Several years back, the RSA (Royal Society of the Arts) created a series of distinctive animated shorts where heavy-hitter intellectuals presented big ideas, and a talented artist rapidly illustrated them on a whiteboard. Some of those talks featured the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Steven Pinker and Barbara Ehrenreich. Now RSA presents a new video series created in an entirely different aesthetic. Above, you can watch what will hopefully be the first of many “espresso shots for the mind.” This clip features Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, providing some quick insights into the difference between sympathy and empathy, and explaining why empathy is much more meaningful. To learn more about The Power of Empathy, you can watch Brown’s complete RSA lecture here. You can also watch her very popular TED Talk on The Power of Vulnerability here.
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There is a well-known scene in Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run (1969) when Virgil Starkwell (Allen) takes a psychological test to join the Navy, but is thwarted by his lascivious unconscious. The psychological measure that proves to be Starkwell’s undoing—rejected, he turns to a life of crime—is the Rorschach inkblot test, devised almost a century ago by Carl Jung’s compatriot and fellow psychologist, Hermann Rorschach. Although Rorschach would die young, at 37, his namesake remains embedded in our perception of psychology, alongside Freud’s couch and Pavlov’s dog.
Hermann Rorschach’s father was an art teacher, and encouraged his son to express himself. Whether the young Rorschach had innate artistic leanings, or had begun to listen to his father more closely after the death of his mother at age 12, is uncertain. What is known, however, is that Hermann became so fascinated with making pictures out of inkblots—a Swiss game known under the delightful designation of Klecksography—that his schoolmates gave him the nickname of Klecks.
Although he struggled to choose between art and science as a career, Rorschach, on the counsel of eminent German biologist and ardent Darwin supporter Ernst Haeckel, chose medicine, specializing in psychology. Still, he never abandoned art.
Even before the young Rorschach began to study psychology, the medical profession had flirted with imagery association. In 1857, a German doctor named Justinus Kerner published a book of poetry, with each poem inspired by an accompanying inkblot. Alfred Binet, the father of intelligence testing, also tinkered with inkblots at the outset of the 20th century, seeing them as a potential measure of creativity. While stating that Rorschach was familiar with these particular ink blotches reaches no further than educated conjecture, we know that he was familiar with the work of Szyman Hens, an early psychologist who explored his patients’ fantasies using inkblots, as well as Carl Jung’s practice of having his patients engage in word-association.
After noticing that schizophrenic patients associated vastly different things with inkblots than other patients, Rorschach, following some experimentation, created the first version of the inkblot test as a measure of schizophrenia in 1921. The test, however, only came to be used as a form of personality assessment when Samuel Beck and Bruno Klopfer expanded its original scope in the late 1930s. Since then, psychologists have frequently used the various aspects of people’s responses (e.g., inkblot focus area) to make judgment calls about broad personality traits. Ironically, Rorschach himself had been skeptical about the inkblots’ value in assessing personality.
In honor of Rorschach’s birthday (he was born on this day in 1884), we’ve highlighted his original images below, as well as some of the most popular responses. If you see something else in these images, feel free to let us know in the comments section below. The images, we should note, are in the public domain, and otherwise readily viewable on Wikipedia. And, according to Wikimedia Commons, the images are in the public domain.
Image 1: Bat, butterfly, moth
Image 2: Two humans
Image 3: Two humans
Image 4: Animal hide, skin, rug
Image 5: Bat, butterfly, moth
Image 6: Animal hide, skin, rug
Image 7: Human heads or faces
Image 8: Animal; not cat or dog
Image 9: Human
Image 10: Crab, lobster, spider,
Happen to see an elephant and a men’s glee club engaged in unmentionable acts? Don’t fret—you’ve likely projected nothing intelligible. The test has long been out of date, and is deemed neither reliable nor valid in the vast majority of cases (although an updated version exists, it suffers from similar methodological flaws). Virgil Starkwell, it seems, would have made a fine Navy officer.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture writer. Follow him at@iliablinderman
A new study published this week in Scienceconcludes that you may get something unexpected from reading great literary works: more finely-tuned social and emotional skills. Conducted by Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd (researchers in the psych department at the New School for Social Research), the study determined that readers of literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or non-fiction) find themselves scoring better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence. In some cases, it took reading literary fiction for only a few minutes for test scores to improve.
The New York Times has a nice overview of the study, where, among other things, it features a quote by Albert Wendland, an English professor at Seton Hall, who puts the relationship between literature and social intelligence into clear terms: “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”
On October 13, 1972, the charismatic and controversial French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is giving a lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, when a young man with long hair and a chip on his shoulder walks up to the front of the lecture hall and begins making trouble. He spills water and what appears to be flour all over Lacan’s lecture notes and then stammers his way into a strange speech that sounds as if it were taken straight out of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle:
“The composite body which up to fifty years ago could be called ‘culture’– that is, people expressing in fragmented ways what they feel — is now a lie, and can only be called a ‘spectacle,’ the backdrop of which is tied to, and serves as, a link between all alienated individual activities. If all the people here now were to join together and, freely and authentically, wanted to communicate, it’d be on a different basis, with a different perspective. Of course this can’t be expected of students who by definition will one day become the managers of our system, with their justifications, and who are also the public who with a guilty conscience will pick up the remains of the avant-garde and the decaying ‘spectacle.’ ”
The 71-year-old Lacan never loses his composure. (His cigar appears bent out of shape, but it was that way from the beginning.) The audience, too, retains a certain Gallic nonchalance. Dangerous Minds sums it up in the headline “The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.” The scene is from Jacques Lacan Speaks, a one-hour documentary by Belgian filmmaker Françoise Wolff. You can watch the complete film, which includes Lacan’s extended and rather cryptic response to the incident and other excerpts from the lecture, followed by Wolff’s interview with Lacan the following day, in our post: “Charismatic Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan Gives Public Lecture (1972).”
