Other People – Page 3

The chaos behind a legendary portrait

I just found this fascinating account of how Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear while seemingly severely mentally ill, the event that led him to paint one of his most famous pictures.

The account is apparently reconstructed from known events at the time but also has van Gogh’s own description of the event, taken from letters to his sister.

On Christmas Eve 1888, after Gauguin already had announced he would leave, van Gogh suddenly threw a glass of absinthe in Gauguin’s face, then was brought home and put to bed by his companion. A bizarre sequence of events ensued. When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe, which he then presented to Rachel, his favorite prostitute.

The police were alerted; he was found unconscious at his home and was hospitalized. There he lapsed into an acute psychotic state with agitation, hallucinations, and delusions that required 3 days of solitary confinement. He retained no memory of his attacks on Gauguin, the self-mutilation, or the early part of his stay at the hospital…

At the hospital, Felix Rey, the young physician attending van Gogh, diagnosed epilepsy and prescribed potassium bromide. Within days, van Gogh recovered from the psychotic state. About 3 weeks after admission, he was able to paint Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear and Pipe, which shows him in serene composure. At the time of recovery and during the following weeks, he described his own mental state in letters to Theo and his sister Wilhelmina: “The intolerable hallucinations have ceased, in fact have diminished to a simple nightmare, as a result of taking potassium bromide, I believe.”

“I am rather well just now, except for a certain undercurrent of vague sadness difficult to explain.” “While I am absolutely calm at the present moment, I may easily relapse into a state of overexcitement on account of fresh mental emotion.” He also noted “three fainting fits without any plausible reason, and without retaining the slightest remembrance of what I felt”

Although absinthe is commonly associated with hallucinations and madness, and the author of the article wonders whether it might have helped cause his epilepsy, this is unlikely due to the fact that the effect of absinthe’s ‘special ingredient’ is largely a myth.

The distinctive aspect of the drink, the chemical thujone from the wordwood plant, is actually present in such small quantities that absinthe has virtually no psychoactive effects beyond the alcohol.

However, epilepsy does raise the risk of psychosis and it is suspected that he had temporal lobe epilepsy which is particularly associated with this reality-bending mental state.

Link to AJP article on ‘The Illness of Vincent van Gogh’.

Shifting between the worlds of Carl Jung

The New Atlantis has a wonderful article giving an in-depth biography of Carl Jung, perhaps one of the most interesting, infuriating and brilliant thinkers in the history of psychology.

Variously a pioneering experimental psychologist, a depth-analyst, an asylum psychiatrist and a man submerged in his own psychosis, he had a massive influence on both our understanding of the mind and 20th century culture.

…Jung never slackened in his pursuit of the ultimate — both ultimate good and ultimate evil, which he tended to find inseparable. He was frequently off in the empyrean or down in the bowels of hell, consorting with gods and demons as ordinary men do with family and friends. Few persons conducted such conversations, and most of them were inmates of lunatic asylums. For a time the thought that he might be insane terrified him.

The fear dissipated, however, as he became convinced that his visions were genuinely revelatory and belonged to the primordial psychic reality that all men have in common: the collective unconscious, he called it. Poets and such may get away with beliefs like these, for their madness is pretty well taken for granted, but it was a most unorthodox way for an esteemed psychiatrist to think.

Jung is also probably one of the most misunderstood figures in psychology, largely owing to his tendency to swing between science, poetic genius and outright flakery.

The New Atlantis article is a fantastic exploration of the man and his ideas and one of the best short introductions you could find. Well, as short as you could get with Carl Jung.

Link to ‘Psychology’s Magician’.

From character analysis to orgasm batteries

Slate has a brilliant article on one of the most troubled and yet fascinating people in the history of psychology – William Reich – inventor of the orgasmotron.

Reich was one of Freud’s inner circle but decided to propose his own ideas rather than follow the Freudian orthodoxy, something which got him promptly kicked out of the chosen few.

The point of contention was that Reich favoured analysing the personality as a whole, rather than individual symptoms, using a system he developed call ‘character analysis’.

His system had a massive impact on psychoanalysis but as time went on he became more and more radical to the point of seeming to have lost his marbles.

