The Power of Conformity: 1962 Episode of Candid Camera Reveals the Strange Psychology of Riding Elevators

Watch tele­vi­sion cre­ator Allen Funt pre­dict flash mobs in the 1962 episode of Can­did Cam­era above, filmed some forty years before Harp­er’s mag­a­zine edi­tor, Bill Wasik, found­ed the move­ment with anony­mous­ly e‑mailed instruc­tions for a coor­di­nat­ed pub­lic action.

The stunt, enti­tled “Face the Rear,” was pulled off by a hand­ful of “agents”—a phrase coined by Improv Everywhere’s founder Char­lie Todd to describe the pok­er-faced par­tic­i­pants con­jur­ing a secret­ly agreed upon alter­nate real­i­ty to con­found (and not always delight) its tar­get sub­ject, along with unsus­pect­ing bystanders.

Com­pared to the grand-scale the­atrics that have trans­formed an upscale mar­ket into a scene from La Travi­a­ta and infil­trate sub­ways world­wide with thou­sands of pants-less rid­ers every year, this prank is quite sub­tle in the exe­cu­tion.

It suc­ceeds on our tac­it under­stand­ing of what con­sti­tutes prop­er ele­va­tor behav­ior when oth­ers pas­sen­gers are present. Left to our own devices, we can sing, dance, and let the mask of pro­pri­ety slip in any num­ber of ways. Once oth­ers enter? We share the space and face for­ward.

But what if every­one who enters inex­plic­a­bly faces the back wall?

What would you do?

As hypo­thet­i­cals go, this one’s not near­ly so weighty as con­sid­er­ing whether you’d have fol­lowed the script of Stan­ley Milgram’s obe­di­ence exper­i­ments or put your own fam­i­ly at risk by hid­ing Anne Frank.

Still…

For the sub­jects of Can­did Cam­era’s ele­va­tor gag, the pres­sure to suc­cumb to group think quick­ly over­ruled years of learned phys­i­cal behav­ior.

And nor­ma­tive ele­va­tor phys­i­cal­i­ty def­i­nite­ly springs from social cues, as John Dono­van, host of NPR’s “Around the Nation” said, in an inter­view with Lee Gray, author of From Ascend­ing Rooms to Express Ele­va­tors: A His­to­ry of the Pas­sen­ger Ele­va­tor in the 19th Cen­tu­ry:

I know a psy­chol­o­gist who works with teenagers who have autism who—he uses encour­ag­ing to learn skills that will allow them to be inde­pen­dent in the world to get out on their own. And one of his lessons with some of the teenagers is what to do in an ele­va­tor because he says that the typ­i­cal kid that he works with, when the door is opened, and he’s been told that he should step inside, will step inside and face the back wall because nobody has told him that every­body else in the ele­va­tor is going to turn around and face the front doors…

Can­did Camera’s stunts were always framed as com­e­dy, though its cre­ator, Funt, was well versed in psy­chol­o­gy, hav­ing served as child psy­chol­o­gist Kurt Lewin’s research assis­tant at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty.

In an arti­cle for the Archive of Amer­i­can Tele­vi­sion, writer Amy Loomis iden­ti­fied five premis­es into which the aver­age Can­did Cam­era gag could fall:

  1. Revers­ing nor­mal or antic­i­pat­ed pro­ce­dures
  2. Expos­ing basic human weak­ness­es such as igno­rance or van­i­ty
  3. Using the ele­ment of sur­prise
  4. Ful­fill­ing fan­tasies
  5. Plac­ing some­thing in a bizarre or inap­pro­pri­ate set­ting

“Face the Rear” was a case where con­for­mi­ty born of an unex­pect­ed rever­sal in nor­mal pro­ce­dure yield­ed laughs, at the gen­tle expense of a series of unsus­pect­ing sub­jects, whose solo rides were dis­rupt­ed by a bunch of Can­did Cam­era oper­a­tives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Footage from the Psy­chol­o­gy Exper­i­ment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obe­di­ence Study (1961)

The Lit­tle Albert Exper­i­ment: The Per­verse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of San­ta Claus & Bun­nies

This is Your Brain on Sex and Reli­gion: Exper­i­ments in Neu­ro­science

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

An Animated David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

“Where do you get your ideas?” Every artist dreads hav­ing to answer that most com­mon of all ques­tions. Well, every artist with the excep­tion of David Lynch. The direc­tor of such mod­ern cin­e­mat­ic qua­si-night­mares as Eraser­headBlue Vel­vet, and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve will glad­ly explain exact­ly where he gets his ideas: from his own con­scious­ness, “the TV in your mind.”

