Malka Ceh, psychoanalyst

29/07/2026

When the answers fall away

I have been thinking about how rarely we speak openly about existential questions, even though they are present beneath so many ordinary concerns. What does it mean to live when life is finite? How do you face the death of people you love when you no longer expect to see them again? Can your life matter if it was not created for a reason? How do you decide what is right when no divine authority is deciding for you?

These questions belong to everyone, but they can become especially difficult after you leave faith. You are not only facing mortality, uncertainty, freedom, and responsibility. You may also be grieving the disappearance of an afterlife, a divine plan, an imagined perfect witness, a moral framework, a community, and an anticipated future.

In “After the Afterlife: Meaning, Mortality, and Freedom Beyond Faith,” I write about what happens when the answers you inherited fall away and how you can begin building a life around reality.

Link in the comments.

23/06/2026

"Fifty years after its publication, The Selfish Gene remains a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology. Together with On the Origin of Species, it book-ends one hundred years of striving towards a coherent understanding of evolution. Even today, the jigsaw is not complete; there are still holes scattered across the puzzle. But posterity will surely say that Richard Dawkins let us see, more clearly, the true nature of the picture we are working towards. The story of The Selfish Gene spans the history of life on Earth, from the simple self-replicating molecules that swarmed in prehistoric slime, to the evolving cultural replicators (‘memes’) of complex human societies." (Weir, 2026)

From prehistoric slime to social media, our biological mission has always been about transporting genes, leaving us without a grand cosmic purpose. This bleak realization is the ultimate secular invitation to author your own existence from the ground up. Freethinkers untangle from the desire for inherent meaning and instead deliberately construct their own idiosyncratic, reason-grounded lives. 🙂🍝🦄😉

https://freethinker.co.uk/2026/06/crystallising-darwinism-50-years-of-the-selfish-gene/

Half a century on, Richard Dawkins’s classic work 'The Selfish Gene' remains an essential explanation of the evolution of life.

23/06/2026

Religions of Peace in the Dock: A Psychoanalytic Look at Doomsday Narratives

Even the most steadfast critics among us sometimes default to the assumption that faith-based systems are generally pro-social. History, however, begs to differ, pointing instead to a long track record of mass violence and persecution across traditions. When we view these belief systems as ideological contagions that exploit human mental vulnerabilities, their mechanics start to make sense. A good example of the exploitation, as outlined by Beit-Hallahmi (2025), is the pervasive presence of exterminatory fantasies within religious traditions. You know, those apocalyptic "Day of Judgment" scenarios where non-believers are systematically wiped out.

Why do these violent narratives exist? It comes down to the function of human mental traits and behaviors. Human groups universally tie their identity and self-esteem to a sense of being "chosen" or exceptional. When this belief inevitably collides with the reality of historical defeats, oppression, or just routine human failures, the resulting injury triggers a mental defense mechanism. Religious mythologies serve as a compensation. By inventing narratives of cosmic vengeance, mythological belief systems offer an outlet for aggression and restore a feeling of superiority in the face of earthly helplessness.

This group cohesion relies on a specific mental architecture: the in-group ego boost inherently requires an out-group to absorb externalized aggression and cruelty. The dynamic culminates in the ultimate justice fantasy. Where secular revenge merely attempts to rearrange human power structures while accepting mortality, religious apocalyptic visions demand the total remaking of nature itself. They promise a "perfect" cosmic justice achieved through the complete destruction of the physical world, the permanent abolition of death for the chosen "elect", and the eternal annihilation of everyone else.

For secular observers, it is genuinely jarring to watch believers navigate daily life entirely unbothered by the exterminatory implications of their own doctrines, while marketing them as a "religion of peace". It requires an exceptionally high tolerance for cognitive distortion.

