Why Med Schools Are Requiring Students to Take Art Classes, and How It Makes Med Students Better Doctors

in Art, Health, Psychology, Science | July 11th, 2018

I have fol­lowed sev­er­al debates recent­ly about the lack of arts and human­i­ties edu­ca­tion in STEM pro­grams. One argu­ment runs thus: sci­en­tists, engi­neers, and pro­gram­mers often move into careers design­ing prod­ucts for human use, with­out hav­ing spent much time learn­ing about oth­er humans. With­out required cours­es, say, in psy­chol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture, etc., stu­dents can end up unthink­ing­ly repro­duc­ing harm­ful bias­es or over­look­ing seri­ous eth­i­cal prob­lems and social inequities.

Tech­no­log­i­cal mal­prac­tice is bad enough. Med­ical mal­prac­tice can have even more imme­di­ate­ly harm­ful, or fatal, effects. We might take for grant­ed that a doctor’s “bed­side man­ner” is pure­ly a mat­ter of per­son­al­i­ty, but many med­icals schools have decid­ed they need to be more proac­tive when it comes to train­ing future doc­tors in com­pas­sion­ate lis­ten­ing. And some have begun using the arts to fos­ter cre­ative think­ing and empa­thy and to improve doc­tor-patient com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The ver­bal­ly-abu­sive Dr. House aside, the best diag­nos­ti­cians actu­al­ly have sym­pa­thet­ic ears.

As Dr. Michael Flana­gan of Penn State’s Col­lege of Med­i­cine puts it, “Our job is to elic­it infor­ma­tion from our patients. By com­mu­ni­cat­ing more effec­tive­ly and estab­lish­ing rap­port with patients so they are more com­fort­able telling you about their symp­toms, you are more like­ly to make the diag­no­sis and have high­er patient sat­is­fac­tion.” From the patient side of things, an accu­rate diag­no­sis can mean more than “sat­is­fac­tion”; it can mean the dif­fer­ence between life and death, long-term suf­fer­ing or rapid recov­ery.

Can impres­sion­ist paint­ing make that dif­fer­ence? Dr. Flana­gan thinks it’s a start. His sem­i­nar “Impres­sion­ism and the Art of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” asks fourth-year med­ical stu­dents to engage with the work of Vin­cent van Gogh and Claude Mon­et, in exer­cis­es “rang­ing from obser­va­tion and writ­ing activ­i­ties to paint­ing in the style of said artists,” notes Art­sy. “Through the process, they learn to bet­ter com­mu­ni­cate with patients by devel­op­ing insights on sub­jects like men­tal ill­ness and cog­ni­tive bias.” Why not just study these sub­jects in psy­chol­o­gy cours­es?

One answer comes from Penn State asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of art his­to­ry Nan­cy Locke, who presents to Flanagan’s class­es. “Art can make peo­ple see their lives dif­fer­ent­ly,” she says, “Doc­tors will see peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly with cer­tain prob­lems.” And they can begin to schema­tize their patients the way they schema­tize dis­eases and dis­or­ders. “But a paint­ing can con­tin­ue to be chal­leng­ing, and there are always new ques­tions to ask.” Impres­sion­ist paint­ing rep­re­sents only one road, among many oth­ers, to the ambi­gu­i­ties of the human mind.

Anoth­er Penn State pro­fes­sor, Dr. Paul Haidet, direc­tor of med­ical edu­ca­tion research, offered a sem­i­nar on jazz and med­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tions to fourth-year stu­dents in 2014 and 2015. As he men­tions in the video above, Flana­gan him­self took the course. “Just as one jazz musi­cian pro­vides space to anoth­er to impro­vise,” he tells Penn State News, “as physi­cians we need to pro­vide space to our patients to com­mu­ni­cate in their own style. It was a trans­for­ma­tion­al expe­ri­ence, unlike any­thing I ever had in med­ical school myself.” He was inspired there­after to intro­duce his paint­ing course.

One could imag­ine class­es on the Vic­to­ri­an nov­el, mod­ernist poet­ry, or impro­vi­sa­tion­al dance hav­ing sim­i­lar effects. Oth­er med­ical schools have cer­tain­ly agreed. Dr. Del­phine Tay­lor, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter, “empha­sizes that arts-focused activ­i­ties are impor­tant in train­ing future doc­tors to be present and aware,” Art­sy writes, “which is more and more dif­fi­cult today giv­en the per­va­sive­ness of tech­nol­o­gy and media.” Arts pro­grams have also been adopt­ed in the med­ical schools at Yale, Har­vard, and UT Austin.