He’ll also glad­ly explain how he gets them by, not to mix the metaphor too much, using the folksy terms of fish­ing: “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch lit­tle fish, you can stay in the shal­low water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deep­er.” And to bait the hook with? Why, bits of oth­er ideas. Those words come from his 2006 book Catch­ing the Big Fish: Med­i­ta­tion, Con­scious­ness, and Cre­ativ­i­ty, a slim vol­ume on this and that which gets into some detail about his use of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion as a kind of fish­ing pole to reel those espe­cial­ly com­pelling ideas in from one’s con­scious­ness. 

A cou­ple of years after that, Lynch sat down with The Atlantic to talk about his spe­cial brand of cre­ativ­i­ty (as dis­tinct from his spe­cial brand of cof­fee, no doubt also a fuel for thought). They’ve just recent­ly ani­mat­ed his remarks to make the short video above, a visu­al­iza­tion of his idea-get­ting process­es, includ­ing day­dream­ing, trav­el­ing, and look­ing into a pud­dle in the gut­ter.

“I always say it’s like there’s a man in anoth­er room with the whole film togeth­er, but they’re in puz­zle parts,” says Lynch as hands chop a fish into frames of cel­lu­loid. “He’s flip­ping one piece at a time into me. At first it’s very abstract; I don’t have a clue. More pieces come, more ideas are caught. It starts form­ing a thing. And then one day, there it is. In a way, there’s no orig­i­nal ideas. It’s just the ideas that you caught.”

The ideas Lynch has caught have become, among oth­er things, some of the most mem­o­rable films of the late 20th cen­tu­ry — and, accord­ing to last mon­th’s BBC poll, the best film of the 21st cen­tu­ry so far. What’s more, he claims not to have suf­fered for them, illus­trat­ing his argu­ment of suf­fer­ing as anti­thet­i­cal to cre­ativ­i­ty with an imag­i­nary sce­nario of a diar­rhea-afflict­ed Van Gogh. As for what part of his con­scious­ness he fished that image out of, per­haps we’d rather not know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains Where His Ideas Come From

Pat­ti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Oscar-Winning Filmmaker Errol Morris Creates a Commercial for Depend Adult Diapers

There’s a gen­der assump­tion for every stage of life these days. From gen­der-cod­ed Lego play sets and teen mag­a­zines, we progress to light­weight, pink tool sets or their more tra­di­tion­al, appar­ent­ly “mas­cu­line” coun­ter­part.

After that?

Adult dia­pers.

Phys­i­cal­ly, it makes sense that the lat­ter would divide along assigned gen­der lines. Biol­o­gy may not be the trump card it was once con­sid­ered to be, but, in gen­er­al, it con­tin­ues to vis­it wider hips on those born female organs than those rock­ing the frank n’ beans.  

(That said, as the moth­er of babies, I always appre­ci­at­ed when a reli­able brand went the extra mile with uni­sex pat­terns on the tapes or waist band.)

Film­mak­er Errol Mor­ris chose to widen the gen­der divide in 2009, when he was hired to direct a Depend spot, fea­tur­ing the company’s new line of gen­der-spe­cif­ic adult dia­pers, above.

In the end, the prod­uct itself was wait­ing in the wings, so a cou­ple of cute midlife inter­vie­wees could take turns describ­ing their impres­sions of a sin­gle Rorschach blot. 

Don’t wor­ry. It’s got noth­ing to do with absorben­cy.

The female sub­ject imme­di­ate­ly begins to spin a fan­ci­ful tale involv­ing two cute birds, while the male hems and haws, appar­ent­ly the vic­tim of some trag­ic gen­der-based lack of imag­i­na­tion. I bet he doesn’t like stop­ping to ask for direc­tions either.

Giv­en this director’s track record of grip­ping doc­u­men­taries, I think I’d have pre­ferred a more straight­for­ward approach. I’d be up for a full-length doc­u­men­tary about the expe­ri­ence of actu­al­ly wear­ing those things, espe­cial­ly if Mor­ris used his Inter­ro­tron to elic­it frank eye con­tact, as he does above. 

It’s an uncom­fort­able sub­ject for sure, but I’d like to hear how adult dia­pers impact an indi­vid­u­al’s sense of attrac­tive­ness and self-worth. I would­n’t want Mor­ris to gen­er­al­ize, but by and large, is it a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence for men than it is for women?

