic Aufhebung Spirit
Launch
14

Søren Kierkegaard

Existence, anxiety, and the leap of faith — the three stages, despair and the self, subjectivity is truth, the teleological suspension of the ethical, the pseudonymous method. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Existentialism Anxiety Leap of Faith
Launch
15

Arthur Schopenhauer

The world as will and representation — the blind Will, the veil of Maya, aesthetic contemplation, music as direct copy of the Will, compassion, and the denial of the will-to-live. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

The Will Pessimism Compassion
Launch
Philosophy & Phenomenology
16

Martin Heidegger

Being, time, and the question of existence — Dasein, being-in-the-world, the ready-to-hand, anxiety, the Kehre, the question concerning technology, dwelling, and language. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Dasein Being & Time Technology
Launch
17

Edmund Husserl

Phenomenology and the return to things themselves — intentionality, the epoché, eidetic reduction, noesis and noema, the lifeworld, transcendental subjectivity, and the crisis of the sciences. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Phenomenology Intentionality Lifeworld
Launch
18

Henri Bergson

Duration, intuition, and creative evolution — the élan vital, matter and memory, the cinematographical illusion, the two sources of morality and religion, comedy and laughter. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Duration Élan Vital Intuition
Launch
19

Alfred North Whitehead

Process, reality, and the philosophy of organism — actual occasions, prehension, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, eternal objects, creativity, and the bifurcation of nature. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Process Philosophy Organism Creativity
Launch
20

William James

Pragmatism, consciousness, and the varieties of experience — the stream of consciousness, radical empiricism, the will to believe, habit, pluralism, and religious experience. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Pragmatism Stream of Consciousness Religious Experience
Launch
21

Martin Buber

I and Thou and the philosophy of dialogue — the I-Thou vs I-It relation, the between, encounter, the eternal Thou, Hasidism, community, and education as encounter. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

I-Thou Dialogue The Between
Launch
22

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology of perception and the lived body — the body schema, the chiasm and the flesh, reversibility, motor intentionality, expression, and the primacy of perception. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Embodiment Perception The Flesh
Launch
23

Roger Scruton

Beauty, belonging, and the sacred — oikophilia, the first-person perspective, aesthetic order, conservatism as settlement, the face and the gaze, and the transcendentals. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Beauty Oikophilia The Sacred
Launch
24

Iain McGilchrist

The divided brain and the making of the Western world — two hemispheres, the master and his emissary, attention as ontologically creative, betweenness, and the four paths to truth. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Divided Brain Attention Betweenness
Launch
25

Byung-Chul Han

The burnout society, psychopolitics, and the transparency society — auto-exploitation, the achievement-subject, positivity excess, neoliberal control through the psyche, and the disappearance of the Other. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Burnout Society Psychopolitics Transparency
Launch
26

Jonathan Haidt

Moral foundations theory, the righteous mind, and the anxious generation — the elephant and the rider, moral intuitionism, the hive switch, the great rewiring, and viewpoint diversity. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Moral Foundations Righteous Mind Anxious Generation
Launch
27

Jacques Lacan

The mirror stage, the three registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary), the unconscious structured like a language, desire of the Other, jouissance, and the four discourses. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Mirror Stage RSI Jouissance
Launch
28

D.W. Winnicott

The good enough mother, transitional objects, true self and false self, the potential space, playing and reality, the holding environment, and the capacity to be alone. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Good Enough Mother Transitional Objects True Self
Launch
29

Wilfred Bion

Container/contained, alpha function and beta elements, thoughts without a thinker, the Grid, experiences in groups, O, and the oscillation between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Container/Contained Alpha Function The Grid
Launch
30

Emmanuel Levinas

The face of the Other, ethics as first philosophy, infinite responsibility, totality and infinity, the saying and the said, and otherwise than being. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

The Face Ethics First Responsibility
Launch
31

Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness, existence precedes essence, radical freedom, bad faith, the Look, being-for-others, and the turn to Marxism. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Bad Faith Freedom Nothingness
Launch
32

Albert Camus

The absurd, the myth of Sisyphus, revolt, the stranger, the plague, the rebel, and Mediterranean thought — moderation, limits, and saying yes to life. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