The prece­dents for incor­po­rat­ing the arts into a sci­ence edu­ca­tion abound—many a famous sci­en­tist has also had a pas­sion for lit­er­a­ture, pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing, or music. (Ein­stein, for exam­ple, wouldn’t be part­ed from his vio­lin.) As the arts and sci­ences grew fur­ther apart, for rea­sons hav­ing to do with the struc­ture of high­er edu­ca­tion and the dic­tates of mar­ket economies, it became far less com­mon for sci­en­tists and doc­tors to receive a lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion. On the oth­er hand, todays lib­er­al arts stu­dents might ben­e­fit from more required STEM cours­es, but that’s a sto­ry for anoth­er day.

via Art­sy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

Your Brain on Art: The Emerg­ing Sci­ence of Neu­roaes­thet­ics Probes What Art Does to Our Brains

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to Anna Freud: The Psychoanalyst (and Daughter of Sigmund) Who Theorized Denial, Projection & Other Defense Mechanisms for Our Egos

in Psychology | July 4th, 2018

Being in denial, engag­ing in pro­jec­tion, ratio­nal­iz­ing or intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing events, regress­ing into child­hood, dis­plac­ing your anger, retreat­ing into fan­ta­sy: who among us has­n’t been sub­ject to accu­sa­tions of doing these things at one time or anoth­er? And even if you haven’t, all of those terms sure­ly sound famil­iar. They owe their place in the cul­ture in large part to the psy­cho­an­a­lyst Anna Freud, who cat­a­logued these and oth­er “defense mech­a­nisms” in her 1934 book The Ego and Mech­a­nisms of Defense. In her analy­sis, we engage in these some­times unpleas­ant and even embar­rass­ing behav­iors to pro­tect our ego — anoth­er now-com­mon term that, in Freudi­an usage, refers to our pre­ferred image of our­selves.

As the daugh­ter of Sig­mund Freud, the “father of psy­cho­analy­sis,” Anna Freud’s name car­ried a con­sid­er­able weight in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal world. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured an ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to the work of Freud père from Alain de Bot­ton’s The School of Life here on Open Cul­ture, and today we have one from the same source on that of Freud fille.

Togeth­er they reveal that, though both Sig­mund and Anna Freud worked in the same field, and indeed each did more than their part to devel­op that field, each of their bod­ies of work on the human mind stands on its own. And though many terms coined by Sig­mund Freud — “Oedi­pus com­plex,” the “sub­con­scious,” and even “id, ego, and super­ego” — remain in our lex­i­con, the names Anna Freud gave the defense mech­a­nisms may well see even more every­day use.

You can hear all those mech­a­nisms explained in the video above or read about them in the accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle at The Book of Life. “Anna Freud start­ed from a posi­tion of deep gen­eros­i­ty towards defense mech­a­nisms,” it says. “We turn to them because we feel immense­ly threat­ened. They are our instinc­tive ways of ward­ing off dan­ger and lim­it­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal pain.” Ulti­mate­ly, her work teach­es “a les­son in mod­esty. For she reveals the extreme prob­a­bil­i­ty that defense mech­a­nisms are play­ing a marked and pow­er­ful role in one’s own life – though with­out it being obvi­ous to one­self that this is so.” In oth­er words, you can’t, for the most part, help it. That expla­na­tion may not get you off the hook the next time some­one tells you to stop pro­ject­ing, intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing, or dis­plac­ing, but bear in mind that when it comes to defend­ing the ego, no one else can help it either.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud, Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis, Intro­duced in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

Sig­mund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Pri­vate Life

Watch Lucian Freud’s Very Last Day of Paint­ing (2011)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro to the Ideas of Jacques Lacan, “the Great­est French Psy­cho­an­a­lyst of the 20th Cen­tu­ry”

The Psy­cho­log­i­cal & Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders Expe­ri­enced by Char­ac­ters in Alice in Won­der­land: A Neu­ro­science Read­ing of Lewis Carroll’s Clas­sic Tale

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Do Our Dreams Predict the Future? Vladimir Nabokov Spent Three Months Testing That Theory in 1964

in Books, Literature, Psychology | June 29th, 2018

Pho­to by NC Mal­lo­ry via Flickr Com­mons 

Why keep a dream jour­nal? There’s prob­a­bly amus­ing befud­dle­ment and even a kind of round­about enlight­en­ment to be had in look­ing back over one’s sub­con­scious visions, so vivid dur­ing the night, that van­ish so soon after wak­ing. But now we have anoth­er, more com­pelling rea­son to write down our dreams: Vladimir Nabokov did it. This we know from the recent­ly pub­lished Insom­ni­ac Dreams, a col­lec­tion of the entries from the Loli­ta and Pale Fire author’s dream jour­nal — writ­ten, true to his com­po­si­tion­al method, on index cards— edit­ed and con­tex­tu­al­ized by Nabokov schol­ar Gen­nady Barab­tar­lo.

