Introduction to “Psychology in the Snow: Reflections on Mental Wellness in the North”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/09
Table of Contents
In-Sight Publishing ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1
Psychology in the Snow: Reflections on Mental Wellness in the North ……………………………. 2
Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7
Introduction by Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson…………………………………………………………………………… 8
Introduction by Scott Douglas Jacobsen ……………………………………………………………………………………. 10
Interviews……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 11
Ask Dr. Robertson 1 — Counselling and Psychology ……………………………………………………………….. 12
December 14, 2018 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 12
Ask Dr. Robertson 2 – Psychotherapy ………………………………………………………………………………………… 13
December 27, 2018 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 13
Ask Dr. Robertson 3 — Social and Psychological Sciences Gone Wrong ……………………………….. 16
January 24, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 16
Ask Dr. Robertson 4 — Just You and Me, One-on-One Counselling ……………………………………….. 20
January 28, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 20
Ask Dr. Robertson 5 — Self-Actualization, Boys, and Young Males:
Solution:Problem::Hammer:Nail ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 22
February 11, 2019 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 22
Ask Dr. Robertson 6 — It’s All About Me, Me, Meme, and the Self: From First Nations to
Second Nations, Building Third Culture Counselling ………………………………………………………………. 28
March 19, 2019 ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 28
Ask Dr. Robertson (and Teela) 7 — Elate, Hawkeye on Roberts: A Happy Counselling
Psychology Family Affair ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 37
April 2, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 37
Ask Dr. Robertson 8 — A Social Work Betrayal of Male ………………………………………………………….. 40
May 14, 2019 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 40
Ask Dr. Robertson 9 — The Age of Psychology, Low Self-Esteem, Crazy Making,
Schizophrenia, Racism, and Religious Fundamentalism ………………………………………………………… 43
June 26, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 43
Ask Dr. Robertson 10— Real Life Effects of Fantasy Categories ……………………………………………. 44
July 21, 2019……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 44
Ask Dr. Robertson 11 — Smells Like Teen Spirit: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Youth Scorned 47
August 13, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 47
Ask Dr. Robertson 12 — Fault and Responsibility: If You Pass the Sentence, Then You
Should Swing the Sword ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 49
August 26, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 49
Ask Dr. Robertson 13 — A Hawk’s Eye on Counsellors’ Professional Ethics and Morals ….. 51
September 17, 2019 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 51
Ask Dr. Robertson (and Teela) 14 — Adlered with Eclecticism: A Confidence of Riches ….. 54
November 4, 2019 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 54
Ask Dr. Robertson 15 — Life Raft in Entertainment: Protection Against Marketing and
Advertising ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 57
December 25, 2019 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 57
Ask Dr. Robertson (and Teela) 16 — Exaggerated Insensitivity: Iniquity Upon the Sons, and
the Son’s Sons …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 60
April 16, 2019 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 60
Ask Dr. Robertson 17: The Era of Personality Disorder Diagnosis ……………………………………….. 62
June 4, 2021 ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 62
Ask Dr. Robertson 18: The Web of Life, and Mind: Unweaving Its Rainbow ……………………….. 64
June 26, 2021 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 64
An Interview with Carey Linde and Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson on Transgender
Identities, Transsexual Identities, Current and Historical Orientations, and Psychological
Science Definition of the Self (Part One) ……………………………………………………………………………………. 66
March 22, 2020 ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 66
An Interview with Carey Linde and Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson on Gender and the Law
(Part Two) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 72
August 1, 2020………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 72
An Interview with Carey Linde and Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson on Ethics, Freedom of
Expression, and Socio-Politics (Part Three) ……………………………………………………………………………… 76
August 15, 2020 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 76
Articles ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 80
Requiem for the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) Discussion Page …………………………. 81
July 12, 2022……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 81
References …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 85
Year of the Virus: Understanding the contagion effects of wokism ………………………………………. 87
February 22, 2021 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 87
The self as a mental analogue to the body ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 87
Therapeutic change to the self of two clients …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 88
A determined species unchained and re-chained …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 91
Is wokism a mind-virus contagion? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 93
Condition One: Change in Individual Self-Definition ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 94
Condition Two: Diminution of the Modern Self ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 96
Condition Three: Appropriation of Individual Resources…………………………………………………………………………………….. 97
Condition Four: Emotional Valence ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 99
Discussion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 100
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 101
References ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 102
Appendix I: Footnotes………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 104
Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture ………………………105
December 22, 2023 ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 105
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 110
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 110
Is Humanism Compatible with Indigeneity? ……………………………………………………………………………113
May 1, 2023 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 113
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 119
License and Copyright ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 121
License ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………121
Copyright ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….121
Acknowledgements
In honour of my friend Elder Albert Scott of the Kinistin Saulteaux who taught me much and gave me the painting reproduced on the front cover.
Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson
To Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson for the expertise, integrity, patience, professionalism, and collaboration, and the late Pete Jacobsen for everything.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Introduction by Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson
In 1998 then editor Scott Boyes agreed to publish a regular column in The Northerner, a weekly newspaper published out of La Ronge in northern Saskatchewan. Over the next seven years I submitted 90 columns on psychology. Then, in 2018 Scott Douglas Jacobsen approached me asking if I would agree to a series of interviews for In-Sight Publishing’s “Question Time” on counselling psychology. He did his research. Some of the questions he asked were about more recent articles published in peer-reviewed journals; but many of the questions were based on my newspaper column published twenty years previously! I quite enjoyed updating, elaborating, and revising my previous opinions on such topics as the purpose of psychotherapy, science and psychology, residential school syndrome, the aboriginal self, building rapport, mind-body dualism, male stigma, victim culture, and grieving. The eighteen interviews we completed are re-published in this book. Three of those interviews include my daughter who was a child when the original columns were published but is now a psychologist in private practice in Edmonton, Alberta. Life is grand. Scott also completed three interviews on transexuality with Vancouver lawyer Carey Linde and me in 2020; and, these interviews are also included in this work. Transsexuality is based on the idea that sex is real and that people born into one sex may wish to transition to the other. Transgender ideology, on the other hand, holds that sex is a social construct and that infants are assigned a sex at their birth. The notion that men can give birth, that people with penises can compete in women’s sports, and that men convicted of gendered crimes such as rape can be subsequently placed in women’s prisons flow from this notion that sex is not a fact but a social construct. While humanism is based on freedom of speech, those who adhere to transgender ideology and related practices such as critical race theory and cancel culture, eschew all such discussion. The second section of this book consists of four articles dealing with this phenomenon I call Woke Identitarianism because is based on personal identification with a number of approved victim groups.
The first article, Requiem for a Discussion Page is based on my experience as a moderator for an open humanist discussion group that had more than 2,000 members. This article recounts how militant Wokists, who could not tolerate respectful discussion of issues like tearing down statues and whether safe spaces for women should be protected, eventually succeeded in shutting the group down.
The second article deals with the larger ideology of critical and queer “theories” that denies the Enlightenment embrace of science, reason, and compassion upon which our civilization is based. Year of the Virus is my attempt to understand this self-defeating phenomenon using a psychological definition of what constitutes a mind virus. My thesis is that mind viruses evolved from pieces of culture and that there are several sources that contributed to the 21st Century Woke Identitarian phenomenon. While much has been written on the sources of Woke Identitarianism, the contribution of “health food” and “alternative medicine” has been neglected.
The third article in this compendium, Retro-evolution in food and health care and its impact on modern culture, deals the New Age Movement’s contribution to this 21st Century anti- intellectual movement. Like the Mormons of the 19th Century, the New Agers of the 20th romanticized people aboriginal to North America. Some have become shamans and pipe carriers in a westernized version of Aboriginal Spiritually with one, Charles Storm, inventing the modern medicine wheel consisting of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual quadrants. In 2003 psychologist Steven Pinker noted that a new quasi-religion had evolved based on the myths of the noble savage, blank slate, ghost in the machine.