Per­haps the riff­ing pair in the com­mer­cial spot have more famil­iar­i­ty with the prod­uct than they were allowed to let on? If so, I’d imag­ine it’s from car­ing for an elder­ly rel­a­tive, but I could be wrong. Either way, those would be sto­ries I’d like to hear.

Per­haps this is a top­ic best tack­led by Wern­er Her­zog

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“They Were There” — Errol Mor­ris Final­ly Directs a Film for IBM

Bob Geld­of Talks About the Great­est Day of His Life, Step­ping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Mor­ris

Her­mann Rorschach’s Orig­i­nal Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est script, Fawn­book, is avail­able in a dig­i­tal edi­tion from Indie The­ater Now.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion is a skill, an art, a slight-of-hand tech­nique. I’m pro­cras­ti­nat­ing right now, but you’d nev­er know it. How many tabs do I have open in my mul­ti­ple brows­er win­dows? Pick a num­ber, any num­ber. How many tasks have I put off today? How many dreams have I deferred? I’ll nev­er tell. The unskilled pro­cras­ti­na­tors stick out, they’re easy to spot. They talk a lot about what they’re not doing. They run around in cir­cles of bewil­der­ment like the trou­bled hero of Dr. Seuss’s Hunch­es in Bunch­es. The skilled prac­ti­tion­er makes it look easy.

But no mat­ter how much Face­book time you get in before lunch and still man­age to ace those per­for­mance reviews, you’re real­ly only cheat­ing your­self, am I right? You want­ed to fin­ish that novel/symphony/improv class/physics the­o­rem. But some­thing stopped you. Some­thing in your brain per­haps. That’s where these things usu­al­ly hap­pen. When Stu­art Lang­field asked a neu­ro­sci­en­tist about the neu­ro­science of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, he got the fol­low­ing answer: “Peo­ple think that you can turn on an MRI and see where something’s hap­pen­ing in the brain, but the truth is that’s not so. This stuff is vast­ly more com­pli­cat­ed, so we have the­o­ries.”

There are the­o­ries aplen­ty that tell us, says Lang­field, “what’s prob­a­bly hap­pen­ing” in the brain. Lang­field explains his own: the prim­i­tive, plea­sure-seek­ing, pain-avoid­ing lim­bic sys­tem acts too quick­ly for our more delib­er­a­tive, ratio­nal pre­frontal cor­tex to catch up, ren­der­ing us stu­pe­fied by dis­trac­tions. Piers Steel, Dis­tin­guished Research Chair at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary and a pro­cras­ti­na­tion expert, shares this view. You can see him explain it in the short video below. The evo­lu­tion­ary “design flaw,” says Lang­field, might make the sit­u­a­tion seem hope­less, were it not for “neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty,” a fan­cy buzz­word that means we have the abil­i­ty to change our brains.

Langfield’s pur­pose in his short video is not only to under­stand the biol­o­gy of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, but to over­come it. He asks psy­chol­o­gist Tim Pychyl, whose answers we see and hear as an incom­pre­hen­si­ble jum­ble of ideas. But then Pychyl reduces the com­pli­cat­ed the­o­ries to a sim­ple solu­tion. You guessed it, mind­ful­ness meditation—to “down­reg­u­late the lim­bic sys­tem.” Real­ly, that’s it? Just med­i­tate? It is a proven way to reduce anx­i­ety and improve con­cen­tra­tion.

But Pychyl and his research team at Car­leton Uni­ver­si­ty have a few more very prac­ti­cal sug­ges­tions, based on exper­i­men­tal data gath­ered by Steel and oth­ers. The Wall Street Jour­nal offers this con­densed list of tips:

Break a long-term project down into spe­cif­ic sub-goals. State the exact start time and how long (not just “tomor­row”) you plan to work on the task.

Just get start­ed. It isn’t nec­es­sary to write a long list of tasks, or each inter­me­di­ate step.

Remind your­self that fin­ish­ing the task now helps you in the future. Putting off the task won’t make it more enjoy­able.

Imple­ment “micro­costs,” or mini-delays, that require you to make a small effort to pro­cras­ti­nate, such as hav­ing to log on to a sep­a­rate com­put­er account for games.

Reward your­self not only for com­plet­ing the entire project but also the sub-goals.