“On Octo­ber 14, 1964, in a grand Swiss hotel in Mon­treux where he had been liv­ing for three years, Vladimir Nabokov start­ed a pri­vate exper­i­ment that last­ed till Jan­u­ary 3 of the fol­low­ing year, just before his wife’s birth­day (he had engaged her to join him in the exper­i­ment and they com­pared notes),” writes Barab­tar­lo in the book’s first chap­ter, which you can read online. “Every morn­ing, imme­di­ate­ly upon awak­en­ing, he would write down what he could res­cue of his dreams. Dur­ing the fol­low­ing day or two he was on the look­out for any­thing that seemed to do with the record­ed dream.”

He want­ed to “test a the­o­ry accord­ing to which dreams can be pre­cog­ni­tive as well as relat­ed to the past. That the­o­ry is based on the premise that images and sit­u­a­tions in our dreams are not mere­ly kalei­do­scop­ing shards, jum­bled, and mis­la­beled frag­ments of past impres­sions, but may also be a pro­lep­tic view of an event to come.”  That notion, writes Dan Piepen­bring at the New York­er, “came from J. W. Dunne, a British engi­neer and arm­chair philoso­pher who, in 1927, pub­lished An Exper­i­ment with Time, argu­ing, in part, that our dreams afford­ed us rare access to a high­er order of time.” The book’s fan base includ­ed such oth­er lit­er­ary nota­bles as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Hux­ley.

Nabokov had his own take on Dun­ne’s the­o­ry: “The wak­ing event resem­bling or coin­cid­ing with the dream event does so not because the lat­ter is a prophe­cy,” he writes on the first note­card in the stack pro­duced by his own three-month exper­i­ment with time, “but because this would be the kind of dream that one might expect to have after the event.” But Nabokov’s dream data seem to have pro­vid­ed lit­tle in the way in absolute proof of what he called “reverse mem­o­ry.” In the strongest exam­ple, a dream about eat­ing soil sam­ples at a muse­um pre­cedes his real-life view­ing of a tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary about the soil of Sene­gal. And as Barab­tar­lo points out, the dream “dis­tinct­ly and close­ly fol­lowed two scenes” of a short sto­ry Nabokov had writ­ten 25 years before.

And so we come to the real appeal of Insom­ni­ac Dreams: Nabokov’s skill at ren­der­ing evoca­tive and mem­o­rable images in lan­guage — or rather, in his poly­glot case, lan­guages – as well as deal­ing with themes of time and mem­o­ry. You can read a few sam­ples at Lithub involv­ing not just soil but sex­u­al jeal­ousy, a lec­ture hasti­ly scrawled min­utes before class time, the Red Army, and “a death-sign con­sist­ing of two roundish gold­en-yel­low blobs with blurred edges.” They may bring to mind the words of the nar­ra­tor of Ada, the nov­el Nabokov pub­lished the fol­low­ing year, who in his own con­sid­er­a­tion of Dunne guess­es that in dreams, “some law of log­ic should fix the num­ber of coin­ci­dences, in a giv­en domain, after which they cease to be coin­ci­dences, and form, instead, the liv­ing organ­ism of a new truth.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Note­cards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Loli­ta: A Look Inside the Author’s Cre­ative Process

Take Vladimir Nabokov’s Quiz to See If You’re a Good Reader–The Same One He Gave to His Stu­dents

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

Alfred Hitch­cock and Vladimir Nabokov Trade Let­ters and Ideas for a Film Col­lab­o­ra­tion (1964)

How a Good Night’s Sleep — and a Bad Night’s Sleep — Can Enhance Your Cre­ativ­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Famous Break Up of Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung Explained in a New Animated Video

in History, Psychology | June 28th, 2018


Mak­ing friends with sim­i­lar inter­ests can be a chal­lenge for any­one. But imag­ine you are the founder of an entire­ly new dis­ci­pline, with its own pecu­liar jar­gon, set of prac­tices, and con­cep­tu­al cat­e­gories. Imag­ine, for exam­ple, that you are Sig­mund Freud, who in 1896 made his break with med­i­cine to pur­sue the work of psy­cho­analy­sis. Draw­ing on clin­i­cal expe­ri­ence with patients, his own self-analy­sis, cocaine-induced rever­ies, and an idio­syn­crat­ic read­ing of Greek mythol­o­gy, Freud invent­ed his strange psy­cho­sex­u­al the­o­ries with­in the con­fi­dence of a very small cir­cle of acquain­tances and admir­ers.