The easiest is to react to this with shock, and I, too, will admit to having my fair share of bewildered, staring moments. Secular analysis helps us step back and identify the mental forces generating these fantasies. Mapping out biological blueprints does more than just explain the delusion; understanding creates the conditions for acceptance. In stark contrast to the violent exclusivity of ancient religions, it positions atheism and secular reason as the rational role models for future societies: communities built on human acceptance instead of promises of cosmic revenge.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07351690.2025.2567214

Openly proclaimed wishes, or expectations, for the elimination of out-groups or even most of humanity are found in many religious traditions. Offering a theoretical framework for explaining extermi...

16/06/2026

🏳️‍🌈 Why Biology is Not Simple Arithmetic: A Look at S*x and Gender 🏳️‍🌈

Since it's Pride Month, the beautiful and infinite complexity of human identity is rightfully taking center stage. 🏳️‍🌈🥳🎉🎈 We are celebrating the vast spectrums of human s*xuality, the fluid nuances of romantic attraction, and the incredibly diverse ways we experience and express ourselves. 🎨🖌️ Naturally, grasping such multifaceted biological and sociological realities requires a certain degree of cognitive flexibility and a certain level of luminosity. Traits that, like everything else in human biology, are not universally distributed. For some, grappling with complex phenomena is simply too heavy a cognitive lift, leaving them hopelessly confused even about the most rudimentary concepts.

So, for the benefit of those struggling to keep up and for the rest of us who want to refresh our memories, let's start with the absolute basics: 👨🏻‍🏫📚 The term "s*x" refers to the biological distinction of female and male. "Gender," on the other hand, refers to the roles and identities we adopt in society, as well as to systemic concepts such as equality. Because gender is a multidimensional composite rather than a simple toggle switch, it is not even close to a binary phenomenon. Instead, it is a fluid spectrum spun from cultural expectations, personal expressions, and internal psychological experiences. And frankly, not even biological s*x is strictly binary. First of all, human biology features natural deviations from the standard XX and XY chromosomal combinations, such as Klinefelter syndrome (XXY), Turner syndrome (X0), and XYY syndrome. Furthermore, even the standard XX and XY chromosomes exhibit a wide range of physical variations, driven by fluctuating hormone levels, gene activation, and cellular receptor sensitivity. 🧬🎨🖌️

Biology is incredibly diverse, and sometimes the human mind (the neurohormonal system) and the physical primary and secondary s*x characteristics (go**ds, genitalia, body shape, etc.) misalign. The main mechanism for this lies in the staggered timeline of human fetal development. During the first trimester in the womb, hormones like testosterone drive the masculinization or feminization of the ge****ls. However, the brain's s*xual differentiation occurs much later, primarily in the third trimester. Because these systems develop in different physiological windows, the physical body can develop in one direction while the brain develops in another. Biology is not simple arithmetic.😉🌿

We can observe that in mental differences between cisgender males and females. Herlitz and colleagues (2026) recently tackled this diversity by analyzing the combined power of multiple small s*x differences across cognitive performance, personality traits, and interests. Here is what they found:

➡️ Cognition: Females generally outperform males in verbal fluency, episodic memory, face recognition, and emotion recognition. Males, conversely, perform better on spatial tasks, such as mental rotation and line angle judgments.
➡️ Personality: When examining personality traits, women are more outgoing, more inclined to please others, more careful, more emotionally expressive, and more open-minded. Men are more reserved, assertive, carefree, less emotionally expressive, and conservative.
➡️ Interests: The study revealed a significant divergence in everyday orientations, with males showing a greater interest in "things" and females showing a greater interest in "people".

While most of these individual psychological differences are small, the researchers found that they add up. When combined, these measures correctly predicted whether an individual was male or female in 80% of cases. However, these findings represent differences in averages. The distributions of these traits largely overlap between men and women, indicating that a significant percentage of men and women share identical cognitive and personality profiles.