A Stock­holm Uni­ver­si­ty study test­ed these strate­gies, assign­ing a group of 150 self-report­ed “high pro­cras­ti­na­tors” sev­er­al of the self-help instruc­tions over 10 weeks, and employ­ing a reward sys­tem and vary­ing lev­els of guid­ance. “The results,” WSJ reports, “showed that after inter­ven­tion with both guid­ed and unguid­ed self-help, peo­ple improved their pro­cras­ti­na­tion, though the guid­ed ther­a­py seemed to show greater ben­e­fit.”

Oth­er times, adding self-help tasks to get us to the tasks we’re putting off doesn’t work so well. We can all take com­fort in the fact that pro­cras­ti­na­tion has a long his­to­ry, dat­ing back to ancient Egypt, Rome, and 18th cen­tu­ry Eng­land. The wis­dom of the ages could not defeat it, or as Samuel John­son wrote, “even they who most steadi­ly with­stand it find it, if not the most vio­lent, the most per­ti­na­cious of their pas­sions, always renew­ing its attacks, and, though often van­quished, nev­er destroyed.”

But there are peo­ple who pro­cras­ti­nate, beset by its per­ti­nac­i­ty, and then there are chron­ic pro­cras­ti­na­tors. “If you’re an occa­sion­al pro­cras­ti­na­tor, says Pychyl, “quit think­ing about your feel­ings and get to the next task.” Suck it up, in oth­er words, and walk it off—maybe after a short course of self-help. For all the con­flict­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry, “there is a qui­et sci­ence behind pro­cras­ti­na­tion,” writes Big Think, and “accord­ing to recent stud­ies, pro­cras­ti­na­tion is a learned habit.” Most research agrees it’s one we can unlearn through med­i­ta­tion and/or patient retrain­ing of our­selves.

How­ev­er if you’re of the chron­ic sub­set, say Pychyl, “you might need ther­a­py to bet­ter under­stand your emo­tions and how you’re cop­ing with them through avoid­ance.” Psy­chol­o­gist Joseph Fer­rari at DePaul Uni­ver­si­ty agrees. Cit­ing a fig­ure of “20 per­cent of U.S. men and women” who “make pro­cras­ti­na­tion their way of life,” he adds, “it is the per­son who does that habit­u­al­ly, always with plau­si­ble ‘excus­es’ that has issues to address.” Only you can deter­mine whether your trou­ble relates to bad habits or deep­er psy­cho­log­i­cal issues.

What­ev­er the caus­es, what might moti­vate us to med­i­tate or seek ther­a­py are the effects. Chron­ic pro­cras­ti­na­tion is “not a time man­age­ment issue,” says Fer­rari, “it is a mal­adap­tive lifestyle.” Habit­u­al pro­cras­ti­na­tors, the WSJ writes, “have high­er rates of depres­sion and anx­i­ety and poor­er well-being.” We may think, writes Eric Jaffe at the Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­cho­log­i­cal Science’s jour­nal, of pro­cras­ti­na­tion as “an innocu­ous habit at worst, and maybe even a help­ful one at best,” a strat­e­gy Stan­ford phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor John Per­ry argued for in The Art of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion. Instead, Jaffe says, in a sober­ing sum­ma­ry of Pychyl’s research, “pro­cras­ti­na­tion is real­ly a self-inflict­ed wound that grad­u­al­ly chips away at the most valu­able resource in the world: time.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Miran­da July Teach­es You How to Avoid Pro­cras­ti­na­tion

The Art of Struc­tured Pro­cras­ti­na­tion

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

Stephen Fry on Coping with Depression: It’s Raining, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

The past three decades have seen an expo­nen­tial growth in the under­stand­ing and treat­ment options for depres­sion, despite the fact that for much of that time, men­tal ill­ness has remained a taboo sub­ject in pop­u­lar dis­course. This was indeed the case, even as almost two-and-a-half mil­lion pre­scrip­tions were writ­ten for Prozac in the U.S. in 1988, the year after its FDA approval. But much has changed since then. For one thing, we’ve seen a full-on back­lash against the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal rev­o­lu­tion in men­tal health treat­ment, lead­ing to the pop­u­lar­i­ty of non-drug treat­ments like cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py and med­i­ta­tion for less severe forms of depres­sion.