One of his close rela­tion­ships dur­ing those pro­duc­tive and tur­bu­lent years, with eccen­tric ear, nose, and throat doc­tor Wil­helm Fliess—a col­lab­o­ra­tor, influ­ence, “con­fes­sor and moral sup­port­er”—end­ed bad­ly in 1906. It was in that same year that Freud met the much-younger Carl Jung. At their first meet­ing, the two “talked non­stop for 13 hours,” the Aeon video above, ani­mat­ed by Andrew Khos­ra­vani, tells us. Thus began the intense and now-leg­endary six-year friend­ship between the psy­chi­a­trists, a “pas­sion­ate and sur­pass­ing­ly weird rela­tion­ship, which, giv­en the peo­ple involved, per­haps shouldn’t come as a sur­prise.” Freud set­tled upon Jung as his pro­tege and suc­ces­sor, the “Joshua to my Moses,” over­joyed to have found a friend who seemed to under­stand his ideas inti­mate­ly.

They trav­eled to the US to give joint lec­tures and ana­lyzed each other’s dreams. Freud wrote to pro­pose that Jung should think of their rela­tion­ship as between “father and son,” an odd pro­pos­al in any friend­ship, but espe­cial­ly when the “father” invent­ed the Oedi­pal com­plex; “this did not go unno­ticed by Freud, and he freaked out a lit­tle.” The unset­tling dynam­ic already pre­sent­ed a shaky basis for a long term bond, but it was their wild­ly diver­gent ideas that ulti­mate­ly drove them apart. Jung took issue with Freud’s obses­sion with libido as the pri­ma­ry dri­ver of human behav­ior. Freud cast a with­er­ing eye on Jung’s keen inter­est in reli­gion, mys­ti­cism, and the para­nor­mal as expres­sions of a col­lec­tive uncon­scious.

As he had divorced him­self from Wil­helm Fleiss in 1906, Freud sim­i­lar­ly, abrupt­ly, broke off his friend­ship with Jung in 1913, send­ing a rather nasty break-up let­ter to sev­er their “emo­tion­al tie.” Jung, he wrote, “while behav­ing abnor­mal­ly keeps shout­ing that he is nor­mal,” giv­ing rise to “the sus­pi­cion that he lacks insight into his ill­ness. Accord­ing­ly, I pro­pose that we aban­don our per­son­al rela­tions entire­ly.” The video ends by declar­ing Freud the win­ner of this “feud,” such as it was, though the per­son­al con­flict seems rather one-sided. As Jung would lat­er relate, he “soon dis­cov­ered that when [Freud] had thought some­thing, then it was set­tled.” After Freud broke it off, Jung wrote in his diary, “the rest is silence.”

As for the lega­cies of both men, these seem set­tled as well. They both had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on writ­ers and artists of all kinds, on lit­er­ary the­o­rists, new age mys­tics, and philoso­phers. But Jung is hard­ly tak­en seri­ous­ly in the main­stream of psy­chi­a­try, and Freud’s ideas have large­ly been aban­doned, save for one: as mil­lions who still reveal them­selves week­ly on ther­a­pists’ couch­es can attest, the talk­ing cure of psy­cho­analy­sis is alive and well.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Video Tells the Sto­ry of Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus’ Famous Falling Out (1952)

The Famous Let­ter Where Freud Breaks His Rela­tion­ship with Jung (1913)

Carl Jung Explains Why His Famous Friend­ship with Sig­mund Freud Fell Apart in Rare 1959 Audio

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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You Don’t “Find” Your Passion in Life, You Actively Develop It, Explains Psychologist Carol Dweck, Theorist of the “Growth Mindset”

in Psychology | June 26th, 2018

You might spend your whole life try­ing to find your life’s pas­sion, or pas­sive­ly hop­ing it comes to you. Many have done so and, trag­i­cal­ly, have nev­er dis­cov­ered it. Were they look­ing for pur­pose in all the wrong places? Maybe. Or maybe the idea that our life’s call­ing waits out there for us to find—like the fairy tale notion of a one true per­fect love—is kind of crap. That’s not how Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gists Car­ol Dweck and Gre­go­ry Wal­ton put it, exact­ly, but their research sug­gests that “the adage so com­mon­ly advised by grad­u­a­tion speak­ers,” as Stan­ford News reports, “might under­mine how inter­ests actu­al­ly devel­op.”

In oth­er words, when peo­ple think of inter­ests or tal­ents as “fixed qual­i­ties that are inher­ent­ly there,” they are more like­ly to give up on pur­suits when they encounter dif­fi­cul­ty, believ­ing they aren’t des­tined for suc­cess. Work­ing with data acquired by Stan­ford post­doc­tor­al fel­low Paul O’Keefe (now at Yale), Dweck and Wal­ton explained some recent research find­ings in a paper titled “Implic­it The­o­ries of Inter­est: Find­ing Your Pas­sion or Devel­op­ing it?” The arti­cle is forth­com­ing in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, and you can read a PDF ver­sion online.