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Last fall Sherry Turkle, an MIT psychologist who explores how technology shapes modern relationships, published Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The third in a trilogy of books, Alone Together tries to make sense of a paradox. The more friends and acquaintances we gather on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the more we feel alone. We’re connected to other people more than ever, and yet we feel isolated in a new solitude. If you’re looking for a primer on Turkle’s thinking, you can watch a new animation (above) created by Shimi Cohen. It was made as a final project for a course taken at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv. Another way to get up to speed on Turkle’s thinking is to watch Turkle’s own TED Talk recorded in February, 2012. Find it right below. And, of course, you could always read her book, Alone Together, in print or digital format. A novel idea that.
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Crash director Paul Haggis impressed us all when his defection from the Church of Scientology became the subject of “The Apostate,” a 2011 New Yorker profile by Lawrence Wright. But Haggis’ high-profile departure from the lavish if shadowy house that L. Ron Hubbard built had a notable precedent in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Scientology. The Naked Lunch author and Beat Luminary published it after his own disillusionment with the organization of Scientology, though he retained his esteem for what he considered their mind-improving techniques. Booktryst offers a brief summary of Burroughs’ intense flirtation with the Church and its teachings: his initial attraction “because of its promise to liberate the mind by clearing it of traumatic memories that impeded personal growth, and, by extension, social progress and freedom from social control,” and his ultimate disappointment that, as biographer Ted Morgan puts it, he “had hoped to find a method of personal emancipation and found instead another control system.”
For a more in-depth look at what brought Burroughs into Scientology and what put him off of it, read Lee Konstantinou’s i09 post on the subject. “Burroughs took Scientology quite seriously indeed for the better part of a decade — during what was arguably his most artistically fertile period,” Konstantinou writes. “Today, where so much attention focuses on the science fictional origins of Scientology, it is easy to forget how seemingly in harmony the Church was with a whole range of countercultural, ‘New Age,’ and anti-psychiatric practices in the Sixties.” He files Scientology with Burroughs’ other “mind-expanding and mind-freeing practice,” including hallucinogens, “Mayan calendrical mind control systems,” apomorphine, and his signature “cut-up” texts. To hear all about it straight from Burroughs, read his 1970 Los Angeles Free Press j’accuse against Hubbard and his “fascist” tendencies, and the whole of Naked Scientology in PDF form.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich really are different from you or me. They’re more likely to behave unethically.
That’s the finding of a group of studies by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The research shows that people of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to break traffic laws, lie in negotiations, take valued goods from others, and cheat to increase chances of winning a prize. The resulting paper, “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” [PDF] was published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Perhaps most surprising, as this story by PBS NewsHour economics reporter Paul Solman shows, is that the tendency for unethical behavior appears not only in people who are actually rich, but in those who are manipulated into feeling that they are rich. As UC Berkeley social psychologist Paul Piff says, the results are statistical in nature but the trend is clear. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New Yorkmagazine,“the rich are way more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
Deities, conspiracies, politics, space aliens: you don’t actually have to believe in these to find them interesting. Just focus your attention not on the things themselves, but in how other people regard them, what they say when they talk about them, and why they think about them the way they do. Psychotherapist and onetime Freud protégé Carl Gustav Jung treated UFOs this way when he wrote his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which examines “not the reality or unreality” of the titular phenomena, but their “psychic aspect,” and “what it may signify that these phenomena, whether real or imagined, are seen in such numbers just at a time” — the Cold War — “when humankind is menaced as never before in history.” As what Jung called a “modern myth,” UFOs qualify as real indeed.
In 1957, with Flying Saucers to appear the following year, New Republic editor Gilbert A. Harrison wanted to get this Jungian perspective on UFOs in his magazine. At the top of this post, you can see (via The Awl) a scan of Jung’s response to Harrison’s query, the text of which follows:
the problem of the Ufos is, as you rightly say, a very fascinating one, but it is as puzzling as it is fascinating; since, in spite of all observations I know of, there is no certainty about their very nature. On the other side, there is an overwhelming material pointing to their legendary or mythological aspect. As a matter of fact the psychological aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem to be real after all. I have followed up the literature as much as possible and it looks to me as if something were seen and even confirmed by radar, but nobody knows exactly what is seen. In consideration of the psychological aspect of the phenomenon I have written a booklet about it, which is soon to appear. It is also in the process of being translated into English. Unfortunately being occupied with other tasks I am unable to meet your proposition. Being rather old, I have to economize my energies.
Jung, as you can see, doubled his own interest in the subject by not only considering flying saucers a social phenomenon, but as a real physical phenomenon as well. Serious enthusiasts of both Jung and UFOs might consider bidding on the original letter, now up for auction. Estimated sale price: $2,000 to 3,000.
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