So, the study's results dismantle the myth of a rigid psychological binary. While we can predict biological s*x with 80% accuracy by combining a massive web of data on mental traits, there is no such thing as a purely "male" or "female" psychology, no clear dichotomy in s*xes from a psychological perspective. Human mental traits exist on heavily overlapping distributions; every single human mind is essentially a unique mosaic. Recognizing this immense variation makes the acceptance of different gender identities a matter of basic biological literacy. When we look at the data, it becomes clear that an identity or expression that doesn’t perfectly align with one's birth s*x isn’t a psychological malfunction; it is a completely natural, predictable outcome of our highly diverse human architecture

Circling back to those who find this multifaceted reality too heavy a cognitive lift, I want to call for a bit of compassion for the aggressors in these cultural debates. We must recognize the psychological mechanisms at play: the people who are the most fiercely engaged in dictating what other people should do with their bodies and identities are usually the ones wrestling with the deepest, most unexamined personal problems themselves. Their aggression is often a direct consequence of the profound frustration of being unable to grasp or accept their own complex identity. They pour an exhausting amount of effort into conforming to rigid expectations, constantly trying to be something they are not. Naturally, they are absolutely furious when they see others granting themselves the freedom to simply exist authentically. ☀️🍃

It has repeatedly been shown that most psychological s*x differences are small, with largely overlapping distributions. This study examined whether multiple small s*x differences—across cognitive performance, personality traits, and interests—can collectively distinguish between males and female...

04/06/2026

Hardwired for the Hard Way

Do you miss certainty and the sheer comfort of believing that someone is actively looking out for you, that suffering belongs to a master plan, and that the universe is somehow just? I was raised agnostic, so I can only glimpse that experience from the outside. As a child, I sometimes watched other children from religious families with a twinge of envy. They seemed to have ready-made explanations for the chaos of the world, together with a built-in safety net of comfort. If you once genuinely believed, however, that safety is not an abstraction, you can get nostalgic about it.

Once faith begins to unravel, you have to construct your own answers and build a supporting framework from scratch. This can require years of reading, study, contemplation, and a fierce commitment to mental development. The old worldview may still look easier from a distance, which raises a painful question: why can you not simply return to it? Part of the answer may lie in your cognitive disposition, part in the habits of thought you developed, and part in the moment your mind began testing the inherited map and could no longer stop.

For the last century, researchers have been documenting the consistent negative association between intelligence and religiosity (Howells, 1928; Sinclair, 1928; Dürlinger and Pietschnig, 2022; Zuckerman et al., 2013; Zuckerman et al., 2020). But the why is what makes it interesting. Turns out that intelligence and religiosity are somewhat “functionally equivalent”. It means that human intelligence and religious belief are essentially two cognitive means that serve the same goal. Dürlinger and Pietschnig (2026) analyzed subject-level data from longitudinal surveys alongside a massive meta-analytical review of existing literature to understand the specific mechanics of this link. Here is the small print.

We live in a chaotic, unpredictable, and often terrifying world. In response, our minds are desperate to establish a sense of order, predictability, and what we call “compensatory control”. To navigate existential anxiety, religions offer simplified guidelines and improvised explanations. An analytical mind, however, looks at those prewritten maps, notices the logical inconsistencies, and continues the search for better answers. This is why there are so many different religions: Each of them tried to build a more sufficient system of shortcuts and heuristics.

In today's times, we are incredibly fortunate to have access to scientific sets of explanations. Still, these sets are incomparably more complex and basically require you to spend years or decades of learning to grasp them. It is hard and abiding, but switching off your analytic filter is evidently harder. Or impossible. Your brain is simply built to take things apart and demand evidence. An analytical mind is also negatively associated with conformity, which makes us not really equipped to uncritically absorb the belief systems for the sake of fitting in. We couldn't just surrender to the crowd because our neuro-hormonal systems demand a more rigorous kind of logic.

If you have left a faith-based worldview and are now building a supporting framework from scratch, welcome to this side of the crossing. There is room here for the comfort you still miss, the people you still love, the pain of what happened to you, and the unanswered questions you now carry. We are in this together.

Negative intelligence and religiosity associations have been well established. Despite a broad consensus about the direction of this effect, reported effect strengths differed substantially in previous research. Because measurement modalities regarding religiosity and intelligence have been found to...

