Magical thinking at a young age
Rightardia occasionally writes about Ricky the Rightard. He is the slack jawed family ditto head drooler. Even principled conservatives in the family consider him a dreamer or a source of amusement.
When Ricky was eight his mother suggested Ricky and I build a cat scratch post as a father-son project. We went to the hardware store and bought some ply wood, carpet, some nails and screws, and found a cardboard tube in our cluster home.
I started the project then asked Ricky where the center of the base board to the scat scratch post was. He pointed with his finger and placed an x on the board.
I then showed home how to use a ruler to measure the board so marks could be put in the middle the top and bottom of the board and the left side and right side. then a line could be drawn top and bottom and left and right to find the center.
I also showed home a simpler way by just drawing lines between the four vertices or corners of the boards.
The centers matched using two different proofs.
However, Ricky had some developmental issues and couldn't grasp that his "magical thinking" about the where the board's center was wrong.
In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities.
In other words, my thoughts can influence or change reality.
Children exhibit a form of magical thinking by about 18 months, when they begin to create imaginary worlds while playing. By age 3, most know what is fantasy and reality . . .
At age 8, however, Ricky was using magical thinking to find the center of a board and when his error was pointed out, he became hysterical
Ricky is now a middle aged adult and still relies on his magical thinking.
A case in point
