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

in History, Psychology | May 6th, 2014

What, I wonder, would Sigmund Freud have made of Hannibal Lector? The fictional psychoanalyst, so sophisticated and in control, moonlighting as a bloodthirsty cannibal… a perfectly grim rejoinder to Freud’s ideas about humankind’s perpetual discontent with the painful repression of our darkest, most antisocial drives. While Freud’s primary taboo was incest, not cannibalism, I’m sure he would have appreciated the irony of an ultra-civilized psychiatrist who gives full steam to his most primal urges.

Freud—who was born on this day in 1856, in the small town of Freiberg—also had a carefully controlled image, though his passionate avocation was not for the macabre, salacious, or prurient, but for the archaeological. He once remarked that he read more on that subject than on his own, an exaggeration, most likely, but an indication of just how much his interest in cultural artifacts and ritual contributed to his theoretical explication of individual and social psychology.

In the film above, we see Freud in conversation with a friend, a professor of archaeology, whom the psychiatrist consulted on his extensive collection of antiquities. Later, we see Freud with his dog, then reclining outdoors with a book. Over this footage we hear the narration of Freud’s daughter Anna, who only allowed this film to be viewed by a small circle until her death in 1982.

Though Freud lived many decades into the era of recording technology, precious little film and audio of the founder of psychoanalysis exists. While the home movies at the top may be the only moving image of him, perhaps the only audio recording of his voice, above, was made in 1938, the year before his death. At 81 years old, Freud’s advanced jaw cancer left him in considerable torment. Nonetheless, he agreed to record this brief message for the BBC from his London home in Maresfield Gardens. Read a transcript of the speech, and see Freud’s handwritten copy, below.

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over. –Sigmund Freud.

The Library of Congress online exhibit Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture has many more primary documents including a holograph page from Freud’s manuscript of Civilization and its Discontents, in which he theorized the bedrock impulse of serial killers, fictional and real: the so-called “Death Drive,” our “human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”

Many important texts by Freud can be found in our collection, 600 Free eBooks for the iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. And you’ll inevitably find a few courses covering Freud’s thought in our collection of Free Online Psychology Courses, part of our list of 950 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

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

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

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

in Psychology, Science | April 3rd, 2014

As David Bowie had his cocaine period, so too did Sigmund Freud, beginning in 1894 and lasting at least two years. Unlike the rock star, the doctor was just at the beginning of his career, “a nervous fellow” of 28 “who wanted to make good,” says Howard Markel, author of An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine. Markel tells Ira Flatow in the NPR Science Friday episode below that Freud “knew if he was going to get a professorship, he would have to discover something great.”

Freud’s experiments with the drug led to the publication of a well-regarded paper called “Über Coca,” which he described as “a song of praise to this magical substance” in a “pretty racy” letter to his then-fiancé Martha Bernays. (He also promised she would be unable to resist the advances of: “a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body.”) Two years later, his health suffering, Freud apparently stopped all use of the drug and rarely mentioned it again.

Freud’s cocaine use began, in fact, with tragedy, “the anguished death of one of his dearest friends,” writes The New York Times in a review of Markel’s book:

[T]he accomplished young phsyiologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose morphine addiction Freud had tried to treat with cocaine, with disastrous results. As Freud wrote almost three decades later, “the study on coca was an allotrion” — an idle pursuit that distracts from serious responsibilities — “which I was eager to conclude.”

The drug was at the time touted as a panacea, and Fleischl-Marxow, Markel says, was “the first addict in Europe to be treated with this new therapeutic.” Freud also used himself as a test subject, unaware of the addictive properties of his cure for his friend’s addiction and his own depression and reticence.

While Freud conducted his experiments, another medical pioneer—American surgeon William Halsted, one of Johns Hopkins “four founding physicians”—simultaneously found uses for the drug in his practice. Freud and Halsted never met and worked completely independently in entirely different fields, says Markel in the news segment above, but “their lives were braided together by a fascination with cocaine,” as addicts, and as readers and writers of “several medical papers about the latest, newest miracle drug of their era, 1894.” Halstead is responsible for many of the modern surgical techniques without which the prospect of surgery by today’s standards is unimaginable —the proper handling of exposed tissue, operating in aseptic environments, and surgical gloves. He injected patients with cocaine to numb regions of their body, allowing him to operate without rendering them unconscious.

Halsted, too, used himself as a guinea pig. “No doctor knew at this point,” says Markel above, “of the terrible addictive effects of cocaine” before Freud and Halsted’s experiments. Both men irrevocably changed their fields and almost destroyed their own lives in the process (see a short documentary on Halsted’s medical advances below). In Freud’s case, much of the work of psychoanalysis has come to be seen as pseudoscience—his work on dreams significantly so, as Markel says above: “Cocaine haunts the pages of the Interpretation of Dreams. The model dream is a cocaine dream.” The “talking cure,” however, engendered by the “loosening of the tongue” Freud experienced while on cocaine, endures as, of course, do Halsted’s innovations.

