Category: Theory

Against Neuroethics

The BPS has published a discussion paper on “Neuroethics”. Neuroethics is an unnecessary phrase which covers a hodge-podge of ethical concerns for psychology researchers and broader societal concerns over the application of findings from the cognitive neurosciences.

The paper, prepared by the impressive team of Carl Senior, Patrick Haggard and John Oates, is mostly a discussion of the particular ethical issues that might arise from research using cognitive neuroscience techniques such as fMRI. Overall, it seems to me that all of the substantive ethical issues mentioned by the paper are treated at length by existing moral philosophy (and in particular by medical ethics). It is not clear that psychology and neurosciences have anything to add, which should be a first clue that the idea of “neuroethics” is inherently dubious.

A particularly revealing moment is the authors’ discussion of the evidence showing that people are more likely to believe an explanation when it is presented alongside a picture of a brain scan (McCabe & Castel, 2008 – covered on Mind Hacks here). This, for the authors of the discussion paper, raises the spectre of BPS members having “undue influence” by accompanying their explanations with pictures of brain scans.

In light of the persuasive power of brain scan imagery its use to illustrate any fact should be restricted as much as possible. Brain scan imagery should not be included on recruitment posters for participation in experiments

Here, the authors seem to have been affected by a peculiar version of the very effect they are warning against! They treat influence due to brain imagery as somehow exceptional, in the same way that people in the experiments treat explanations using brain imagery as somehow exceptional. Consider how the argument would look if it was a prescription against accompanying your communications with partcular phrases, or with offers of financial rewards. The way explanations are phrased affects how often they are believed – that does not mean psychologists should not try to be persuasive, nor that they are wrangling the minds of the public in an exceptional way if they are. There is evidence that monetary rewards, like brain imagery, can distort people’s judgement (see, e.g., Hsee, Zhang & Zhang, 2003) – the BPS has not recommended that members can’t pay people to participate in experiments.

It is part of normal cognitive function to be affected by the environment, and there are many quirks about the way we humans are affected by the exact content and structure of the environment. Examples of that influence are not automatically examples of “undue influence”, regardless of whether they involve brain imagery or not.

There are genuine ethical issues which are peculiar to cognitive neuroscience, but our duty to attend to these is better served by seeing brain related issues in the context of general ethics, rather than pandering to the kind of exceptionalism that the phrase “neuroethics” encourages.

A discussion paper: neuroethics and the british psychological society research ethics code

Hsee, C. K., Yu, F., Zhang, J., & Zhang, Y. (2003). Medium maximization. Journal of Consumer Research, 1–14.

McCabe, D. P., & Castel, A. D. (2008). Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning. Cognition, 107(1), 343-352. doi:16/j.cognition.2007.07.017

Doubts about social contagion

Slate has an important article about how the studies behind last year’s headlines saying that things like divorce, obesity and loneliness spread through social networks like a ‘contagion’ may not be as sound as the stories suggested.

The headline grabbing study on ‘divorce contagion’ has still yet to be published as it hasn’t made it through the scientific peer-review process. The authors are criticised for talking to the media about the conclusions before the results have been confirmed.

Other studies were published in leading journals but the same publications have been much less keen to air criticisms of the work despite the fact that many leading names in the network analysis community have highlighted problems in the methods used in the research.

This is perhaps the real story here, as many conclusions turn out to be wrong in science, but the big name journals work much more like the popular media than they like to admit – heralding flashy new findings but being unwilling to take on the responsibility of continuing the debate after the glitz has faded.

It’s worth noting that the debate about the ‘social contagion’ studies is ongoing but the Slate article has some good coverage of where the growing doubts lie.
 

Link to Slate article ‘Disconnected?’

Naomi Wolf, porn and the misuse of dopamine

‘Is pornography driving men crazy?’ asks campaigner Naomi Wolf in a CNN article that contains a spectacular misunderstanding of neuroscience applied to a shaky moral conclusion.

Wolf asks suggests that the widespread availability and consumption of pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and “causing them to have more difficulty controlling their impulses”.

According to her article, pornography causes “rapid densensitization” to sexual stimulation which is “desensitizing healthy young men to the erotic appeal of their own partners” and means “ordinary sexual images eventually lose their power, leading consumers to need images that break other taboos in other kinds of ways, in order to feel as good.”