Merging abandoned versions of Freudianism and Marxism, Reich saw repression and neurosis as causes and results of bourgeois property ownership and patriarchy. He established free sex clinics and roved the city in a van from which he proselytized for Communism and orgasm. The open expression of libido, beginning with free love between adolescents, would raise the proletarian political consciousness. Soon, Reich was drummed out of the analytic movement and the Communist Party.

This, you may be surprised to hear, was not Reich at his most left-field.

He also began to believe that the power of orgasm, called orgone, could be stored in batteries and could be absorbed from the sky by the use of a special machine called a cloudbuster.

If the name of the machine seems familiar, it’s probably because it ‘Cloudbusting’ was the title of a song and video by Kate Bush which told the story of Reich’s machine and his downfall.

He eventually died in prison after being arrested by the FBI for illegally distributing his ‘orgone energy accumulator’ leaving a chaotic legacy that stretches from the profound to the ridiculous.

Link to Slate article on Willhelm Reich.

An unusual form of the Babinski reflex

A curious anecdote about legendary neurologist Joseph Babinski accidentally hitting on the butler of famous physician Henry Head:

Babinski [1857–1932] stayed with Henry Head in London. He spoke no English but on retiring wanted to use a bidet and summoned the butler who spoke no French; he therefore used sign language to indicate what he wanted and the butler construed the gestures as Babinski propositioning him and resigned from the household.

I’m sure we’ve all made that mistake at some point.

As re-told in an article in this month’s neuroscience journal Brain on the late William McDonald.

Is medical school an empathotoxin?

Medical school seems to have a profound negative effect on empathy according to a research review just published in Academic Medicine.

The review of 18 studies found that self-reported emotional understanding declines markedly during medical training. Counter-intuitively, the crucial downturn happens when medical students start seeing patients.

Although the studies are almost completely based on self-report, at the very least they show a decline in being interested in others’ emotional states, even if we can’t be sure that emotional competency is being affected.

Apart from the start of clinical practice phase of training the other major influence in empathy decline was personal distress, which concurs with studies that suggest that people in general report less empathy as they feel worse.

Of course, there may be a number of other factors at work, including the stress of training, an attempt to cope with suffering patients and what the article describes as ‘poor role models’.

What this refers to is the traditional ‘learning through humiliation’ style of medical teaching that seems to be oddly prized by the medical establishment as a form of clinical hazing.

The occasional reply to concerns about physician empathy is usually something along the lines of “what would you prefer, someone who is a good clinician or someone who is a nice person?”.

Despite the false dichotomy, the study make it abundantly clear why empathy is important in medicine, as it is associated with:

• patients’ reporting more about their symptoms and concerns
• physicians’ increased diagnostic accuracy
• patients’ receiving more illness-specific information
• patients’ increased participation and education
• patients’ increased compliance and satisfaction
• patients’ greater enablement
• patients’ reduced emotional distress and increased quality of life

Link to PubMed entry for study.
Link to DOI entry for study.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: A psychological autopsy

The Independent has an excellent article on the life and death of writer Ernest Hemingway based on an academic article that attempted a ‘psychological autopsy’ to understand the reasons for his suicide.

Hemingway’s suicide has remained a sticking point for many of his biographers as it seemed incongruous with his adventurous, hard drinking and robustly out-going character.

In 2006, psychiatrist Christopher Martin published an examination of Hemingway’s death in the form of a ‘psychological autopsy‘ to better understand his final decision.

The method aims to get a picture of the dead person’s mental state, health, personality, and social situation to understand what motivated them to take their own life.

The Independent is a careful examination, based on Martin’s academic analysis, that looks at Hemingway’s personality and how the myth of the man had overshadowed many of his personal difficulties for many years.

It’s an in-depth and compelling read that gives a stark look at the darker side of the great writer’s mental life.

Link to Independent article on Hemingway (via @brainpicker)
Link to DOI entry and locked academic article.

Carl Jung: a character of complexes

Carl Jung, the brilliant kaleidoscopic mind of psychoanalysis, died 50 years ago next week and The Guardian have the first part of a new series exploring his life and work.

In the history of psychology, Jung lives as a intense sunburst of experiences and ideas.

Sometimes the rays are so bright it’s hard to distinguish which are inspiration, which are psychosis, and which are a shining fusion of the two.

His life was equally as intriguing as his ideas and no less subject to both his brilliance and baffling self-indulgence.