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

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

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Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou Discuss “Philosophy and Psychology” on French TV (1965)

in Philosophy, Psychology | March 25th, 2014

If subtitles don’t play automatically, please click the “CC” button at the bottom of each video.

When Sigmund Freud died in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland, W.H. Auden wrote a eulogy in verse and remarked “We are all Freudians now.” One might have said something similar of Michel Foucault after his death in 1984. Foucault became a fiercely political philosopher after the May 1968 Paris student uprising and in a year that saw the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the following year—after the Manson murders and the grim events at Altamont—the sixties effectively came to an end as its utopian projects flared up and fizzled.

In the next repressive decade, Foucault published Discipline and Punish (1974) and his History of Sexuality (1976). Even as he used Freudian concepts, he declared Freudian psychoanalysis complicit in what he called “disciplinary society,” another method, like prisons, schools, and hospitals, of keeping masses of people under constant surveillance and in states of submission. It is this post-‘68 Foucault many of us came to know—an anti-philosopher whose deep distrust of all institutional forms of power seemed the perfect ally for post-adolescent college students in comfortable rebellion. This is why it is a little surprising to see the Foucault above, in a 1965 conversation with philosopher Alain Badiou, ensconced in the bourgeois world of a French philosophical culture, with its lineages and ordinary citizens browsing paperback copies of Marx and Hegel, instead of staging Situationist actions to disrupt the social order.

But of course, it’s only logical to infer that the one culture led directly to the other. For all his rhetorical theatrics, Foucault never gave up on the humanist institution of the university, but always made his home in classrooms, lecture halls, and yes, even TV interviews. His topic in conversation with Badiou is “Philosophy and Psychology” and they came together on the educational television program L’enseignement de la philosophie—another testament, like the well-stocked bookstores and cultural landmarks, to a sixties French culture steeped in philosophical attitudes. Unfortunately we have only the first two parts of the interview, above, with English subtitles (the third and final part is still waiting to be translated). You can, however, see the full interview in French below.

The interview opens with the question “What is psychology?” Foucault’s answer, which he would revise many times in the coming decades, along with his terminology, begins by asking that we “interrogate” the discipline of Psychology “like any other type of culture.” Prodded by Badiou, he elaborates: Psychology is yet another institutionalized “form of knowing” that makes up a disciplinary society, the core concept of his philosophy. Foucault’s interviewer Badiou is now an elder statesman of French philosophy, its “greatest living exponent,” writes his publisher. His most recent book documents forty years of what he calls the “’French moment’ in contemporary thought”—one greatly inspired by Michel Foucault.

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

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Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics Enthusiast, Lectures About “the Visionary Experience” at MIT (1962)

in Literature, Psychology | March 17th, 2014

Today, those who get “turned on” to Aldous Huxley (as they might have said back in the 1960s) get it through his books: the dystopian novel Brave New World, usually, or perhaps the mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception. But during Huxley’s lifetime, especially in its final years from the late 1950s to the early 60s, he made no small number of adherents through lecturing. Having transplanted himself from his native England to California in 1937, he eventually achieved great regard among the region’s self-styled intellectuals and spiritual seekers, giving talks at such mystically high-in-the-zeitgeist places as Hollywood and Santa Barbara’s Vedanta temples and even Big Sur’s famous Esalen Institute. But the prolific speech-giver also went farther afield, to far squarer venues such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, in 1962, he recorded the album Visionary Experience: A Series Of Talks On The Human Situation, which you can hear on Ubuweb, or right below.

At that point, Huxley had already gained worldwide fame for his views on better living, which was sometimes achieved, he believed, through psychedelic drugs. This might have already sounded like old hat in, say, the San Francisco of the late 1960s, let alone the 70s and onward, but in these recordings Huxley says his piece in — I still can’t quite believe it — the MIT of the early 1960s. But Huxley, diagnosed a couple years before with the cancer that would claim his life the next, had nothing to lose by spreading the word of his substance-induced discoveries. These would, as you may remember, even facilitate the death itself, Huxley’s final visionary experience. To learn even more about all those that preceded it, see his collection Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931–1963), that’s available on the Internet Archive. While we here at Open Culture don’t endorse drug use, we do endorse the words of Huxley as a substitute, and perhaps an even more vivid one.

Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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How To Think Like a Psychologist: A Free Online Course from Stanford

in Online Courses, Psychology | February 26th, 2014

In early January, we brought you a set of 15 tips to help you stick to your New Year’s resolutions, straight from The Willpower Instinct, a bestselling book by Dr. Kelly McGonigal. Today, we’re highlighting a course that McGonigal organized for Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program, entitled How To Think Like a Psychologist. The premise is simple: McGonigal introduces prominent Stanford psychologists, who proceed to discuss their research and explain precisely why their field happens to be so fascinating, after which McGonigal leads a short discussion with the guest. An audience Q&A session follows.