We’ve also seen a pop­u­lar­iza­tion of can­did dis­cus­sions about the ill­ness, lead­ing to a spate of clickbait‑y arti­cles like “20 Celebri­ties Who Bat­tled Depres­sion” and seri­ous, seem­ing­ly week­ly fea­tures on social media depres­sion. We can cred­it actor and writer Stephen Fry for a lot of our cur­rent famil­iar­i­ty and com­fort lev­el with the dis­ease.

Ten years ago, Fry “came out” in his BBC doc­u­men­tary The Secret Life of the Man­ic Depres­sive, and since then, he’s open­ly dis­cussed his strug­gle with his ill­ness and his sui­cide attempts. In the videos here, you can see him do just that. At the top, in an inter­view imme­di­ate­ly after the doc­u­men­tary came out, Fry dis­cuss­es the “mor­bid” seri­ous­ness of his dis­ease, which he com­pares to hav­ing “your own per­son­al weath­er.” In deal­ing with it, he says, there are “two mis­takes… to deny that it’s rain­ing… and to say, ‘there­fore my life is over. It’s rain­ing and the sun will nev­er come out.’”

Since mak­ing his diag­no­sis pub­lic, Fry has always sound­ed a note of hope. But his sto­ry, which he tells in more per­son­al detail in the clip fur­ther up, illus­trates the incred­i­ble tra­vails of liv­ing with depres­sion and men­tal ill­ness, even under treat­ment that has brought him sta­bil­i­ty and suc­cess. Like the weath­er, storms come. He revealed his “black stages” in his 2006 doc­u­men­tary. Now, ten years on, Fry has revis­it­ed the strug­gle in a fol­low-up piece, The Not So Secret Life of the Man­ic Depres­sive, in which he opens up about more recent inci­dents, like his sui­cide attempt after inter­view­ing Simon Loko­do, Uganda’s Min­is­ter for Ethics and Integri­ty and spon­sor of the country’s noto­ri­ous “Kill the Gays” bill. (Fry, who is gay, describes Loko­do as a “foam­ing froth­ing homo­phobe of the worst kind.”)

The “mes­sage” of his most recent film, writes The Inde­pen­dent, “was clear across the board: there is no quick fix for men­tal health and no catch-all solu­tion.” As Fry says, “It’s nev­er going to get off my back, this mon­key, it’s always going to be there.” But as he re-iter­ates strong­ly in the Big Think inter­view above, “if the weather’s bad, one day it will get bet­ter.” This can’t hap­pen in a sus­tained way, as it has for Fry, if we per­son­al­ly deny we’re depressed and don’t get help, or if we pub­li­cal­ly deny the dis­ease, and force peo­ple liv­ing with it into a life of shame and need­less suf­fer­ing. “The stig­ma of men­tal ill­ness,” argues clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist Michael Fried­man, “is mak­ing us sick­er.” But Fry, who has in the last ten years become the pres­i­dent of a men­tal health non-prof­it called Mind, is opti­mistic. “It’s in the cul­ture more,” he says, “and it’s talked about more.” One hopes we see that talk turned into more action in the com­ing years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Launch­es Pin­dex, a “Pin­ter­est for Edu­ca­tion”

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18

Stephen Fry Hates Danc­ing: Watch Fry’s Rant Against Danc­ing Get Turned into a Won­der­ful Inter­pre­ta­tive Dance

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

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

Sig­mund Freud and Carl Jung—leg­endary friends and col­leagues, then rivals—“were not good for one anoth­er,” wrote Lionel Trilling in a 1974 review of their new­ly-pub­lished cor­re­spon­dence. Their friend­ship, begun in 1907, “made them sus­cep­ti­ble to false atti­tudes and ambigu­ous tones.” Freud first thought of Jung as “the Joshua to his Moses,” his “heir” and “suc­ces­sor and crown prince.” Twen­ty years his mentor’s junior, Jung swore feal­ty to Freud’s pro­gram, hop­ing not to dis­ap­point the man. But this was inevitable.

Freud’s harsh 1913 break-up let­ter to his for­mer dis­ci­ple shows us the lim­its of the Vien­nese doctor’s kind­ness as he recounts the “lin­ger­ing effect of past dis­ap­point­ments” that has sev­ered his “emo­tion­al tie” with Jung. Forty-six years lat­er, and twen­ty years after Freud’s death, Jung remained tac­i­turn about the per­son­al details of their rela­tion­ship. In the 1959 inter­view above, Jung tells us how their “long and pen­e­trat­ing con­ver­sa­tions” began after he sent Freud a book he’d writ­ten on schiz­o­phre­nia. In answer to the ques­tion, “what kind of man was Freud?” Jung gives us only a hint of his mentor’s obsti­na­cy, say­ing he “soon dis­cov­ered that when [Freud] had thought some­thing, then it was set­tled.”