He remains one of the most compelling figures in psychology this new series aims to capture some of his colourful life.

Link to ‘Carl Jung, part 1: Taking inner life seriously’.

A reflection of the greatest

A surprising study has just appeared in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about whether narcissists realise what others think about their egotistical self-image.

Narcissism is a trait where people are more concerned about themselves than others and tend to think they are better and more important than their peers.

This has often been considered to be a form of self-delusion or self-serving cognitive bias, while this new study deliberately tested whether highly narcissistic realised what others thought about them.

The study came to the surprising conclusion that narcissism is usually accompanied by a crystal clear insight into how others don’t share the shining view that narcissists have of themselves.

You probably think this paper’s about you: Narcissists’ perceptions of their personality and reputation

J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 May 23. [Epub ahead of print]

Carlson EN, Vazire S, Oltmanns TF.

Do narcissists have insight into the negative aspects of their personality and reputation? Using both clinical and subclinical measures of narcissism, the authors examined others’ perceptions, self-perceptions, and meta-perceptions of narcissists across a wide range of traits for a new acquaintance and close other (Study 1), longitudinally with a group of new acquaintances (Study 2), and among coworkers (Study 3).

Results bring 3 surprising conclusions about narcissists: (a) they understand that others see them less positively than they see themselves (i.e., their meta-perceptions are less biased than are their self-perceptions), (b) they have some insight into the fact that they make positive first impressions that deteriorate over time, and (c) they have insight into their narcissistic personality (e.g., they describe themselves as arrogant). These findings shed light on some of the psychological mechanisms underlying narcissism.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

The testing of Alan Turing

The Providentia blog has a brilliant three part series on Alan Turing, focusing on how his homosexuality was treated at the time both as a mental illness and a criminal act.

As with all of the posts of Providentia it’s wonderfully written and captures the sad circumstances leading to the death of one of the world’s artificial intelligence pioneers and breaker of key German codes in the Second World War.

The piece places Turing’s ‘treatment’ in the context of how homosexuality was conceived and dealt with by the medical establishment of the time

In a 1949 paper, F.L. Golla and his colleagues presented the results obtained from a sample of thirteen convicted homosexuals and concluded that “libido could be abolished within a month” with sufficiently high dosages of female sex hormones. The authors concluded that “in view of the non-mutilating nature of this treatment and the ease with which it can be administered to a consenting patient we believe that it should be adopted whenever possible in male cases of abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urge”. Politicians and newspaper editorials alike praised the potential value of hormonal therapy. While critics warned that there was still too many unknowns involving the treatment, the potential gain was felt to be worth the risks involved. Controlling “unnatural” sexual urges with hormone treatments fit in well with the radical advances being made in other areas of psychiatry. Considering other types of experimental treatment being tried (including aversive conditioning, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive therapy), such treatment seemed relatively benign.

A highly recommended read about an exceptional man who was sadly let down by the country for whom who worked to protect.

Link to ‘The Turing Problem’ Part 1.
Link to ‘The Turing Problem’ Part 2.
Link to ‘The Turing Problem’ Part 3.

A connoisseur’s list of essential psychology

Every month since 2008 The Psychologist magazine has run an interview with a leading psychologist where they ask them to name one book or journal article, either contemporary or historical, that all psychologists should read.

The BPS Research Digest has compiled all the answers into handy and fascinating list.

A few of the answers:

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. “You’ll get to understand why hypocrites never see their own hypocrisy, why couples so often misremember their shared history, why many people persist in courses of action that lead straight into quicksand. It’s lucid and witty, and a delightful read,” said Elizabeth Loftus, Oct 08.

“Muriel Dimen’s Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, which offers one feminist’s journey from dualism to multiplicity, questioning and making more complex all the accounts we have of how you grow up to become a sexed person,” said Lynne Segal, Jan 09.

“B.F. Skinner’s The operational analysis of psychological terms (Psychological Review 52, 270–277, 1945) is rarely read and even less often understood. Contrary to some misrepresentations of his position, Skinner never doubted that we can describe internal states such as thoughts or emotions, but he wondered how we are able to do this. His answer was surprising, relevant to the practice of psychotherapy, and a challenge to all those who (like some unsophisticated therapists) assume that we can know our own feelings by a simple process of self-inspection,” said Richard Bentall, Apr 11.