Each of the course’s six lectures is a neatly packaged primer on a researcher’s area of expertise: Greg Walton gives a detailed talk about his work on academic stigma, and the role it plays in the achievement gap so evident in American education, while in later lectures, James Gross discusses his research on emotional regulation, and Bridget Martin Hard explains the benefits of studying animals to better understand humans. The strength of the course lies both in its accessibility, and its level of depth: one does not need a background in science to learn something tangible about current psychological research. What’s more, one gets a sense of how relevant psychology is as a practical science, governing every fleeting thought and social interaction.

How To Think Like a Psychologist is currently available on iTunesU. You can find it listed in our collection of Free Online Psychology Courses, part of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Happens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitchcock: The Neuroscience of Film

in Film, Psychology, Science | February 13th, 2014

If you have 22 minutes, why not sit back and watch the classic piece of television above, Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ 1961 episode “Bang, You’re Dead”? You may well have seen it before, quite possibly long ago, but you’ll find it holds up, keeping you in suspense today as artfully as it or any other Hitchcock production always has. But why do we get so emotionally engaged in this simple tale of a five-year-old boy who comes into possession of a real handgun that he mistakenly thinks a harmless toy? Here with detailed answers rooted in the mechanics of the human brain, we have “Neurocinematics: the Neuroscience of Film,” a presentation by Uri Hasson of Princeton University’s Neuroscience Institute.

Hitchcock conceived of his style of cinema, says Hasson in the clip below, as “doing experiments on the audience,” and of a movie itself as “a sequence of stages designed to have an effect on your brain.”

The brains of everyone sitting in the theater thus, theoretically, all become “resonant and aligned with the movie in a very powerful and complicated way.” Various types of research bear this out, from measuring the skin temperature, perspiration, and blood flow in the brains of subjects as they watch Hitchcock’s young protagonist add more “toy” bullets to the “toy” gun he brandishes around the neighborhood. In the clip below, you can see exactly how the scientists’ functional MRI machines scan the viewers as they watch the episode, whose plot, as one of the research team puts it, “keeps the participants a bit on their feet,” flat on their back though they need to remain for the duration. You’ll find the watching experience much more comfortable in your chair. It won’t produce much data for the scientific community, but at least now you’ll know what goes on in your brain as it happens, something about which even Hitchcock himself could only guess. To conduct your own experiments, see our collection of 21 Free Hitchcock Movies Online.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

in Creativity, Health, How to Learn for Free, Psychology | February 11th, 2014

Previously, we’ve written about a growing number of cultural figures who practice transcendental meditation, with Paul McCartney, David Lynch, Leonard Cohen, Ellen Degeneres, and Sheryl Crow being ardent supporters. Mindfulness meditation, while less known, has also steadily increased in popularity over the past half-decade. In part, there’s its inherent appeal: mindfulness cultivates an all-accepting awareness of the present moment, thereby dissolving anxieties about the future or preoccupations with thoughts of the past. There’s also the growing momentum of mindfulness research in the scientific community, with studies suggesting that mindfulness-based therapeutic approaches may benefit a host of psychological issues. Its use to alleviate anxiety, depression, and stress is particularly promising.

“Sounds tempting,” you say, “but where does one try this mindfulness meditation business, anyway? Can I try it without going anywhere?” You’re in luck, my friend! UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) has uploaded a set of mindfulness meditations to iTunesU, where the series is presently the #1 download. “I’m too busy,” you say, opening a Facebook tab. Not so fast! Most of the meditations are under 10 minutes long, with the complete series clocking in at two hours.

We’ve had trouble listening to the lectures on the UCLA site, so if you’re interested, head over to iTunesU to download Mindful Meditations. Otherwise, if you live within a reasonable distance of UCLA’s Hammer Museum, drop in for free weekly meditation sessions (recordings for most of these are available here).

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Science of Willpower: 15 Tips for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions Last from Dr. Kelly McGonigal

in Life, Psychology | January 5th, 2014

At the stroke of midnight, millions of New Year’s resolutions went into effect, with the most common ones being lose weight, get fit, quit drinking and smoking, save money, and learn something new. Unfortunately, 33% of these resolutions will be abandoned by January’s end. And upwards of 80% will eventually fall by the wayside. Making resolutions stick is tricky business. But it’s possible, and Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal has a few scientifically-proven suggestions for you.