01/06/2026

The Pathology of the Love-Haters: Diagnosing Bigotry 🏳️‍🌈🔬

Pride Month is here! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🥳 As the flags go up, we should brace ourselves for the inevitable vomit of hate from the straggots. But this year, instead of engaging or getting exhausted, let's take the opportunity to observe the hostility through a clinical lens. 🧐🔬 Science suggests we aren't looking at a moral crusader defending the fabric of society, but at the sound of a not-so-sound mind panicking. 🚨🧠 You raise your eyebrow ... panicking? 🤨 Why has it historically been called homophobia if it looks so much like pure hostility? Well ... 😏

There's that legendary Adams et al. (1996) study, which found that exclusively the most vehemently homophobic men showed increased physiological arousal when exposed to male homos*xual stimuli. 😉💦📈 Baumeister et al. (1998), too, highlighted how bigotry mirrors the defense mechanism of reaction formation. The mind frantically converts a terrifying internal impulse into an aggressive outward opposite. 🎭💥 More recently, Silva (2019) demonstrated that extreme homophobia remains one of the strongest predictors of a rigid "straight" identity among individuals who actually experience same-s*x attraction. 🤫 So, the intolerance you see is simply a terrified reaction to one's own repressed impulses. When the hater's mind perceives an internal threat to its constructed identity, it compensates with an aggressive dominance display. 🦍💥 They attack to prove, mostly to themselves, that they ... are not gay. 🐑🛡️

But all that is old news. Here is some fresh: The display of reactionary dominance is associated with measurable psychological pathology. 📉🦠 Godø et al. (2025) mapped what this deficit looks like. Their scoping review found that anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice is heavily predicted by right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. Simply put, it is a frantic need to submit to strict, traditional rules and enforce an arbitrary pecking order to soothe the internal anxiety. But the authors didn't just look at ideology; they looked at the personality traits of the haters. 🔎

The data show that their hostility correlates strongly with critically low levels of openness to experience and agreeableness. To put it plainly, these individuals literally lack cognitive flexibility and the basic capacity for compassion, sympathy, or cooperation. 🧊💔 Even more damning, gender-bashing and transnegativity are strongly associated with the "dark triad" of personality, specifically psychopathy (high impulsivity and a clinical lack of empathy) and machiavellianism (cynical, manipulative behavior). 🐍🌑

We are not dealing with a philosophical difference of opinion, but witnessing a behavioral symptom. 🤒📋 I need to say it. It's time we stop arguing with the haters and start feeling compassion for them. 🕊️❤️‍🩹 Their hostility is a symptom of an unwell, rigid mind. Trapped by its own fear, terrified of its own nature, and lashing out at a modern world that is starting to accept the complexities of life, which the haters simply do not have the capacity for (yet). 🌍🧩

Godø et al. (2025): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38656199/

Other sources:

Silva, T. J. (2019). Straight identity and same-s*x desire: Conservatism, homophobia, and straight culture. Social Forces, 97(3), 1067-1094.

Adams, H. E., Wright Jr, L. W., & Lohr, B. A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homos*xual arousal?. Journal of abnormal psychology, 105(3), 440.

Baumeister, R. F., Dale, K., & Sommer, K. L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. Journal of personality, 66(6), 1081-1124.

This scoping review investigates the existing literature regarding personality traits, ideology, gender roles, and attitudes toward LGBT people. The review was conducted through PubMed and Web of Science databases. After establishing inclusion- and exclusion criteria, 12 studies published between 20...

29/04/2026

Weaponized Empathy: Why Feeling Seen Isn't Always a Green Light 🚥

Ever met someone who just gets you? They nod at the exact right moment, perfectly mirror your emotional state, and make you feel completely seen ... right before they flawlessly weaponize that perfectly calibrated emotional dataset for their own strategic gain. 🥲🙃 It is a baffling experience.

You have probably been told that empathy is the ultimate moral virtue. 🏅😇 Society equates it with benevolence, assuming that if someone can feel your pain, they must be a good person. But here is the reality check: empathy is not a moral compass. It is just a highly evolved, neutral radar system. At its core, understanding another person's state is an evolutionarily evolved intelligence-gathering tool. 🧬📊 Your mind evaluates this data in layers.