As for him­self, Jung says he “was doubt­ing all the time,” a con­se­quence of his devot­ed study of Kant, where Freud “had no philo­soph­i­cal edu­ca­tion.” Their method­olog­i­cal impasse only grew as Jung pur­sued the sym­bol­ic depths of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious, and their the­o­ries began to diverge on almost meta­phys­i­cal grounds. And yet, Jung cred­its their tur­bu­lent rela­tion­ship for inspir­ing his “lat­er inves­ti­ga­tion of psy­cho­log­i­cal types.” Dur­ing their acquain­tance, the two ana­lyzed each oth­er fre­quent­ly; asked about “the sig­nif­i­cant fea­tures of Freud’s dreams,” Jung refus­es to answer on the grounds of keep­ing “pro­fes­sion­al secrets.”

Jung died two years after this inter­view, and in 1970 the Freud and Jung fam­i­lies made what Trilling called “the enlight­ened deci­sion” to pub­lish their cor­re­spon­dence togeth­er in one vol­ume, in Ger­man and Eng­lish. You’ll hear Jung above dis­cuss his unwill­ing­ness to release the let­ters before his death. At the very end of the short inter­view he talks more explic­it­ly about his break with Freud. While Freud may have felt let down by his one­time dis­ci­ple, Jung express­es his own dis­ap­point­ment with Freud’s “pure­ly per­son­al approach and his dis­re­gard of the his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions of man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Man­u­script The Red Book: A Whis­pered Intro­duc­tion

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

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

Philosopher Sam Harris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guided Meditation

We’ve post­ed on med­i­ta­tion research late­ly because it’s so com­pelling, and med­i­ta­tion music and instruc­tions because so many cre­ative peo­ple have found it lib­er­at­ing. But it’s always worth not­ing that a few med­i­ta­tion skep­tics have weighed in with point­ed objec­tions to the large claims med­i­ta­tion teach­ers often make. And yet even after one of the most unspar­ing cri­tiques of med­i­ta­tion research and teach­ing, sci­ence writer John Hor­gan still admits that “it might make you feel bet­ter, nicer, wis­er” and plans to con­tin­ue med­i­tat­ing in the face of his “per­fect con­tempt for it.”

Anoth­er pro­fes­sion­al skep­tic has gone even fur­ther along this road. Once spo­ken of as one of the dread­ed “Four Horse­men” of New Athe­ism, Sam Har­ris has also long called him­self a sec­u­lar Bud­dhist, and has writ­ten “a guide to spir­i­tu­al­i­ty with­out reli­gion.”

Wad­ing into the pol­i­tics of med­i­ta­tion means deal­ing with skep­tics like Har­ris who treat Bud­dhism as quaint and archa­ic fool­ish­ness that just hap­pened to pre­serve the sci­en­tif­ic tech­nol­o­gy of mind­ful­ness, and it means sort­ing through a lot of sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies, many of which—as is always the case—have a num­ber fatal flaws in their method. Har­ris’ sci­en­tif­ic claims about mind­ful­ness have come in for their own cri­tiques, from both mys­tics and sec­u­lar­ists.

All of this said, the fact is that, like yoga and many oth­er prac­tices designed to har­mo­nize mind and body, the ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion, place­bo-induced or oth­er­wise, are observ­able, and the risks entire­ly neg­li­gi­ble. Many skep­ti­cal researchers have decid­ed to dive in and try med­i­ta­tion before ful­ly cred­it­ing their doubts. And that, sup­pos­ed­ly, is the very instruc­tion we find in what is often called the Bud­dhist “char­ter for free inquiry,” which tells prac­ti­tion­ers to inves­ti­gate for them­selves and take no one’s word for any­thing, a few hun­dred years in advance of the British Roy­al Soci­ety’s mot­to, nul­lius in ver­ba.

In this spir­it, skep­tics like Har­ris have inves­ti­gat­ed med­i­ta­tion and report­ed their find­ings. Many also, like Har­ris and aca­d­e­m­ic researchers like Oxford psy­chi­a­trist Mark Williams, have record­ed their own guid­ed mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tions that cor­re­spond in many respects to the orig­i­nal ancient instruc­tions. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured guid­ed med­i­ta­tions from UCLA and a com­pi­la­tion of record­ed instruc­tions from new agers and sci­en­tists. At the top of the post, you can hear Har­ris’ very straight­for­ward guid­ed med­i­ta­tion, and fur­ther down a short­er ver­sion of the same.