The paper describes five stud­ies on “implic­it the­o­ries of inter­est” and con­trasts a fixed the­o­ry with a “growth the­o­ry” of inter­est, an idea that comes out of Dweck’s pri­or research on what she calls a “growth mind­set.” She has pub­lished a best­selling book on the sub­ject and giv­en very pop­u­lar talks on what she calls in her TED appear­ance in Swe­den above “the pow­er of yet”—a phrase she derives from a high school in Chica­go that gave stu­dents the grade of “not yet” when they hadn’t suc­cess­ful­ly passed a course. This hope­ful assess­ment encour­aged them to keep try­ing rather than to think of them­selves as fail­ures.

Dweck tells her TED audi­ence about giv­ing a group of ten-year-olds’ prob­lems she knew would be too hard for them to solve. Those with a “growth mind­set” respond­ed with excite­ment, eager for a chal­lenge and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to expand their capa­bil­i­ties. The kids who had a “fixed mind­set” crum­pled, feel­ing like they had been judged and come up want­i­ng. “Instead of lux­u­ri­at­ing in the pow­er of yet,” says Dweck, “they were gripped in the tyran­ny of now.” Chil­dren thus “tyr­an­nized” by feel­ings of fail­ure might be more like­ly to cheat rather than study, make down­ward com­par­isons to boost feel­ings of self-worth, or become avoidant and “run from dif­fi­cul­ty.”

These strate­gies are even vis­i­ble in images of brain activ­i­ty. None of them, of course, will lead to progress. But Dweck claims that the prob­lem is endem­ic to a gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who need con­stant val­i­da­tion and who fold when they meet chal­lenges. So how can par­ents and teach­ers help kids become more growth-ori­ent­ed or, in Dweck’s lin­go, build “the bridge to yet”? Her rec­om­men­da­tions may not sound that rev­o­lu­tion­ary to those who have fol­lowed the back­lash against the well-mean­ing but mis­guid­ed “self-esteem move­ment” of the past few decades.

For one thing, prais­ing effort, rather than intel­li­gence or tal­ent, will help kids devel­op more resilience and val­ue ongo­ing process over instant results. Judi­cious appli­ca­tions of “good try!” go much far­ther than rep­e­ti­tions of “you’re bril­liant and amaz­ing!” Dweck’s oth­er strate­gies involve a sim­i­lar focus on process and progress. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, when we believe we can change and improve, we are far more like­ly to work at devel­op­ing tal­ent, instead of assum­ing we’ve either got it or we don’t, an unsci­en­tif­ic and self-defeat­ing way of think­ing that has done a lot of peo­ple need­less harm. Dweck and her col­leagues show that our life’s pas­sion isn’t a ful­ly-formed thing out there wait­ing for us, or an inborn, immutable qual­i­ty, but rather it comes as the result of patient and per­sis­tent efforts.

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Is Pro­cras­ti­na­tion & How Can We Solve It? An Intro­duc­tion by One of the World’s Lead­ing Pro­cras­ti­na­tion Experts

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Bill Murray Explains How He Pulled Himself Out of a Deep, Lasting Funk: He Took Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice & Listened to the Music of John Prine

in Comedy, Life, Music, Psychology | June 22nd, 2018

Judg­ing by the out­pour­ing of affec­tion in online com­ment sec­tions, Chica­go folk musi­cian John Prine (may he rest in peace) has helped a great many of his fans through tough times with his human­ist, oft-humor­ous lyrics.

Add fun­ny man Bill Mur­ray to the list.

Tap­ing a video in sup­port of The Tree of For­give­ness, Prine’s first album of new mate­r­i­al in over a decade, Mur­ray recalled a grim peri­od in which a deep funk robbed him of all enjoy­ment. Though he care­ful­ly stip­u­lates that this “bum­mer” could not be diag­nosed as clin­i­cal depres­sion, noth­ing lift­ed his spir­its, until Gonzo jour­nal­ist Dr. Hunter S. Thomp­son—whom Mur­ray embod­ied in the 1980 film, Where the Buf­fa­lo Roam—sug­gest­ed that he turn to Prine for his sense of humor.

Mur­ray took Thompson’s advice, and gave his fel­low Illi­nois­ian’s dou­ble great­est hits album, Great Days, a lis­ten.

This could have back­fired, giv­en that Great Days con­tains some of Prine’s most melancholy—and memorable—songs, from “Hel­lo in There” and “Angel from Mont­gomery” to “Sam Stone,” vot­ed the 8th sad­dest song of all time in a Rolling Stone read­ers’ poll.

But the song that left the deep­est impres­sion on Mur­ray is a sil­ly coun­try-swing num­ber “Lin­da Goes to Mars,” in which a clue­less hus­band assumes his wife’s vacant expres­sion is proof of inter­plan­e­tary trav­el rather than dis­in­ter­est.