The Absurd Revolt Mediterranean
Launch
33

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Tractatus, language games, family resemblance, the private language argument, rule-following, forms of life, and On Certainty. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Language Games Tractatus Forms of Life
Launch
34

Simone Weil

Attention, affliction, gravity and grace, decreation, the love of God and affliction, force, roots, and the implicit love of God. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Attention Decreation Gravity & Grace
Launch
Medieval Philosophy
35

Augustine of Hippo

Grace, original sin, the Two Cities, time and memory, divine illumination, the restless heart, and the Neo-Platonic synthesis that shaped Western Christianity. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Grace Two Cities Confessions
Launch
36

Thomas Aquinas

Scholasticism at its height — the Five Ways, faith and reason, natural law, the Summa Theologiae, virtue ethics, and the Aristotelian-Christian synthesis. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Scholasticism Natural Law Five Ways
Launch
37

William of Ockham

Nominalism, Ockham's Razor, divine omnipotence, individual rights, and the dissolution of scholastic universals that set the stage for modern science and politics. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Nominalism Ockham's Razor Rights Theory
Launch
Ancient Philosophy
38

Socrates

The examined life — the Socratic method, Socratic ignorance, virtue as knowledge, the daimon, the trial and death in the Apology, and the philosophical revolution that left no writings but founded the Western tradition. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Elenchus Examined Life Apology
Launch
39

Plato

The Theory of Forms, the Republic, the Cave Allegory, the philosopher-king, Eros and beauty in the Symposium, the immortal soul, and the founding of the Academy. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Theory of Forms The Republic The Academy
Launch
40

Aristotle

The four causes, hylomorphism, the Unmoved Mover, the Nicomachean Ethics, eudaimonia, virtue as the mean, the polis, logic and the Organon, and the encyclopaedic programme of the Lyceum. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Four Causes Eudaimonia Logic
Launch
41

Seneca

Stoic wisdom — the dichotomy of control, virtue as the only good, memento mori, the Letters to Lucilius, the passions, cosmopolitanism, and Stoicism from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Stoicism Virtue Memento Mori
Launch
42

Plotinus & Neo-Platonism

Emanation from the One through Nous and World Soul, the soul's return, the beautiful, against the Gnostics, and the Neo-Platonic tradition from Porphyry to Pseudo-Dionysius. 17 slides with SVG diagrams.

Emanation The One Neo-Platonism
Launch

Historical Influences

These thinkers form a deeply interconnected web of influence spanning two millennia. The map below traces the major lines of intellectual inheritance across the collection.

ANCIENT MEDIEVAL 18TH C. 19TH C. EARLY 20TH MID 20TH LATE 20TH 21ST C. Socrates 470–399 Plato 428–348 Aristotle 384–322 Seneca 4 BCE–65 Plotinus 205–270 Augustine 354–430 Aquinas 1225–1274 Ockham 1287–1347 Kant 1724–1804 Hegel 1770–1831 Schopenhauer 1788–1860 Kierkegaard 1813–1855 Nietzsche 1844–1900 Dostoevsky 1821–1881 W. James 1842–1910 Jung 1875–1961 Freud 1856–1939 Heidegger 1889–1976 Husserl 1859–1938 Bergson 1859–1941 Adler 1870–1937 Frankl 1905–1997 Rogers 1902–1987 Buber 1878–1965 Whitehead 1861–1947 Merleau-Ponty 1908–1961 Neumann 1905–1960 Weil 1909–1943 Campbell 1904–1987 Lacan 1901–1981 Peterson b. 1962 Wittgenstein 1889–1951 Sartre 1905–1980 Levinas 1906–1995 Camus 1913–1960 Scruton 1944–2020 Winnicott 1896–1971 Piaget 1896–1980 Bion 1897–1979 McGilchrist b. 1953 Han b. 1959 Haidt b. 1963
Depth Psychology
Psychoanalysis / Existential
Phenomenology / Literature
Pragmatism / Process
Epistemology / Development
Dashed = indirect or contested
THE DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY LINEAGE