Moreover, she says “some men (and women) have a “dopamine hole” – their brains’ reward systems are less efficient – making them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more easily.”

Wolf cites the function of dopamine to back up her argument and says this provides “an increasing body of scientific evidence” to support her ideas.

It does not, and unfortunately, Wolf clearly does not understand either the function or the relevance of the dopamine system to this process, but we’ll get onto that in the moment.

Purely on the premise of the article, I was troubled by the fact that “breaking taboos” is considered to be a form of pathology and it lumps any sort of progression in sexual interest as a move toward the “extreme”.

‘Taboo’ and ‘extreme’ are really not the issue here as both are a matter of perception and taste. What is important is ‘consensual’ and ‘non-consensual’ and when the evidence is examined as a whole there is no conclusive evidence that pornography increases sexual violence or the approval of it (cross-sectional studies tend to find a link, experimental and crime data studies do not).

To the contrary, wanting new and different sexual experiences is for the majority a healthy form of sexual exploration, whether that be through porn or other forms of sexual behaviour.

One part of the motivation for this is probably that people do indeed become densensitised to specific sexual images or activities, so seeing the same thing or doing the same thing over and over is likely to lead to boredom – as any women’s magazine will make abundantly clear on their advice pages.

But this is no different to densensitisation to any form of emotional experience. I contacted Jim Pfaus, the researcher mentioned in the article, who has conducted several unpublished studies showing that physiological arousal reduces on repeat viewing of sexual images, but he agrees that this is in line with standard habituation of arousal to most type of emotional images, not just sexual, that happens equally with men and with women.

It’s important to point out that this densensitisation research is almost always on the repetition of exactly the same images. We would clearly be in trouble if any sexual experience caused us to densensitise to sex as we’d likely lose all interest by our early twenties.

However, it is Wolf’s description of the dopamine system where things get really weird:

Since then, a great deal of data on the brain’s reward system has accumulated to explain this rewiring more concretely. We now know that porn delivers rewards to the male brain in the form of a short-term dopamine boost, which, for an hour or two afterwards, lifts men’s mood and makes them feel good in general. The neural circuitry is identical to that for other addictive triggers, such as gambling or cocaine.

The addictive potential is also identical: just as gamblers and cocaine users can become compulsive, needing to gamble or snort more and more to get the same dopamine boost, so can men consuming pornography become hooked. As with these other reward triggers, after the dopamine burst wears off, the consumer feels a letdown – irritable, anxious, and longing for the next fix.

Wolf is accidentally right when she says that porn ‘rewires the brain’ but as everything rewires the brain, this tells us nothing.

With regard to dopamine, it is indeed involved in sexual response, but this is not identical to the systems involved with gambling or cocaine as different rewards rely on different circuits in the brain – although doesn’t it sound great to lump those vices together?

Porn is portrayed as a dangerous addictive drug that hooks naive users and leads them into sexual depravity and dysfunction. The trouble is, if this is true (which by the way, it isn’t, research suggests both males and females find porn generally enhances their sex lives, it does not effect emotional closeness and it is not linked to risky sexual behaviours) it would also be true for sex itself which relies on, unsurprisingly, a remarkably similar dopamine reward system.

Furthermore, Wolf relies on a cartoon character version of the reward system where dopamine squirts are represented as the brain’s pleasurable pats on the back.

But the reward is not the dopamine. Dopamine is a neurochemical used for various types of signalling, none of which match the over-simplified version described in the article, that allow us to predict and detect rewards better in the future.

One of its most important functions is reward prediction where midbrain dopamine neurons fire when a big reward is expected even when it doesn’t occur – such as in a near-miss money-loss when gambling – a very unpleasant experience.

But what counts as a reward in Wolf’s dopamine system stereotype? Whatever makes the dopamine system fire. This is a hugely circular explanation and it doesn’t account for the huge variation in what we find rewarding and what turns us on.

This is especially important in sex because people are turned on by different things. Blondes, brunettes, men, women, transsexuals, feet, being spanked by women dressed as nuns (that list is just off the top of my head you understand).

Not all sex is rewarding to all people and people have their likes, dislikes and limits.

In other words, there is more to reward than the dopamine system and in many ways it is a slave to the rest of the brain which interprets and seeks out the things we most like. It is impossible to explain sexual motivation or sexual pathology purely or, indeed, mainly as a ‘dopamine problem’.

