User:Nickeleon

Hi! Welcome to the Psychology Wiki User Page for Dr. Nicolas E. Leon Ruiz.

About me:

By training I am a philosopher, not a psychologist, though I do have a serious and professional interest in psychology.

My area of specialization is early Greek philosophy - in 2007 I successfully defended a dissertation on the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus (considered by some to be the first western psychologist) and received my PhD from SUNY Stony Brook.

The era of Greek philosophical thought that I studied had a deep connection to mystery religion, meditation, healing and other aspects of ancient Mediterranean life that we would regard, broadly, as "experiential" and "transformational" - at any rate, it was far removed from the abstract intellectualizing of the later Greek philosophical tradition! The texts that I am most familiar with also have affinities with the mystical traditions of Persia, India, and the East in general - and this has led to a great deal of reading on these more "psychological" approaches to philosophy and on contemporary attempts to reconcile East and West by looking the similarities between Asian religious traditions grounded in meditation and European/western psychoanalytic traditions.

In terms of my psychological interests: they are broad, but I tend to gravitate towards the giants of classical psychoanalytic thought - Freud, Jung, Lacan - and contemporary clinical researchers engaged in the above-mentioned attempts to integrate western and eastern approaches to mind into their practices. Also of general interest is what might be called the psychology of mysticism - not to be confused with transpersonal psychology generally.