I have been fascinated by human behaviour for as long as I can remember. When I was in sixth form, I voraciously consumed popular psychology books. In the process, one particular book cemented my passion to pursue psychology at university: a pale leather-bound book that I distinctly remember picking up at a second-hand book stall. It was titled Freud’s India: Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst, Girindrasekhar Bose (2018). The book shook my perceptions about psychology as a field, not by introducing me to some kind of indisputable scientific truth, but by showing me that Freud had critics (such as Bose) even during his own lifetime. This was a very different perspective on Freud than I had been reading about in popular psychology books, and made me want to study psychology in a deeper and more critical way than such ‘popular’ books could allow.
On my first day at Nottingham Trent University, I was extremely excited. I wore my favourite shirt and marched into the introductory class. However, by the end of the first week, I was lost, confused, terrified and felt like a complete impostor. There have been (and continue to be) many ups and downs in my psychology journey. If I could travel back in time and say just a few words to my younger self standing at that second-hand book stall, staring at that strange book and contemplating a university education in psychology, I would have told myself a few important things.
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