First, there is the automatic, subcortical sensing: the emotional contagion where you quite literally “catch” what someone else is feeling. Then come your conditioned, habitual responses. Finally, your prefrontal cortex kicks in with cognitive reflection, allowing you to deliberately adopt their perspective. And here comes the plot twist: A skilled manipulator is using the exact same dynamic and cognitive machinery to find your weak spots as a kind friend uses to comfort you. Empathy is just the data stream, but what someone does with it is a separate question. 🎲♣️♥️

Kirkpatrick, Whitty, and Wheeldon (2026) dismantle the “empathy is always good” myth by surveying existing definitions across psychology and cognitive science. 🔬 To resolve the glaring contradictions in how the concept is used, they refined the definition by stripping away all moral assumptions. They conceptualized “empathic perception” as a dynamic, embodied process that simply provides neutral intelligence. Their results mapped out a spectrum of actions informed by this perception, ranging all the way from “considered altruism” to “planned predation”. The fascinating part is that the underlying biological process of gathering the data is identical in both extremes. ⚫️⚪️

Understanding this is an act of self-preservation: Empathy is not a mandate to care, but simply biology handing a situational report. 🌱🧠 Whether it is a draining friend, a charismatic online guru, or a corporation masquerading as your bestie, the world is constantly deploying empathy to map your weak spots. When you register a deep connection, treat it with caution. Check if someone is just mining your emotions before handing over your energy, your loyalty, or your credit card. 💳😉

This paper reconceptualises evaluative processes pertinent to empathy as empathic perception: an evaluative, dynamic, and embodied process that provides morally...

17/03/2026

The Exhausting Math of Trying to be Understood 🧮💭

You know the draining exhaustion of finding yourself staring at your phone at 12:30 AM, carefully editing a message just to make sure the other person “gets” where you are coming from. And extending your shower to litigate a past argument to the shampoo jury, desperately chasing the phantom relief of finally being understood. 🛁⚖️

Before you self-diagnose with a personality flaw or an incurable neurosis, let me offer you a neurobiological alibi: it is not a personal quirk. It’s a homo sapiens hard-wiring issue.

To map this exact wiring, Morelli, Torre, and Eisenberger (2014) placed people in an fMRI scanner and experimentally induced the feelings of being understood and misunderstood. The results were revealing about humans' biological hardware:

- The Reward of Being Seen: When participants felt understood, the ventral striatum and the middle insula in the brain were activated. These are the neural regions associated with processing primary rewards, like eating a great meal or receiving money.
- The Pain of the Cold Shoulder: When participants felt misunderstood, their anterior insula was activated. This is a region closely tied to negative affect and social pain. It physically hurts to be misread.
- The Volume K**b: If you happen to be someone with a higher sensitivity to rejection, this neural alarm rings even louder when someone fails to grasp your perspective. 🚨

Your biology dictates that feeling understood is a deeply satisfying neurochemical reward, and being misunderstood is profoundly hurtful. This biological drive is a massive liability. 🧬

When you blindly obey this biological craving, you hemorrhage your cognitive and emotional bandwidth. You end up paying a massive translation tax, wasting precious resources drafting perfect analogies for people who are entirely committed to misunderstanding you. You perform exhausting post-mortem email autopsies, frantically re-reading sent messages fourteen times to ensure your tone was flawlessly unobjectionable. You endlessly dilute your work and your personality to manage everyone else's impressions, use your friends and family as external hard drives to crowdsource validation, and ultimately outsource your happiness to a mythical soulmate who you hope will mirror your internal world. 🎭

My suggestion to you is a free will override. 🧠⚡

One of the highest, most liberating forms of peace lies in letting go of the need to be understood. You do not have to obey your biology. Releasing this biological compulsion is about reclaiming massive amounts of your personal capital. It frees your capacity to pursue goals you choose deliberately, rather than exhausting yourself by chasing those evolution laid into your crib. 🧬🐤

And here is the ultimate spoiler: You already have the one person who can fully understand you, see you, know you, and always stand by your side. That person will never leave you, and you spend 24 hours a day with them.

