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

in Health, Psychology | August 10th, 2016

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

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

in History, Psychology | August 4th, 2016

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

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

in Health, Neuroscience, Psychology, Religion | August 2nd, 2016

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

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Stream 18 Hours of Free Guided Meditations

in Health, Psychology, Religion | July 27th, 2016

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

in Philosophy, Psychology | June 16th, 2016

You may still suf­fer from painful mem­o­ries of hav­ing had to read Jacques Lacan in school, but look past all that ver­biage about, say, desire’s “fren­zied mock­ing of the abyss of the infi­nite, the secret col­lu­sion with which it envelops the plea­sure of know­ing and of dom­i­nat­ing with jouis­sance,” and you can find real insights into human­i­ty. The ani­mat­ed primer from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life just above will give you a clear sense — a much clear­er sense than any you might get from Lacan’s own prose — of what “the great­est French psy­cho­an­a­lyst of the 20th cen­tu­ry” under­stood about us all.


This video, as well as Lacan’s entry in The Book of Life, breaks the man’s thought down into three parts. First, iden­ti­ty: fol­low­ing his fas­ci­na­tion with the dis­tinc­tive­ly human expe­ri­ence of rec­og­niz­ing one’s own image, Lacan ulti­mate­ly sug­gests that “we accept that oth­er peo­ple sim­ply won’t ever expe­ri­ence us the way we expe­ri­ence our­selves; that we will be almost entire­ly mis­un­der­stood – and will in turn deeply mis­un­der­stand.” Sec­ond, love: though giv­en to grand state­ments such as “Men and women don’t exist,” Lacan com­pre­hend­ed “the extent to which we don’t tru­ly com­pre­hend our lovers and sim­ply peg a range of fan­tasies drawn from child­hood expe­ri­ences to their phys­i­cal forms,” which sup­ports the emi­nent­ly prac­ti­cal advice “not to be upset when we don’t feel a per­fect rap­port with some­one who ini­tial­ly seemed a soul­mate.”

The third part deals with the are­na in which Lacan’s writ­ings remain most often con­sid­ered: pol­i­tics. He came into his own as an inter­na­tion­al “intel­lec­tu­al celebri­ty” in the 1960s, the time of “the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, great inter­est in com­mu­nism, and lots of protests.” But he actu­al­ly took a dim­mer view of all that agi­ta­tion than many, telling those stu­dent pro­test­ers chomp­ing at the bit to remake soci­ety that “What you aspire to as rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies is a new mas­ter. You will get one.” He saw ear­ly on what we still see in every elec­tion cycle: that “we desire to have some­one else in charge who can make every­thing OK, some­one who is, in a sense, an ide­al par­ent – and we bring this pecu­liar-sound­ing bit of our psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­tasies into the way we nav­i­gate pol­i­tics.”

You can watch Lacan engag­ing with one par­tic­u­lar­ly rebel­lious stu­dent in a 1972 video we fea­tured a few years ago, and you can see an hour­long lec­ture he deliv­ered at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain that same year in this video we post­ed before that. Empow­ered by the kind of overview of Lacan’s ideas that the School of Life has put togeth­er, you can bet­ter con­front his famous­ly (or infa­mous­ly) elab­o­rate rhetoric and judge for your­self whether to con­sid­er him a thinker who “made some extreme­ly use­ful addi­tions to our under­stand­ing of our­selves” — or, in the judg­ment of Noam Chom­sky, a mere prac­ti­tion­er of emp­ty “pos­tur­ing.” But then, hav­ing lived a life that, as de Bot­ton puts it, mixed “intel­lec­tu­al truth with world­ly suc­cess,” can’t he be both?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charis­mat­ic Psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan Gives Pub­lic Lec­ture (1972)

Jacques Lacan’s Con­fronta­tion with a Young Rebel: Clas­sic Moment, 1972

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psy­cho­analy­sis with Panache (1973)

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

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The Art Market Demystified in Four Short Documentaries

in Art, Economics, Psychology | May 27th, 2016

Spend an hour or two at MoMA, Tate Mod­ern, or some oth­er world class muse­um and inevitably you’’ll over­hear some vari­a­tion of “my sev­en-year-old could paint that.”