Kant → Schopenhauer → Nietzsche → Freud → Jung → Neumann → Campbell → Peterson

Kant's thing-in-itself became Schopenhauer's blind, irrational Will — the headwater of depth psychology. Schopenhauer's insight that unconscious striving drives human life shaped Nietzsche (who transformed pessimism into life-affirmation), Freud (who acknowledged Schopenhauer's priority on repression), and Jung (whose collective unconscious parallels the transpersonal Will). Kierkegaard's existential anxiety fed into Heidegger and Frankl. The tradition flowed through Neumann's developmental mythology, Campbell's comparative myths, and into Peterson's neo-Jungian synthesis. Dostoevsky's literary explorations of the divided self enrich the entire lineage.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL LINEAGE

Husserl → Heidegger → McGilchrist & Scruton

Husserl's phenomenological method — the epoché, intentionality, and the return to the lifeworld — was radicalised by his student Heidegger into an analysis of Dasein, being-in-the-world, and the question of technology. McGilchrist draws heavily on Heidegger's distinction between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand to articulate the difference between right- and left-hemisphere modes of attention. Scruton inherits Husserl's intentionality and Heidegger's concept of dwelling to ground his philosophy of beauty, the first-person perspective, and the sacred.

THE PROCESS & EXPERIENCE LINEAGE

William James ↔ Bergson → Whitehead → McGilchrist

James's radical empiricism and Bergson's duration represent parallel discoveries: experience is continuous flow, not discrete atoms. Their mutual admiration fuelled both pragmatism and process thought. Bergson's élan vital and critique of the "cinematographical illusion" — intellect spatialising what is really flowing — directly anticipates McGilchrist's left-hemisphere critique. Whitehead built on both James and Bergson to create process philosophy, whose "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" is central to McGilchrist's thesis. James also influenced Husserl, Jung, and Frankl's psychology of meaning.

THE EXISTENTIAL LINEAGE

Kierkegaard → Heidegger → Frankl & Buber

Kierkegaard's existential categories — anxiety as the dizziness of freedom, despair as the sickness of the self, the leap of faith — were secularised by Heidegger into Angst, being-toward-death, and authenticity. Frankl transformed existential despair into logotherapy: meaning as the answer to suffering. Buber, influenced by Kierkegaard's "single individual before God" but critical of his solipsism, opened the existential tradition to dialogue — the I-Thou relation, which directly shaped Rogers's person-centred therapy and McGilchrist's concept of betweenness.

THE EMBODIMENT LINEAGE

Husserl → Heidegger → Merleau-Ponty → McGilchrist

Husserl's phenomenology grounded knowledge in lived experience; Heidegger radicalised this into being-in-the-world and the primacy of practical engagement. Merleau-Ponty completed the turn to the body: the lived body is our primary way of being in the world, perception is active and embodied, and the "flesh" is the element from which both subject and object arise. McGilchrist draws on Merleau-Ponty more than almost any other philosopher — the primacy of embodied, pre-reflective perception maps directly onto right-hemisphere processing, making Merleau-Ponty the key bridge figure between phenomenology and hemisphere neuroscience.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC LINEAGE

Freud → Lacan · Winnicott · Bion

Lacan's "return to Freud" re-read psychoanalysis through structural linguistics — the unconscious structured like a language, desire as the desire of the Other, and the three registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) that map the topology of the subject. Winnicott took a different path entirely, emphasising the facilitating environment, the good enough mother, and the transitional space where culture and creativity are born. Bion, trained by Melanie Klein, extended object relations into a theory of thinking itself — container/contained, alpha function that transforms raw experience into thinkable thoughts, and the radical concept of "thoughts without a thinker." All three transformed Freud's legacy in directions he could not have anticipated, yet all remain recognisably psychoanalytic in method and commitment.