To hear Mur­ray tell it, as he thumbs through a copy of John Prine Beyond Words, the moment was not one of gut-bust­ing hilar­i­ty, but rather one of self-aware­ness and relief, a sig­nal that the dark clouds that had been hang­ing over him would dis­perse.

A grate­ful Murray’s admi­ra­tion runs deep. As he told The Wash­ing­ton Post, when he was award­ed the Kennedy Cen­ter Mark Twain Prize for Amer­i­can Humor, he lobbied—unsuccessfully—to get Prine flown in for the cer­e­mo­ny:

I thought it would have been a nice deal because John Prine can make you laugh like no else can make you laugh.

Dit­to Prine’s dear friend, the late, great folk musi­cian, Steve Good­man, the author of “The Veg­etable Song,” “The Lin­coln Park Pirates” (about a leg­endary Chica­go tow­ing com­pa­ny), and “Go, Cubs, Go,” which Mur­ray trilled on Sat­ur­day Night Live with play­ers Dex­ter Fowler, Antho­ny Riz­zo, and David Ross short­ly before the Cub­bies won the 2016 World Series.

I just found out yes­ter­day that Lin­da goes to Mars

Every time I sit and look at pic­tures of used cars

She’ll turn on her radio and sit down in her chair

And look at me across the room as if I was­n’t there

Oh, my stars, my Lin­da’s gone to Mars

Well, I wish she would­n’t leave me here alone

Oh, my stars, my Lin­da’s gone to Mars

Well, I won­der if she’d bring me some­thing home

Some­thing, some­where, some­how took my Lin­da by the hand

And secret­ly decod­ed our sacred wed­ding band

For when the moon shines down upon our hap­py hum­ble home

Her inner space gets tor­tured by some out­er space unknown

Oh, my stars, my Lin­da’s gone to Mars

Well, I wish she would­n’t leave me here alone

Oh, my stars, my Lin­da’s gone to Mars

Well, I won­der if she’d bring me some­thing home

Now I ain’t seen no saucers ‘cept the ones upon the shelf

And if I ever seen one I’d keep it to myself

For if there’s life out there some­where beyond this life on earth

Then Lin­da must have gone out there and got her mon­ey’s worth

Oh, my stars, my Lin­da’s gone to Mars

Well, I wish she would­n’t leave me here alone

Oh, my stars, my Lin­da’s gone to Mars

Well, I won­der if she’d bring me some­thing home

Yeah, I won­der if she’d bring me some­thing home

Lis­ten to a Great Days Spo­ti­fy playlist here, though nei­ther Open Cul­ture, nor Bill Mur­ray can be held account­able if you find your­self blink­ing back tears.

Bonus: Below, watch Prine and Mur­ray “swap songs and sto­ries about the ear­ly days in Chica­go cross­ing paths with the likes of John Belushi, Steve Good­man and Kris Kristof­fer­son.” Plus more.


Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

Bill Mur­ray Reads the Poet­ry of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er, Lucille Clifton & More

Lis­ten to Bill Mur­ray Lead a Guid­ed Medi­a­tion on How It Feels to Be Bill Mur­ray

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Thurs­day June 28 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Ralph Steadman Creates an Unorthodox Illustrated Biography of Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis (1979)

in Art, Books, History, Psychology | June 6th, 2018

Sig­mund Freud died in 1939, and the near­ly eight decades since haven’t been kind to his psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal the­o­ries, but in some sense he sur­vives. “For many years, even as writ­ers were dis­card­ing the more patent­ly absurd ele­ments of his the­o­ry — penis envy, or the death dri­ve — they con­tin­ued to pay homage to Freud’s unblink­ing insight into the human con­di­tion,” writes the New York­er’s Louis Menand. He claims that Freud thus evolved, “in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion, from a sci­en­tist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they can­not be refut­ed. No one asks of ‘Par­adise Lost’: But is it true? Freud and his con­cepts, now con­vert­ed into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.”

The mas­ter of a legion of undead psy­cho­log­i­cal metaphors — who, in the ranks of liv­ing illus­tra­tors, could be more suit­ed to ren­der such a fig­ure than Ralph Stead­man? And how many of us know that he actu­al­ly did so in 1979, when he pro­duced an “art-biog­ra­phy” of the “Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis”?

Sig­mund Freud, which has spent long stretch­es out of print since its first pub­li­ca­tion, tells the sto­ry of Freud’s life, begin­ning with his child­hood in Aus­tria to his death, not long after his emi­gra­tion in flight from the Nazis, in Lon­don. It was there that he met Vir­ginia Woolf, who in her diary describes him as “a screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, par­a­lyzed spas­mod­ic move­ments, inar­tic­u­late: but alert.”