May­haps, Madam, but how much would it fetch at auc­tion?

As a new doc­u­men­tary series, the Art Mar­ket (in Four Parts), makes clear, the mon­e­tary val­ue of art is tricky to assign.

There are excep­tions, of course, such as in the irre­sistible Picas­so anec­dote cit­ed in the trail­er, above.

Usu­al­ly how­ev­er, even the experts must resort to an edu­cat­ed guess, based on a num­ber of fac­tors, none of which can tell the whole sto­ry.

As jour­nal­ist and for­mer direc­tor of New York’s White Columns gallery, Josh Baer, points out in the series’ first episode below, even art mar­ket indices are an unre­li­able tool for assess­ing worth. A por­trait of actress Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor by Andy Warhol failed to attract a sin­gle bid at auc­tion, though art­net Price Data­base report­ed sales of between $27 mil­lion and $31.5 mil­lion for oth­er “Liz” paint­ings by the same artist.

I’d have thought a sig­na­ture as famous as Warhol’s would con­fer the same sort of ins­ta-worth Picas­so claimed his John Han­cock did.

The unpre­dictabil­i­ty of final sales fig­ures has led auc­tion hous­es to issue guar­an­tees in return for a split of the prof­its, a prac­tice Sotheby’s North and South Amer­i­ca chair­man, Lisa Den­ni­son, likens to an insur­ance pol­i­cy for the sell­er.

With the excep­tion of the ill-fat­ed Warhol’s great big goose egg, the num­bers bat­ted around by the series’ influ­en­tial talk­ing heads are pret­ty stag­ger­ing. Snap­py edit­ing also lends a sense of art world glam­our, though gal­lerist Michele Mac­carone betrays a cer­tain weari­ness that may come clos­er to the true ener­gy at the epi­cen­ter of the scene.

As for me, I couldn’t help think­ing back to my days as a recep­tion­ist in a com­mer­cial gallery on Chicago’s tourist friend­ly Mag­nif­i­cent Mile. I was con­temp­tu­ous of most of the stuff on our walls, which ran heav­i­ly to pas­tel gar­den par­ties and har­le­quins posed in front of rec­og­niz­able land­marks. One day, a cou­ple who’d wan­dered in on impulse dropped a ridicu­lous sum on a florid beach scene, com­plete with shim­mer­ing rain­bows. Rich they may have been, but their utter lack of taste was appalling, at least until the wife excit­ed­ly con­fid­ed that the paint­ing’s set­ting remind­ed them of their long ago Hawai­ian hon­ey­moon. That clar­i­fied a lot for me as to art’s true val­ue. I hope that the cou­ple is still alive and enjoy­ing the most for their money’s worth, every sin­gle day.

The Art Market’s oth­er three parts, “Gal­leries,” “Patrons,” and “Art Fairs,” will be released week­ly through mid-June. And we’ll try to add them to this post, as they roll out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Warhol: The Bell­wether of the Art Mar­ket

Braque in Bulk: Cost­co Gets Back into the Fine Art Mar­ket

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She wrote about her brief stint as a gallery recep­tion­ist in her third book, Job Hop­per: The Check­ered Career of a Down-Mar­ket Dilet­tante. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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

in Harvard, Health, Neuroscience, Psychology, TED Talks | May 25th, 2016

I don’t mean to sound dra­mat­ic, but med­i­ta­tion may have saved my life. Dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing time of over­work, under­pay, and seri­ous fam­i­ly dis­tress, I found myself at dan­ger­ous, near-stroke lev­els of high cho­les­terol and blood pres­sure, and the begin­nings of near-crip­pling ear­ly-onset arthri­tis. My doc­tors were alarmed. Some­thing had to change. Unable to make stress­ful out­er cir­cum­stances dis­ap­pear, I had to find con­struc­tive ways to man­age my respons­es to them instead. Yoga and med­i­ta­tion made the dif­fer­ence.