In the video above, Har­ris employs just a lit­tle hyper­bole in com­par­ing mind­ful­ness to the Large Hadron Col­lid­er. His claim that only through this prac­tice can we dis­cov­er “the self is an illu­sion” rings false when we think of the many oth­er philoso­phers who have inde­pen­dent­ly come to the same con­clu­sion, whether as Taoists or Empiri­cists. But Har­ris isn’t only mak­ing the case for mind­ful­ness meditation’s true cor­re­spon­dence to some fun­da­men­tal nature of real­i­ty, but for its prag­mat­ic use­ful­ness in help­ing us move through the world with greater skill and peace of mind—reliable out­comes from reg­u­lar med­i­ta­tion that no one has yet cred­i­bly denied.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lena Dun­ham Shows Why It’s So Damn Hard to Med­i­tate: A Four-Minute Com­e­dy

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

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

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guided Meditations

Meditate_Tapasya_Dhyana

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

This year’s crazed elec­tion got you stressed out? Or just life in gen­er­al? “It’s nev­er too late,” Allen Gins­berg reminds us, “to med­i­tate.” On Mon­day, we brought you sev­er­al ver­sions of Ginsberg’s med­i­ta­tion instruc­tions, which he set to song and record­ed with Bob Dylan and dis­co maven/experimental cel­list Arthur Rus­sell, among oth­ers. Ginsberg’s “sug­ar-coat­ed dhar­ma,” as he called it, does a great job of draw­ing atten­tion to med­i­ta­tion and its ben­e­fits, per­son­al and glob­al, but it’s hard­ly the sooth­ing sound­track one needs to get in the right pos­ture and frame of mind.

For that, you might try Moby’s 4 hours of ambi­ent music, which he released free to the pub­lic through his web­site last month. Tra­di­tion­al­ly speak­ing, no music is nec­es­sary, but there’s also no need go the way of Zen monks, or to embrace any form of Bud­dhism or oth­er reli­gion. Whol­ly sec­u­lar forms of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion have been shown to reduce stress, depres­sion, and anx­i­ety, help man­age phys­i­cal pain, improve con­cen­tra­tion, and pro­mote a host of oth­er ben­e­fits.

Still skep­ti­cal? Don’t take my word for it. We’ve point­ed you toward the vast amount of sci­en­tif­ic research on the sub­ject of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, much of it con­duct­ed by skep­ti­cal researchers who came to believe in the ben­e­fits after see­ing the evi­dence. If you too have come around to the idea that, yes, you should prob­a­bly med­i­tate, your next thought may be, but how? Well, in addi­tion to Ginsberg’s wit­ty Vipas­sana how-to, UCLA has a series of short, guid­ed med­i­ta­tions avail­able on iTune­sU. And just above, we have an entire playlist of guid­ed meditations—18 hours in total. It was put togeth­er by Spo­ti­fy, whose free soft­ware you can down­load here.

These include more reli­gious­ly-ori­ent­ed kinds of med­i­ta­tions like “Guid­ed Chakra Bal­anc­ing” and the mys­ti­cal philoso­phies of Deep­ak Chopra, but don’t run off yet if all that’s too woo for you. There are also sev­er­al hours of very prac­ti­cal, non-reli­gious instruc­tion from teach­ers like Pro­fes­sor Mark Williams of the Oxford Mind­ful­ness Cen­tre, who offers med­i­ta­tions for cog­ni­tive ther­a­py. See Williams dis­cuss mind­ful­ness research and med­i­ta­tion as an effec­tive means of man­ag­ing depres­sion in the video above. (Catch a full mind­ful­ness lec­ture from Pro­fes­sor Williams and hear anoth­er guid­ed med­i­ta­tion from him on Youtube).

You’ll also find a 30-minute guid­ed med­i­ta­tion for sleep, sitar music from Ravi Shankar, and many oth­er guid­ed med­i­ta­tions at var­i­ous points on the spec­trum from the mys­ti­cal to the whol­ly prac­ti­cal. Some­thing for every­one here, in oth­er words. Go ahead and give it a try. No mat­ter if you can man­age ten min­utes or an hour a day, it’s nev­er too late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

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

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