There, again, Freud sounds like one of Stead­man’s draw­ings, some­times out­ward­ly unap­peal­ing but always pos­sessed of an unig­nor­able vital­i­ty gen­er­at­ed by a sol­id core of per­cep­tive­ness. Ear­li­er chap­ters of Freud’s life, char­ac­ter­ized by intel­lec­tu­al as well as phys­i­cal vig­or­ous­ness aid­ed by the 19th-cen­tu­ry “mir­a­cle drug” of cocaine, also give the illus­tra­tor rich mate­r­i­al to work with. One can’t help but think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which forged a per­ma­nent cul­tur­al link between Stead­man’s art and Hunter S. Thomp­son’s prose. How “true” is the drug-fueled desert odyssey that book recounts? More so, per­haps, than many of Freud’s sup­pos­ed­ly sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. But as with the work of Freud, so with that of Thomp­son and Stead­man: we return to it not because we want the truth, exact­ly, but because we can’t turn away from the often grotesque ver­sions of our­selves it shows us.

You can pick up a copy of Stead­man’s illus­trat­ed Sig­mund Freud here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud, Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis, Intro­duced in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

Sig­mund Freud’s Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Draw­ings Show How He First Visu­al­ized the Ego, Super­ego, Id & More

How a Young Sig­mund Freud Researched & Got Addict­ed to Cocaine, the New “Mir­a­cle Drug,” in 1894

Ralph Steadman’s Wild­ly Illus­trat­ed Biog­ra­phy of Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1983)

Gonzo Illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man Draws the Amer­i­can Pres­i­dents, from Nixon to Trump

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How to Use Psychedelic Drugs to Improve Mental Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

in Books, Health, Psychology | May 29th, 2018

The his­to­ry of research on psy­che­del­ic drugs is so sen­sa­tion­al that more sober-mind­ed exper­i­ments (so to speak) often get obscured by the hip, the weird, and the nefar­i­ous, the lat­ter includ­ing secret CIA and Army test­ing of LSD and oth­er drugs as a means of psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare and “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion.” These exper­i­ments inad­ver­tent­ly led to Ken Kesey’s infa­mous “Acid Tests” in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. On the oth­er side of the coun­try, Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist Tim­o­thy Leary used ques­tion­able meth­ods in his psilo­cy­bin exper­i­ments with pris­on­ers and stu­dents, before get­ting fired and going on to expand the mind of the coun­ter­cul­ture, earn­ing the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing Richard Nixon call him “the most dan­ger­ous man in Amer­i­ca.”

Mean­while, work­ing in rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty in very dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances in the late 50s, a UC Irvine psy­chi­a­trist named Oscar Janiger brought vol­un­teer sub­jects, includ­ing sev­er­al dozen artists, to a house out­side L.A., where they were giv­en LSD and psy­chother­a­py. Janiger’s work has its sen­sa­tion­al side—a cousin of Allen Gins­berg, he report­ed­ly intro­duced Cary Grant, Anais Nin, Jack Nichol­son, and Aldous Hux­ley to acid. But his pri­ma­ry achieve­ment, in data that remained most­ly unpub­lished dur­ing his life­time, were his dis­cov­er­ies of the ther­a­peu­tic and cre­ative use of psy­che­del­ic drugs under con­trolled con­di­tions with sub­jects who were pre­pared for the expe­ri­ence and guid­ed through it by trained pro­fes­sion­als.

The exper­i­ments con­duct­ed by Janiger and oth­ers dif­fered marked­ly from the free­wheel­ing recre­ation­al drug use of the coun­ter­cul­ture and the weaponiza­tion of psy­che­delics by the U.S. gov­ern­ment. In recent years, sci­en­tists and psy­chol­o­gists have con­duct­ed sim­i­lar kinds of research under even more tight­ly con­trolled con­di­tions, sub­stan­ti­at­ing and expand­ing on the con­clu­sions of ear­ly exper­i­menters who found that psy­che­delics seem remark­ably effec­tive in treat­ing depres­sion, anx­i­ety, alco­holism, drug addic­tion, and oth­er stub­born­ly destruc­tive human ills. This research sup­ports with sound evi­dence LSD inven­tor Albert Hoff­man’s descrip­tion of his drug as “med­i­cine for the soul.”