I’m hard­ly alone in this jour­ney. The lead­ing cause of death in the U.S. is heart dis­ease, fol­lowed close­ly by stroke, dia­betes, and depres­sion lead­ing to suicide—all con­di­tions exac­er­bat­ed by high lev­els of stress and anx­i­ety. In my own case, a changed diet and dai­ly exer­cise played a cru­cial role in my phys­i­cal recov­ery, but those dis­ci­plines would not even have been pos­si­ble to adopt were it not for the calm­ing, cen­ter­ing effects of a dai­ly med­i­ta­tion prac­tice.

Anec­dotes, how­ev­er, are not evi­dence. We are bom­bard­ed with claims about the mir­a­cle mag­ic of “mind­ful­ness,” a word that comes from Bud­dhism and describes a kind of med­i­ta­tion that focus­es on the breath and body sen­sa­tions as anchors for present-moment aware­ness. Some form of “mind­ful­ness based stress reduc­tion” has entered near­ly every kind of ther­a­py, reha­bil­i­ta­tion, cor­po­rate train­ing, and pain man­age­ment, and the word has been a mar­ket­ing totem for at least a sol­id decade now. No one ever needs to men­tion the B‑word in all this med­i­ta­tion talk. As one med­i­ta­tion teacher tells his begin­ner stu­dents, “Bud­dhism can­not exist with­out mind­ful­ness, but mind­ful­ness can exist per­fect­ly well with­out Bud­dhism.”

So, no need to believe in rein­car­na­tion, renun­ci­a­tion, or high­er states of con­scious­ness, fine. But does med­i­ta­tion real­ly change your brain? Yes. Aca­d­e­m­ic researchers have con­duct­ed dozens of stud­ies on how the prac­tice works, and have near­ly all con­clud­ed that it does. “There’s more than an arti­cle a day on the sub­ject in peer-reviewed jour­nals,” says Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to psy­chi­a­trist Steven Selchen, “The research is vast now.” One research team at Har­vard, led by Har­vard Med­ical School psy­chol­o­gy instruc­tor Sara Lazar, pub­lished a study in 2011 that shows how mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion results in phys­i­cal changes to the brain.

The paper details the results of MRI scans from 16 sub­jects “before and after they took part in the eight-week Mind­ful­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) Pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Cen­ter for Mind­ful­ness,” reports the Har­vard Gazette. Each of the par­tic­i­pants spent “an aver­age of 27 min­utes each day prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness exer­cis­es.” After the pro­gram, they report­ed sig­nif­i­cant stress reduc­tion on a ques­tion­naire, and analy­sis of their MRIs “found increased gray-mat­ter den­si­ty in the hip­pocam­pus, known to be impor­tant for learn­ing and mem­o­ry, and in struc­tures asso­ci­at­ed with self-aware­ness, com­pas­sion, and intro­spec­tion.”

The Har­vard Busi­ness Review points to a anoth­er sur­vey study in which sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia and the Chem­nitz Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy “were able to pool data from more than 20 stud­ies to deter­mine which areas of the brain are con­sis­tent­ly affect­ed. They iden­ti­fied at least eight dif­fer­ent regions.” High­light­ing two areas “of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als,” the HBR describes changes to the ante­ri­or cin­gu­late cor­tex (ACC), an area of the frontal lobe asso­ci­at­ed with self-reg­u­la­tion, learn­ing, and deci­sion-mak­ing. The ACC “may be par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant in the face of uncer­tain and fast-chang­ing con­di­tions.” Like Lazar’s Har­vard study, the researchers also iden­ti­fied “increased amounts of gray mat­ter” in the hip­pocam­pus, an area high­ly sub­ject to dam­age from chron­ic stress.