THE FRENCH EXISTENTIAL LINEAGE

Kierkegaard → Heidegger → Sartre → Camus · Levinas · Weil

Sartre drew on Heidegger's analysis of Dasein and Husserl's phenomenology to produce his radical doctrine of freedom: existence precedes essence, consciousness is pure nothingness, and bad faith is the flight from this terrifying liberty. Camus shared the existential terrain but rejected the label — offering the absurd and Mediterranean revolt as alternatives to Sartre's political engagement. Their famous rupture defined post-war French thought. Levinas turned Heidegger's ontology inside out: ethics, not being, is first philosophy, and the face of the Other commands infinite responsibility. Weil, the most singular figure in this constellation, took suffering, attention, and decreation as paths toward a divine gravity and grace that dissolves the self — a mystical existentialism drawing equally on Plato, the Stoics, and the Gospels.

THE ANALYTIC TRADITION

Wittgenstein — and the Limits of Language

Wittgenstein stands apart from every lineage — connected to Frege and Russell's logic but ultimately dissolving systematic philosophy itself. The early Tractatus drew a limit around what can be said, consigning ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical to silence. The later Philosophical Investigations replaced logical atomism with language games, family resemblance, and forms of life — showing that meaning is use, not reference, and that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. His later work profoundly influenced McGilchrist's understanding of how language shapes (and distorts) experience, and his critique of the "bewitchment of intelligence by means of language" anticipates the left-hemisphere thesis. Schopenhauer's influence on the young Wittgenstein — the mystical, the ethical, the ineffable — is often overlooked but constitutive.

THE ANCIENT LINEAGE

Socrates → Plato → Aristotle  ·  Zeno → Seneca  ·  Plotinus

Socrates founded philosophy as a practice of rigorous self-examination and dialogical inquiry, leaving no writings but generating the entire Western tradition through the unsettling force of his questioning. Plato institutionalised this spirit in the Academy and gave it metaphysical depth: the world of particulars participates imperfectly in a transcendent realm of Forms, culminating in the Form of the Good. Aristotle rejected the separate Forms while preserving teleology — making nature itself intelligible through four causes, the soul as form of the body, and the Unmoved Mover as the ultimate ground of cosmic motion. In parallel, Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism in Athens c.300 BCE, teaching that virtue alone is the good and that the logos pervades all things — a tradition culminating in the Letters of Seneca, Epictetus's Discourses, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Plotinus in the 3rd century CE synthesised Plato, Aristotle, and the Pythagorean tradition into Neo-Platonism: a system of emanation from the ineffable One through Intellect and World Soul to Matter, with philosophy as the path of return — a framework that decisively shaped Augustine, medieval mysticism, and the Renaissance.

THE MEDIEVAL LINEAGE

Augustine → Aquinas → Ockham

Augustine synthesised Neo-Platonic philosophy with Christian revelation, bequeathing to the West the inward turn of the self, the doctrine of original sin and irresistible grace, the two-cities philosophy of history, and the restless heart as the engine of philosophical inquiry. Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas harmonised Augustine's inheritance with Aristotelian metaphysics: grace perfects nature, faith and reason cooperate, and God is Ipsum Esse Subsistens — Being itself. William of Ockham then challenged both: his nominalism dissolved universal natures into mere names, his voluntarism freed the divine will from rational constraint, and his Razor cleared the ground for empirical science and individual rights theory. The arc from Augustine's restless heart to Ockham's razor-sharp particulars is the inner drama of medieval philosophy — and its output is the conceptual world we still inhabit.

THE CONVERGENCE

McGilchrist, Scruton & Han: Where the Lineages Meet

McGilchrist, Scruton, and Han each argue — from very different starting points — that Western modernity has become pathologically one-sided. McGilchrist frames the imbalance through hemisphere neuroscience: the left hemisphere's narrow, analytic, instrumental attention has usurped the right hemisphere's broad, contextual, relational grasp. Scruton diagnoses the same pathology through aesthetics and the sacred: beauty, belonging, and the first-person perspective are sacrificed to utility. Han, drawing on Heidegger and Levinas, identifies a "burnout society" in which the disciplinary power Foucault described has been internalised as auto-exploitation — the achievement-subject who destroys himself in the name of freedom. All three draw on Heidegger's critique of technology, and all converge on the same prescription: the antidote to modern disenchantment lies not in more information, productivity, or optimisation, but in a recovery of attention, contemplation, the Other, and the irreducibility of presence.