While research orga­ni­za­tions like MAPS (Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­che­del­ic Stud­ies) have cen­tral­ized and pro­mot­ed much of the cur­rent research, it’s now get­ting a huge pop­u­lar boost from none oth­er than food writer Michael Pol­lan, best­selling author of books like The Omnivore’s Dilem­ma and In Defense of Food. “A self-described ‘reluc­tant psy­cho­naut,’” writes NPR, Pol­lan sub­mit­ted him­self as a test sub­ject for exper­i­ments with “LSD, psilo­cy­bin and 5‑MeO-DMT, a sub­stance in the ven­om of the Sono­ran Desert toad.” He has described his expe­ri­ences and the work of the research com­mu­ni­ty in a new book titled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Sci­ence of Psy­che­delics Teach­es Us About Con­scious­ness, Dying, Addic­tion, Depres­sion, and Tran­scen­dence.

At the top of the post, see Pol­lan describe the book in a short video from Pen­guin. He dis­cuss­es such ancient ideas (as he has in past writ­ings) of psy­choac­tive drugs as “entheagens”—or chem­i­cal con­duits to the divine. “In the Dar­win­ian sense,” he says, the evo­lu­tion­ary pur­pose of psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences may be an increase in cog­ni­tive vari­ety and the stim­u­la­tion of “more metaphors, more insights.” In his Fresh Air inter­view above, Pol­lan fur­ther explains how this works ther­a­peu­ti­cal­ly. “One of the things our mind does is tell sto­ries about our­selves,” he says. “If you’re depressed, you’re being told a sto­ry per­haps that you’re worth­less, that no one could pos­si­bly love you… that life will not get bet­ter.”

“These sto­ries,” Pol­lan says, “trap us in these rumi­na­tive loops that are very hard to get out of. They’re very destruc­tive pat­terns of thought.” Psy­che­del­ic drugs “dis­able for a peri­od of time the part of the brain where the self talks to itself. It’s called the default mode net­work, and it’s a group of struc­tures that con­nect parts of the cor­tex — the evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly most recent part of the brain — to deep­er lev­els where emo­tion and mem­o­ry reside.” Dis­rupt­ing old nar­ra­tives helps peo­ple to write bet­ter, health­i­er sto­ries.

As Pol­lan says in the Time video above, psy­che­delics have been pop­u­lar­ly con­ceived as drugs that make you crazy—and in some cas­es, that hap­pens. But they are also “drugs that can make you sane, or more sane.”  One of the major dif­fer­ences between one out­come and the oth­er is the con­di­tions under which the drug is tak­en. When qual­i­ty and dosage of the drugs are con­trolled, and when sub­jects are pre­pared for “bad trips” with spe­cif­ic instruc­tions, even fright­en­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions can con­tribute to bet­ter men­tal health.

In his psilo­cy­bin exper­i­ment, for exam­ple, Pol­lan was accom­pa­nied by two “guides” and giv­en “a set of ‘flight instruc­tions,” includ­ing what to do if you see a mon­ster.

…don’t try to run away. Walk right up to it, plant your feet and say, “What do you have to teach me? What are you doing in my mind?” And if you do that, accord­ing to the flight instruc­tions, your fear will morph into some­thing much more pos­i­tive very quick­ly.

In anoth­er exam­ple, anoth­er psy­lo­cy­bin sub­ject, Alana, describes in the Vox video below her guid­ed expe­ri­ence with the drug dur­ing a smok­ing ces­sa­tion tri­al at Johns Hop­kins. “There were scary parts, fore­bod­ing parts,” she says, but thanks to con­trolled con­di­tions and the reas­sur­ing pres­ence of a guide, “I always knew there was joy and peace on the oth­er side of it. It was free­ing.”

Using psy­che­delics to con­front and con­quer fears goes back many thou­sands of years in tra­di­tion­al soci­eties. Mod­ern tech­no­log­i­cal cul­ture has large­ly turned to anti­de­pres­sants and oth­er phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to reg­u­late anx­i­ety, but as Pol­lan points out, “Prozac doesn’t help when you’re con­fronting mor­tal­i­ty,” the deep­est, most uni­ver­sal fear of all. But psychedelics—as Aldous Hux­ley found when he took LSD on his deathbed—can “occa­sion an expe­ri­ence in people—a mys­ti­cal experience—that some­how makes it eas­i­er to let go.” Sure­ly, there are oth­er ways to do so. In any case, psy­che­del­ic drugs seem so ben­e­fi­cial to psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being that they can be, and hope­ful­ly will be in the future, used to pos­i­tive­ly (respon­si­bly) shift the con­scious­ness and cre­ative poten­tial of mil­lions of suf­fer­ing peo­ple.

For more on this sub­ject, read Pol­lan’s lat­est book–How to Change Your Mind: What the New Sci­ence of Psy­che­delics Teach­es Us About Con­scious­ness, Dying, Addic­tion, Depres­sion, and Tran­scen­dence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip Which Took Place on April 19, 1943

Rare Footage Shows US and British Sol­diers Get­ting Dosed with LSD in Gov­ern­ment-Spon­sored Tests (1958 + 1964)

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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