The blank slate holds that our thoughts can be shaped through “politically correct” language. The ghost in the machine myth holds that we are born with an essence that decides, for example, whether we are transgender. The noble savage myth adds the view that indigenous ways of knowing are superior to “white”: or “western” ways. Humanism which includes our ideas of the universality of human rights is based on the Enlightenment which, in turn, has been called “a white, male way of knowing.” The last article in this book deals with the question Is humanism compatible with indigeneity? My answer is what you might expect from a psychologist, “It depends…”:
I would like to thank Scott both for his hard work as an interviewer and editor, but also for his inspiration in suggesting this project. I would also like to thank my fellow New Enlightenment Project board member, George Hewson for suggesting the title “Psychology in the Snow.” I would like to think that we are developing a psychology that is indigenous to Canada, different from that ofthe American Psychological Association.
Kind regards,
Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson
January, 2024
Introduction by Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Let me start with this: I did not expect this collaboration or the project. Even though, they’re my fault. I tend to fart around a lot with a wide smattering of projects, topics, themes, personas. I find them fun. I remain a playful and experimental person, even as I get older. Maybe, especially as I get older, it seems like deep temperament. Something to plumb. I enjoy reading authors who exist as kin to Kurt Vonnegut. A survivor of war: so trauma survivor – a funny writer. A physical sensation of pleasure to read the architecture of the written word by authors like him. Perhaps, that roots the element of play with me. As the late and prominent American humanist Isaac Asimov purportedly said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’”
Atheists, agnostics, brights, freethinkers, humanists, satanists, und so weiter, I, often, get a sense of whimsy about a life so short in community with them, because the so short life must take a whimsy sense given its brevity. My matrix or meta-premises of orientations about the world, myself, and the relation between the two, sits somewhere between the superset of these. A common thread with the superset comes from the presence of humour and use of empirical means to grasp elements of the world. The religious discourse, on the other hand, tends towards the asinine, the boring, the cruel, the dogmatic, the dreary, the dull, the dumb, the erred, and – no doubt – the faithful. Words in some sense seem ineffective in the display of overwhelming wonder present to generations of humanity with nothing but religious iconography, tales, and text to guide them. A sincere and naive wonder bound by ignorance without a method to know deeper functional and pragmatic truths about the universe. A “Eureka” followed by silence. Science gave the “that’s funny” response to the “Eureka” reverberating through the human animal in response to Nature.
Psychology as a purported claimant to scientific status appears late in the empirical game in the 1870s with Wilhelm Wundt. An empiricism beginning in the contemporary centuries, maybe, in the 1500s. Modern science garners respect for functional truths about the world, pragmatic truths about the world. These functional truths represent operationalism. These pragmatic truths represent practical application. The latter following from the former. To represent operations of Nature means the possibility for practical application on Nature, thus, we come to the basic sciences: biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, with the development of technologies following from these fields of inquiry. The greater the magnitude of complex systems, then the more difficult the discovery of deeper truths about those systems. Human information processing remains a great problem to solve, potentially a mystery. Regardless, as an evolved production of Nature and the unitary nature of Nature, the functional truths about Nature apply to us. In theory, psychology can act as a scientific conduit to learn deeper truths about human information processing with the possibility for technological developments to modify it. Is that true, funny, or both?
Counselling psychology comes from psychology. Ideally, psychological investigation remains empirical: the “that’s funny.” Counselling psychology, naturally, follows this vein. The counselling psychology interviews with Dr. Robertson represent an educational series devoted to casual discussion of complex counselling psychology ideas and topics in relation to counselling psychology.
As both humanists, the bias sits on this fulcrum: the “und so weiter” – my people. As a trauma survivor who did his work, life can be trauma. Counselling psychology becomes a necessity there. In the aforementioned sense, a technology, a tool, to modify human information processing for healthier living. The articles come as bonus materials to interested readers.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
December 28, 2023
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