Wolf finishes by saying that “understanding how pornography affects the brain and wreaks havoc on male virility permits people to make better-informed choices” despite clearly not understanding how pornography could affect the brain and providing nothing but anecdotes about the effect on male sexual function.

This does not mean all porn is helpful or healthy, either to individuals or society, but we should be criticising it on established effects, not on misunderstood and poorly applied neuroscience deployed in the service of bolstering shaky conclusions about its personal impact.
 

Link to Naomi Wolf’s “Is pornography driving men crazy?”

The trouble with psychiatry

If you want an incisive critique of modern psychiatry, look no further than an excellent article in The New York Review of Books.

It brilliantly captures the fights over diagnosis and the DSM, the problem of drug companies buying influence by paying physicians, and why the promises of drug treatments are often propped up with marketing hype.

The article is well-informed, doesn’t mince words, and the author is no anti-psychiatry flak. She’s Marcia Angell, ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world’s leading medical journals.

One of the leaders of modern psychiatry, Leon Eisenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Medical School, who was among the first to study the effects of stimulants on attention deficit disorder in children, wrote that American psychiatry in the late twentieth century moved from a state of “brainlessness” to one of “mindlessness.” By that he meant that before psychoactive drugs (drugs that affect the mental state) were introduced, the profession had little interest in neurotransmitters or any other aspect of the physical brain. Instead, it subscribed to the Freudian view that mental illness had its roots in unconscious conflicts, usually originating in childhood, that affected the mind as though it were separate from the brain.

But with the introduction of psychoactive drugs in the 1950s, and sharply accelerating in the 1980s, the focus shifted to the brain. Psychiatrists began to refer to themselves as psychopharmacologists, and they had less and less interest in exploring the life stories of their patients. Their main concern was to eliminate or reduce symptoms by treating sufferers with drugs that would alter brain function. An early advocate of this biological model of mental illness, Eisenberg in his later years became an outspoken critic of what he saw as the indiscriminate use of psychoactive drugs, driven largely by the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.

If you want a great insight into the difficulties of psychiatry and how they’ve emerged, this article is one of the best introductions you could hope for.
 

Link to article in the NYRB (via 3QD).

But what does it teach you?

The New Yorker has a fantastic article on theories of education and how the reasons for why people go to college have changed over the years. The description sounds a bit dull but the article is really very good.

It tracks how the perception of what a college education should do, at least in the States, has changed and evolved over the years.

For example, selection by academic ability is a relatively new concept. Ivy League universities were largely considered as finishing schools for young men, and presumably, the occasional daring young woman who had the support of their family and felt there was more to life than getting up the duff (Americans: blessed with child).

In the mid 20th Century, the concept changed so college was considered a place to identify and shape the brightest members of society, while more recently it has become seen as a place to deliver needs-specific training.

The articles weaves in this story with modern ideas and preoccupations about whether students actually learn anything useful and whether education is being dumbed down, prettied up or sold out.
 

Link to New Yorker article.

From the bottom of my hard disk

The latest edition of RadioLab is a wonderful exploration of how we interact with machines and whether it is possible to simulate the humanity at the core of who we are.

While most discussions on this topic tend to focus on theoretical artificial intelligence of the future, the programme instead looks at technologies that attempt to connect with us emotionally and might already be allowing us to form intense emotional bonds to machines.

Both delightfully playful and profound, it covers everything from emulated romance to sentient toys.

We begin with a love story–from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives…and that’s chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.

A beautiful hour of radio.
 

Link to RadioLab on ‘Talking to Machines’.

Human nature is a moving target

I just caught up with a fascinating discussion on ABC Radio’s Future Tense on what artificial intelligence showdowns like the Turing Test tell us about the evolution of human nature.

It sounds like a bit of clichéd subject but the interview with author Brian Christian is full of novel, thoughtful insights into how human nature is evolving in response to technological innovations.

This is one of many fascinating bits, about the effect of mobile phone technology on the dynamics of conversation.

One of the comments that we’ve heard several times on our program in the past is that people are now starting to interact with each other like computers. That computers aren’t just learning from us, we’re learning from computers…

…I would also say that the shift in telephone technology from landlines to cellphones has had a kind of unforeseen trade-off, which is that we’re now much more accessible geographically, but the cost is that the lag on the connection is six times greater. So it’s about half of a second instead of a little bit less than a tenth of a second.

