What Is ASMR? Watch the The New Yorker’s Introduction to the Whispering & Crinkling Sounds That Help Calm Anxiety and Induce Euphoria

in Life, Psychology | July 25th, 2018

ASMR… is it a medical condition? A sexual fetish? A desire for peace and quiet coupled with an inability to turn off YouTube? Maybe all or none of the above?

Maybe you caught Act One of This American Life’s “Tribes” episode, in which novelist Andrea Seigel describes her passionate need for whispering, and finds a community of people who need the same. She discovered the “tingle” early in life, when a friend came over to inspect her shell collection, describing each item in a gentle whisper and provoking in Seigel an “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a euphoric reaction thousands crave as though it were a drug. They get their fix, as we learn in the New Yorker video above, from videos in which male and female “ASMR artists” gently handle, manipulate, and describe objects in low murmurs.

Sensual sibilance, the sounds of a brush through hair, scissors clipping, plastic quietly crinkling, tapping, spraying… all producing the same effect as Bob Ross’s happy little clouds and trees, a pioneering source of ASMR, though it had not yet been identified as such.

Many of Ross’s viewers were not, in fact, aspiring artists, but people who responded to his calming demeanor and the swishing sounds of his brush on the canvas. (Watch all episodes of his show here.) ASMR artist Maria of the YouTube channel “Gentle Whispering” is not only a purveyor of ASMR sounds, she’s also a client who herself shivers at fingertips on paper and breathy whispers. See one of her videos below (and many more here).

“No one’s been able to unravel the biochemistry or the exact physiological experience that people are having,” says Shenandoah University’s Craig Richard, an ASMR enthusiast. Oxytocin—the “love hormone”—seems to be involved, which may explain why many ASMR videos have a slightly sexy feel to them. Sensation, touch, and closeness define the genre (often hosted by young, conventionally attractive women). ASMR videos may adhere to some specific cultural constructions, but the phenomenon seems real enough. And it has a psychological nemesis, misophonia, “an extreme dislike of certain sounds,” such as just those that set ASMR folks a‑tingling.

“How can a sound be so relaxing for group A,” asks Richard, “and really make group B angry?” Maybe there is a genetic component, he speculates. And maybe the popularity of ASMR videos shows a softer, G‑rated side of how lonely people meet a need online. ASMR artists “tend to be people with really kind and caring dispositions,” says Richard. “You’re brought into this world and this moment with you and another person. And this person just seems to really care about you.” Role-playing plays a big role in ASMR videos, which can make them seem even more like adult movies.

But it’s not at all about sex, but about intimacy, calm, and connection, which many people understandably hunger for in a noisy, alienating world. As Richard points out, many say that ASMR videos help with anxiety and insomnia. Stressed-out students, single mothers, veterans with PTSD—all have reported finding peace through ASMR. “Our society has become quicker in every possible way,” says Maria. “Everything is pushed to the top, to the limit. ASMR slows down your perception of everything.” It’s a meditative art, she suggests, and an antidote to the brain-scrambling disorientation of contemporary life.

10 Hours of Ambient Arctic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Meditate, Study & Sleep

Hear “Weightless,” the Most Relaxing Song Ever Made, According to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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.

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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.”

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

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

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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.

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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

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.

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Is ASMR? Watch the The New Yorker’s Introduction to the Whispering & Crinkling Sounds That Help Calm Anxiety and Induce Euphoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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