These stud­ies and many oth­ers bring mind­ful­ness togeth­er with anoth­er cur­rent psy­cho­log­i­cal buzz­word that has proven to be true: neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty, the idea that we can change our brains for the better—that we are not “hard­wired” to repeat pat­terns of behav­ior despite our best efforts. In the TEDx Cam­bridge talk at the top of the post, Lazar explains her results, and con­nects them with her own expe­ri­ences with med­i­ta­tion. She is, you’ll see right away, a skep­tic, not inclined to accept med­ical claims prof­fered by yoga and med­i­ta­tion teach­ers. But she found that those prac­tices worked in her own life, and also had “sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed ben­e­fits” in reduc­ing stress, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, and phys­i­cal pain. In oth­er words, they work.

None of the research inval­i­dates the Bud­dhist and Hin­du tra­di­tions from which yoga and med­i­ta­tion come, but it does show that one needn’t adopt any par­tic­u­lar belief sys­tem in order to reap the health ben­e­fits of the prac­tices. For some sec­u­lar intro­duc­tions to med­i­ta­tion, you may wish to try UCLA’s free guid­ed med­i­ta­tion ses­sions or check out the Med­i­ta­tion 101 ani­mat­ed beginner’s guide above. If you’re not too put off by the occa­sion­al Bud­dhist ref­er­ence, I would also high­ly rec­om­mend the Insight Med­i­ta­tion Center’s free six-part intro­duc­tion to mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion. Chron­ic stress is lit­er­al­ly killing us. We have it in our pow­er to change the way we respond to cir­cum­stances, change the phys­i­cal struc­ture of our brains, and become hap­pi­er and health­i­er as a result.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life

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

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Download Sigmund Freud’s Great Works as Free eBooks & Free Audio Books: A Digital Celebration on His 160th Birthday

in Psychology | May 6th, 2016

free freud ebooks and audiobooks

Image by Max Hal­ber­stadt via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Any­one with a pass­ing famil­iar­i­ty with the work of Sig­mund Freud—which is just about everyone—knows at least a hand­ful of things about his famous psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic the­o­ry: Ego, Super-ego, and Id, sex and death dri­ves, Oedi­pal com­plex, “Freudi­an slip,” “some­times a cig­ar is just a cig­ar”… (a quote that didn’t come from Freud). Most of these terms, except that cig­ar thing, orig­i­nate from Freud’s lat­er period—from about 1920 to his death in 1939—perhaps his most pro­duc­tive from a lit­er­ary stand­point, start­ing with Beyond the Plea­sure Prin­ci­ple, in which he began to devel­op his well-known struc­tur­al mod­el of the mind.

Dur­ing these lat­er years Freud built on ideas from 1913’s Totem and Taboo and ful­ly expand­ed his psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis into a philo­soph­i­cal and cul­tur­al the­o­ry in books like The Future of an Illu­sion, Civ­i­liza­tion and its Dis­con­tents, and Moses and Monothe­ism. For those who have pri­mar­i­ly encoun­tered Freud in intro to psych class­es, these works can seem strange indeed, giv­en the sweep­ing spec­u­la­tive claims the Vien­nese doc­tor makes about reli­gion, war, ancient his­to­ry, and even pre­his­to­ry. Though pep­pered with ter­mi­nol­o­gy from psy­cho­analy­sis, Freud’s more philo­soph­i­cal works roam far afield of his med­ical spe­cial­iza­tions and direct obser­va­tions.

When and how did Freud’s psy­chi­a­try become phi­los­o­phy, and what pos­sessed him to apply his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries to analy­ses of broad social and his­tor­i­cal dynam­ics? We see hints of Freud the philoso­pher through­out his career, but it’s dur­ing his mid­dle period—when his tri­par­tite mod­el of the psy­che still con­sist­ed of the con­scious, pre­con­scious, and unconscious—that he began to move more ful­ly from case stud­ies of indi­vid­ual psy­cho­sex­u­al devel­op­ment and inter­pre­ta­tions of dreams to stud­ies of human devel­op­ment writ large. These books are almost Dar­win­ian expan­sions of what Freud called “metapsychology”—which includ­ed his the­o­ries of Oedi­pal neu­roses, nar­cis­sism, and sado­masochism.