And it may not seem like much, but in fact it is enough to disrupt a lot of the subtle dynamics of timing and pauses, and yielding to other people, and it’s turning communication much more into a kind of peer data exchange, you know, pure content.

 

Link to ABC Future Tense on technology and human nature.

Empathy in shades of grey

Scientific American has an insightful and beautifully written article asking whether it is possible to make sense of empathy using brain scans.

Neuroscience studies are increasingly focusing on what science calls ‘high level’ concepts and what those outside the field might just call ‘vague’.

Empathy is probably not in the ‘vague’ category although it is true to say that there are several competing definitions and no standard way of measuring it.

It does have huge intuitive appeal, however, leading to a boom in brain scanning studies that are trying to pin down how we understand other people’s emotions.

The SciAm piece takes a trip to the Saxelab Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at MIT to take a look at how at how a study is attempting to understand the neuroscience of empathy, as well as asking some searching questions about whether we are over-simplifying the problem

A short but excellent piece of writing.
 

Link to SciAm article ‘Looking for Empathy’ (via @edyong209).

Face to face with psychopathy

The Guardian has a curious article where journalist Jon Ronson investigates what it means to be a psychopath and meets a patient diagnosed with psychopathy at one of Britain’s highest security psychiatric hospitals.

In popular culture, ‘psychopath’ refers to a crazed killer but in psychiatry it refers to someone with anti-social personality traits along with low empathy and manipulative behaviour. Although psychopathy is more common amongst violent criminals it is not restricted to this group and the many other people can have ‘psychopathic traits’.

Ronson explores the concept and his experiences of meeting someone with the condition, but also recounts some surprising anecdotes from the history of the condition.

In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim [see previously on Mind Hacks]. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears…

And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the “total encounter capsule”, a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

 

Link to Guardian article on psychopathy (via @tomstafford)

The psychology of the end of the world

I’ve written an article for Slate on tomorrow’s predicted doomsday and how believers cope with the non-arrival of the apocalypse.

Although many people are familiar with When Prophecy Fails, a book by psychologist Leon Festinger that charted how a flying saucer cult dealt with the non-arrival of the Armageddon, it’s less widely know that it is only one among many studies that investigated how believers coped with failed prophecies.

When Prophecy Fails has become a landmark in the history of psychology, but few realize that many other studies have looked at the same question: What happens to a small but dedicated group of people who wait in vain for the end of the world? Ironically, Festinger’s own prediction—that a failed apocalypse leads to a redoubling of recruitment efforts—turned out to be false: Not one of these follow-ups found evidence to support his claim. The real story turns out to be far more complex.

Psychologists and sociologists have eagerly accompanied those waiting for the second coming of Christ, alien visitation and nuclear apocalypse to see how the followers would react.

While none of the apocalyptic groups reacted as Festinger predicted, they have given us a fascinating insight into how we make sense of stark contradictions and have helped us understand why our beliefs are more resilient that many would assume.
 

Link to Slate article on the psychology of failed prophecy.

Grief, mental illness and psychiatry’s sad refrain

Scientific American covers a coming shake-up in how grief is defined in relation to mental illness as the forthcoming DSM-5 diagnostic manual aims to radically redefine how mourning is treated by mental health professionals.

It’s worth saying that the DSM-5 has yet to be finalised and will not appear until 2013 but the changes to how grief is classified seem quite drastic.

Two proposed changes in the “bible” of psychiatric disorders—­the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—­aim to answer that question when the book’s fifth edition comes out in 2013. One change expected to appear in the DSM-5 reflects a growing consensus in the mental health field; the other has provoked great controversy.

In the less controversial change, the manual would add a new category: Complicated Grief Disorder, also known as traumatic or prolonged grief. The new diagnosis refers to a situation in which many of grief’s common symptoms—such as powerful pining for the deceased, great difficulty moving on, a sense that life is meaningless, and bitterness or anger about the loss—­last longer than six months. The controversial change focuses on the other end of the time spectrum: it allows medical treatment for depression in the first few weeks after a death. Currently the DSM specifically bars a bereaved person from being diagnosed with full-blown depression until at least two months have elapsed from the start of mourning.