There are many more where they came from to make for an eye-opening and informative list of recommendations.

Link to BPS Research Digest list of essential reads.

Time flies when you’re having fun

The New Yorker has a fantastic profile of neuroscientist David Eagleman that captures both his playful approach to science and his intriguing work on how we perceive time.

Eagleman is one of the most engaging thinkers in neuroscience – equally at home tackling fascinating areas of cognitive science and writing playful books about the afterlife.

The New Yorker article manages to both his wide ranging enthusiasm and the science behind his work into offbeat but essential brain functions.

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

An entertaining article that tackles everything from time stretch during life threatening incidents to a study on drummers with Brian Eno. Great fun and throught-provoking.

Link to New Yorker profile of David Eagleman.

From Both of Me to all 15 of You

While browsing through Flickr I just found this amazing signed photo that rocker Alice Cooper dedicated to his psychologist Eugene Landy.

If you click on the image for the full version you can see the photo in all its Cooper-esque glory. It’s dated 1976, which is apparently shortly before Cooper was hospitalised to treat his alcohol problems.

Even with an enlarged image the writing remains quite hard to read but according to this autograph auction page the text reads:

A b&w 8″ x 10″ photo inscribed “Eugene from Both of Me to all 15 of You” and signed “Alice Vincent Cooper” in black ink by the original shock rocker. the date “8-76” is printed above the inscription. “Eugene” refers to psychologist Eugene Landy, with whom Cooper was a patient in the 1970s. (Lundy also treated Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.)

To say Lundy ‘treated’ Brian Wilson is a bit like saying Napolean ‘toured’ Europe as he eventually lost his license after it was found out that he had taken over Wilson’s business affairs while supposedly working with him as a responsible clinician.

The situation lasted several years and has become a notorious episode in Wilson’s life.

Link to photo on Flickr.

It’s just something inside my head

A remarkably accurate account of the learned helplessness theory of depression as recounted in the lyrics of downbeat hip-hop track ‘Something Inside My Head’ by London based rapper Akala.

I wasn’t born this way
My condition was learned
Once bitten twice shy I don’t wanna be burned
When you travel a passage
That leaves your heart ravaged
Your mind waxes placid to limit the damage
Your reaction is passive
Whether you like it or not
You cannot win whether you fight it or not
Your brain swallows the pain and buries it instead
Now.. It’s just something inside my head

Link to audio on YouTube.
Link to lyrics.

A slice of the pusher man

New York Magazine has an in-depth article on a low-level drug dealer in the Big Apple who is trying, somewhat half-heartedly, to get out of the game.

It is neither glamorisation nor condemnation, but is a carefully observed slice of life from a business minded, spreadsheet obsessed, upper middle class cocaine dealer.

Lenny sighs, rubs his temples, orders another beer. Sometimes he can’t help but be disgusted by his customers, people living the heedless life he gave up when he “changed from being a consumer in that environment to being a provider for that lifestyle.” But Lenny is a consummate salesman, and to his customers he plays the role of cordial and crooked shrink, supplying all the hollow justifications that once kept his own fears at bay.

When clients invite him to hang out, Lenny understands their motives: They need to convince themselves that he is merely a friend who happens to have drugs on him, not a dealer supporting an unhealthy habit. So Lenny chills, sips a beer. Sometimes customers insist he do a line with them, at which point Lenny, who no longer uses, “accidentally” blows out through the straw so the coke flies everywhere, and then laughs it off.

Link to ‘The One-Man Drug Company’ (via Metafilter).

I can smell burnt toast

Pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was the subject of one of Canadian television’s ‘Heritage Minutes’ in a melodramatic classic that celebrates his stimulating brain research.

It really does just last one minute and looks like a cross between Hammer Horror and Gone With The Wind with the dramatic stares and hammy acting to match.

Penfield is portrayed as a brilliant neurosurgeon (and “the greatest Canadian alive”!) who operates on women in full make-up to cure them of their epilepsy.

If you ask me, any piece of television that hits a high on a cry of “I can smell burnt toast” has got to be a timeless masterpiece.

Link to Wilder Penfield ‘Heritage Minute’ on YouTube.