From 1914 to 1915, after his break with Jung, Freud worked on a series of papers on “metapsy­chol­o­gy,” intend­ed, he wrote “to clar­i­fy and car­ry deep­er the the­o­ret­i­cal assump­tions on which a psy­cho-ana­lyt­ic sys­tem could be found­ed.” Sev­en of the man­u­scripts from this peri­od van­ished, seem­ing­ly lost for­ev­er. In 1983, psy­cho­an­a­lyst Ilse Gru­bich-Simi­tis dis­cov­ered one of these essays in an old trunk belong­ing to a friend and col­league of Freud. Pub­lished as A Phy­lo­ge­net­ic Fan­ta­sy, this fas­ci­nat­ing, unfin­ished work points the way for­ward for Freud, pro­vid­ing some con­nec­tive tis­sue between his “ontoge­ny,” the devel­op­ment of the indi­vid­ual, and “phy­loge­ny,” the devel­op­ment of the species.

It is here, his trans­la­tors write in their intro­duc­tion to this rare work, that Freud “con­cludes that each indi­vid­ual con­tains some­where with­in him­self or her­self the his­to­ry of all mankind; fur­ther, that men­tal ill­ness can use­ful­ly be under­stood as a ves­tige of respons­es once nec­es­sary and high­ly adap­tive to the exi­gen­cies of each era. Accord­ing­ly, men­tal ill­ness can be under­stood as a set of for­mer­ly adap­tive respons­es that have become mal­adap­tive as the cli­mat­ic and soci­o­log­i­cal threats to the sur­vival of mankind have changed.”

These basic, yet rad­i­cal, ideas may be said to form a back­drop against which we might read so much of Freud’s mature work as a means for decod­ing what seems puz­zling, irra­tional, and down­right mad­den­ing about human behav­ior. Freud’s sci­en­tif­ic work has long been super­seded, and many of the specifics of his psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic the­o­ry deemed unwork­able, irrel­e­vant, or even dam­ag­ing. But there are very good rea­sons why his work has thrived in lit­er­ary the­o­ry and phi­los­o­phy. There is even a case to be made the Freud was the first evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gist, rough­ly bring­ing Dar­win­ian con­cepts of adap­ta­tion to bear on the devel­op­ment of the human psy­che from pre­his­to­ry to moder­ni­ty.

For all the neg­a­tive crit­i­cism his work has endured, Freud dared to explain us to our­selves, draw­ing on every resource at his disposal—including our most foun­da­tion­al nar­ra­tives in mythol­o­gy and ancient poet­ry. For that rea­son, his rel­e­vance, writes Jane Cia­bat­tari, as a “the­o­ret­i­cal cat­a­lyst” in the 21st cen­tu­ry remains potent, and his work remains well worth read­ing and pon­der­ing, for any stu­dent of human behav­ior.

Today, on the 160th birth­day of the father of psy­cho­analy­sis, we bring you a col­lec­tion of Freud’s major works avail­able free to read online or down­load as ebooks in the links below. Fur­ther down, find a list of Freud audio­books to down­load as mp3s or stream.

Whether root­ed in clin­i­cal study and research, detec­tive-like case stud­ies, philo­soph­i­cal spec­u­la­tions, or poet­ic flights of fan­cy, Freud’s writ­ing draws us deep­er into strange, obses­sive, pro­found, and dis­turb­ing ways of think­ing about our uneasy rela­tion­ships with our­selves, our fam­i­lies, and our unsta­ble social order.

eBooks

Audio Books

Relat­ed Con­tents:

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

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

Sig­mund Freud Appears in Rare, Sur­viv­ing Video & Audio Record­ed Dur­ing the 1930s

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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