For years, McGonigal has taught a very popular course called The Science of Willpower in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, where she introduces students to the idea that willpower is not an innate trait. Rather it’s a “complex mind-body response that can be compromised by stress, sleep deprivation and nutrition and that can be strengthened through certain practices.” For those of you who don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can also find McGonigal’s ideas presented in a recent book, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, which just came out in paperback yesterday. Below, we have highlighted 15 of Dr. McGonigal’s strategies for increasing your willpower reserves and making your New Year’s resolution endure.

Will power is like a muscle. The more you work on developing it, the more you can incorporate it into your life. It helps, McGonigal says in this podcast, to start with small feats of willpower before trying to tackle more difficult feats. Ideally, find the smallest change that’s consistent with your larger goal, and start there.
Choose a goal or resolution that you really want, not a goal that someone else desires for you, or a goal that you think you should want. Choose a positive goal that truly comes from within and that contributes to something important in life.
Willpower is contagious. Find a willpower role model — someone who has accomplished what you want to do. Also try to surround yourself with family members, friends or groups who can support you. Change is often not made alone.
Know that people have more willpower when they wake up, and then willpower steadily declines throughout the day as people fatigue. So try to accomplish what you need to — for example, exercise — earlier in the day. Then watch out for the evenings, when bad habits can return.
Understand that stress and willpower are incompatible. Any time we’re under stress it’s harder to find our willpower. According to McGonigal, “the fight-or-flight response floods the body with energy to act instinctively and steals it from the areas of the brain needed for wise decision-making. Stress also encourages you to focus on immediate, short-term goals and outcomes, but self-control requires keeping the big picture in mind.” The upshot? “Learning how to better manage your stress is one of the most important things you can do to improve your willpower.” When you get stressed out, go for a walk. Even a five minute walk outside can reduce your stress levels, boost your mood, and help you replenish your willpower reserves.
Sleep deprivation (less than six hours a night) makes it so that the prefrontal cortex loses control over the regions of the brain that create cravings. Science shows that getting just one more hour of sleep each night (eight hours is ideal) helps recovering drug addicts avoid a relapse. So it can certainly help you resist a doughnut or a cigarette.
Also remember that nutrition plays a key role. “Eating a more plant-based, less-processed diet makes energy more available to the brain and can improve every aspect of willpower from overcoming procrastination to sticking to a New Year’s resolution,” McGonigal says.
Don’t think it will be different tomorrow. McGonigal notes that we have a tendency to think that we will have more willpower, energy, time, and motivation tomorrow. The problem is that “if we think we have the opportunity to make a different choice tomorrow, we almost always ‘give in’ to temptation or habit today.”
Acknowledge and understand your cravings rather than denying them. That will take you further in the end. The video above has more on that.
Imagine the things that could get in the way of achieving your goal. Understand the tendencies you have that could lead you to break your resolution. Don’t be overly optimistic and assume the road will be easy.
Know your limits, and plan for them. Says McGonigal, “People who think they have the most self-control are the most likely to fail at their resolutions; they put themselves in tempting situations, don’t get help, give up at setbacks. You need to know how you fail; how you are tempted; how you procrastinate.”
Pay attention to small choices that add up. “One study found that the average person thinks they make 14 food choices a day; they actually make over 200. When you aren’t aware that you’re making a choice, you’ll almost always default to habit/temptation.” It’s important to figure out when you have opportunities to make a choice consistent with your goals.
Be specific but flexible. It’s good to know your goal and how you’ll get there. But, she cautions, “you should leave room to revise these steps if they turn out to be unsustainable or don’t lead to the benefits you expected.”
Give yourself small, healthy rewards along the way. Research shows that the mind responds well to it. (If you’re trying to quite smoking, the reward shouldn’t be a cigarette, by the way.)
Finally, if you experience a setback, don’t be hard on yourself. Although it seems counter-intuitive, studies show that people who experience shame/guilt are much more likely to break their resolutions than ones who cut themselves some slack. In a nutshell, you should “Give up guilt.”

To put all of these tips into a bigger framework, you can get a copy of Kelly McGonigal’s book, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Or you can get The WillPower Instinct, as a free audio book, if you care to try out Audible.com’s free trial program.

If you live in the SF Bay Area, you can take Kelly’s The Science of Willpower course that begins on January 13. (Anyone can enroll, and yes, I know that because I help run the Continuing Studies program at Stanford.)

Finally you might also want to peruse How to Think Like a Psychologist (iTunes Video), a free online course led by Kelly McGonigal. It appears in our collection of 800 Free Courses Online.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou Discuss “Philosophy and Psychology” on French TV (1965)

Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics Enthusiast, Lectures About “the Visionary Experience” at MIT (1962)

How To Think Like a Psychologist: A Free Online Course from Stanford

What Happens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitchcock: The Neuroscience of Film

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

The Science of Willpower: 15 Tips for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions Last from Dr. Kelly McGonigal

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