It's you. 🤍 Work on that relationship instead.

Past research suggests that feeling understood enhances both personal and social well-being. However, little research has examined the neurobiological bases of feeling understood and not understood. We addressed these gaps by experimentally inducing felt understanding and not understanding as partic...

08/03/2026

Ruining Romance with a Spreadsheet: The Evolutionary Truth About "Soulmates" 📊🧬

Have you ever dialed into a mundane Wednesday morning meeting, heard a brand-new consultant introduce themself off-camera, and suddenly your entire nervous system just short-circuits? 🎙️🙃 You haven't even seen them. You don't know if they sort their recycling or pay their taxes. ♻️📄 But their voice has this inexplicable cadence that makes your brain go utterly blank, and your body go entirely ballistic. 🧠💥

It is so tempting to interpret that visceral, heart-pounding reaction as a cosmic sign. ✨ You feel that magnetic pull and immediately start weaving a mystical narrative: You must have a deep, soulful connection. 🔮 This must mean something. Are they ... the one? 💍 Well, clinging to that magical explanation can be a trap. It is exactly how you end up projecting a beautiful fantasy onto a person who might be objectively terrible for you, just because your biology got briefly hijacked by a nice baritone. 🎶🚩

What feels like an overwhelming, mystical force is actually just your ancient affective neurocircuitry clocking in for its day job: reading their biological resume. 💼🧬 From an evolutionary perspective, human attraction isn’t about fate. It’s your mental system rapidly processing physical cues to assess someone's genetic quality and health. You are essentially a walking, talking biological billboard trying to figure out other humans. 🌌🚶‍♀️💬

Now, as a normal person, you have learned about this bizarre phenomenon, and you’ll just want to go about your day. ☕ But evolutionary nerds go: "Wait, does a person's physical presence hand over one cohesive genetic resume, or are their body parts out there sending totally mixed signals?" 🤔 Leave it to us to ruin a perfectly good romance with a spreadsheet. 📊😄

Kordsmeyer and colleagues (2026) tackled exactly this question. 🔬 They had 400 people rate the facial photos, voice recordings, and 3D body scans of 165 men and 155 women. The targets were judged for their attractiveness, health, and physical dominance. 💪 (To keep things strictly scientific, they even used headless, grey 3D body scans that omitted skin color, so raters were judging pure body shape! 🗿) Now, read on. ⬇️

It turns out, the human face and the body are usually singing the same tune. 🎵 If a face signals "healthy and attractive", the body is typically echoing that exact same message. 👯‍♀️ However, the human voice is a biological wildcard. 🃏🫠 The authors found very few significant associations between how a voice was judged and how the face or body was judged. 📉 So, a person’s voice might be telling a completely different genetic story than their face. 🎭

Now, knowing that your biology is just frantically reading a fragmented, sometimes contradictory resume should be wonderfully freeing. 🕊️ It removes the heavy, exhausting weight of trying to find your "soulmate" in every flutter of your nervous system. 🦋 In evolutionary science, we spend our days designing delightfully eccentric studies to decode these ancient biological billboards. 👩‍🔬 But here is the secret: we are only mapping the genetic ads. 🧬 We aren't measuring how those ads translate to actual, subjective compatibility, like whether they will make your days lighter, support your dreams, or remember how you take your coffee. ☕🌟 🙃

The next time you feel inexplicably drawn to a stranger's voice, jawline, or broad shoulders, you can just smile. 😏 The universe isn't handing you a pre-packaged partner. 🎁 Your sensory receptors just caught a really good ad for genetic potential. 📈 The rest is entirely up to you. ✨😉

If you, by any chance, enjoy a little light, romantic-dream-crushing data analysis with your coffee, the full paper is available here:

Previous research has shown that attractiveness perceptions of male body parts and modalities correlate with each other. These findings support the on…