Interview with Wade Davis: Part II – culture clashes

This is Part II of our interview with ethnobotanist and explorer Wade Davis where we discuss technology, culture and the slippery concept of human nature.

Davis kindly spoke to myself and science journalist Ana María Jaramillo while visiting Medellín’s excellent science museum Parque Explorer and in Part I we discussed altered states of consciousness and the use of psychedelic plants.

If you’re in Medellín, the science museum is shortly to host an exhibition curated by Davis, of photographs by the founding father of ethnobotany, Richard Evans Shultes.

Schultes travelled through then unexplored parts of the Amazon and studied the native peoples, their rituals and knowledge of the forest and was Davis’ professor and mentor.

Ana María: You wrote “Anthropology has long taught that whether a people’s mental potential goes into technical wizardry or unravelling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is merely a matter of cultural choice and orientation.” Do you think Western cultures have lost anything important with a greater focus on technical wizardry?

I’m no scholar of middle Europe but if you think of the moment that we elected to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of absolute faith, and that case, the tyranny of the church, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment was the power of the mind over the body of man. When Descartes said that ‘mind and matter is all that matters’ he thrust out all instincts for myth, mysticism and metaphor and basically, in a single gesture, devitalised Europe.

That idea that only human beings can be animate or the idea that a bird could have animus was ridiculed and dismissed as ridiculous. It was pretty clear that the way that we treat the Earth as simply a raw resource to be consumed at our pleasure comes directly out of that process of devitalising the Earth.

That really goes back to the revelations of genetics where geneticists have shown that we’re all cut from the same genetic cloth, that race is a complete fiction, that the human genetic endowment is a continuum. And the corollary of that is that if we all share the same raw intellectual capacity we all share the same human genes and so how the genes are expressed is a matter of cultural choice.

That’s really my whole work with National Geographic to go around the world looking at cultures that manifest the human genus in different ways. Whether that be a shaman learning to manipulate plants with such dexterity to create a preparation like ayuhuasca or the Polynesian navigator who, through a process of dead reckoning, was able to chart the open oceans centuries before the Europeans dared leave the protection of the coastline, or the Buddhist science of the mind with 2500 years of empirical observation on the nature of mind.

To me these are all just options that human beings have taken. In terms of the relationship to the natural world the classic opposition to our world view is the Aborigines of Australia. What’s fascinating when you look at their entire intellectual devotion is that it is not to improve upon anything. We embrace this cult of improvement which technological wizardry expressed and made this really remarkable world we live in, which I’m not denigrating.

My friend Andy Weil, even though he’ll speak of the value of alternative medicine, says that if you get your arm ripped off in a car accident you don’t want to be taken to a shaman. But the physical impact of our world view on the planet has been demonstrable and what I find interesting is that in these cultures that define the world as being alive – like in Andean Peru where people really do believe that they have a reciprocal obligation to the Earth and the Earth in turn has reciprocal obligations to people. That doesn’t mean that the people of the Andes didn’t cut down the forests – they did – but in general that world has a much more gentle impact on the landscape than modernity has had.

And with the Aborigines it’s fascinating because they didn’t only not embrace the cult of progress but they embraced a world view that denied progress. Their who purpose in life was to not improve on anything – to do the ritual gestures necessary to maintain the world exactly as it was at the time of its origins and that’s a profoundly conservative way of thinking but it had real consequences. As a result – yes they didn’t develop a sophisticated material culture – but they didn’t create climate change either.

I don’t think any of this is about saying who’s right and who’s wrong but it’s just fascinating to recognise that there are different options and these other cultures aren’t failed attempts at being us but they’re unique answers to a fundamental question – what does it mean to be human and alive?

When people answer that question, they do so in 7,000 languages. The problem comes along through cultural myopia, which all cultures tend to have but with our unique power we are causing so many of these world views to be lost.

Vaughan: One of the things that anthropology is constantly doing is defying our expectation of what it is to be human. I’m wondering how much you believe in a common humanity?

Genetics shows that we’re all cut from the same genetic cloth, and, as I said, social anthropology shows that we all have the same adaptive imperatives. That’s what I find so cool about culture. Every culture has to deal with death, every culture deals with procreation, coupling or whatever, but within that communality there’s this amazing set of possibilities and so many unique outcomes.