It is particularly striking that normal grief could be classified as a mental illness under the new proposals as this brings into question how we define mental illness itself.

Contrary to popular belief, there is not one ‘standard way’ of grieving and people’s response vary widely in response to losing a loved one. However, it’s true to say that being sad and withdrawn is certainly common enough for it to count as a normal reaction to loss.

This brings to mind psychologist Richard Bentall’s tongue-in-cheek proposal to classify happiness as a mental disorder due to the fact that it is “statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system”.

Perhaps we can also look forward to simmering anger, dashed hopes and unrequited love disorders for the DSM-6?
 

Link to SciAm article ‘Shades of Grief’.

Media addicted to self-fulfilling porn survey shock

Dr Petra has an excellent breakdown of a recent UK survey that ran with the finding that a quarter of men are worried about their online porn use.

Although the piece looks at the details of this particular headline grabbing story, it really serves as a good critique of almost any media survey about sex, as it examines the process of how such surveys are conducted and subsequently reported by the media.

Porn is a topic that is of increasing interest to the media because it fills a particular niche in the way sex is reported: it allows a sexy headline grabbing topic to presented while framing it with acceptable matronly concern.

If you look at the press coverage of this survey (alongside reflecting on the discussions I had with journalists today) some very definite patterns of how journalists/the media see sex/relationships and porn.

The view from medialand is as follows:

Who looks at porn? Well, it’s men. They are all straight and the porn they are seeking out is also heterosexual. Women are constructed as having problems/concerns about pornography – but only in relation to their (male) partner’s use of it. ‘Pornography’ as a term is used to mean one genre from one format (the internet). Looking at mainstream porn in moderation is okay, but if you do it often then it becomes a problem. Quite often described in the medicalised language of addiction.

Men are naturally sexual and so can’t help liking porn, but if they do look at it they’ll become abusers or change their neurological makeup or sexual behaviour. Women don’t like porn, those who do are presented as being in a minority, probably deluded, or liking romantic/couples-based/equality-based/feminist porn. Porn within relationships is only permissible if it’s to spice things up (or encourage reluctant wives to get in the mood). LGBT folk aren’t even thought about…

If you’re starting from this as your standard position it makes thinking critically about pornography difficult. It means journalists will be tasked (or choose) to find evidence to stack up this world view. It also means it’s risky to find other ways to think about/explore porn for fear of being seen to endorse it.

By the way, the image on the right is a French cartoon from the 1800s satirising concern about the ‘pornography epidemic’.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
 

Link to excellent Dr Petra piece on media porn surveys.

The death of the mind

Business Week has an important article on how internet companies are using the massive data sets collected from the minutia of users’ behaviour to influence customer choices.

The article is a useful insight into how tech companies are basing their entire profit model on the ability to model and manipulate human behaviour but the implication for psychology is, perhaps, more profound.

Psychological theories and ideas about how the mind work seem to play a small, if not absent role in these models which are almost entirely based on deriving mathematical models from massive data sets.

Sometimes the objective is simply to turn people on. Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, collects 60 billion data points per day—how long people play games, when they play them, what they’re buying, and so forth. The Wants (Zynga’s term is “data ninjas”) troll this information to figure out which people like to visit their friends’ farms and cities, the most popular items people buy, and how often people send notes to their friends.

Discovery: People enjoy the games more if they receive gifts from their friends, such as the virtual wood and nails needed to build a digital barn. As for the poor folks without many friends who aren’t having as much fun, the Wants came up with a solution. “We made it easier for those players to find the parts elsewhere in the game, so they relied less on receiving the items as gifts,” says Ken Rudin, Zynga’s vice-president for analytics.

Although the example given might seem trivial, it is a massive generator of profit and can be applied to any sort of online behaviour.

What’s striking is that the relationships between the context, motivations, evaluation and behaviour of the users is not being described in terms of how the mind or brain understand and respond the situation but purely as a statistical relationship.

It is psychology devoid of psychology. Rather than the wisdom of crowds approach, it’s the behaviour of zombies model. Unsurprisingly, none of the entrepreneurs mentioned are cognitive scientists. They’re all mathematicians.

I am reminded of the Wired article ‘The End of Theory’ which warned that big data crunching computers could solve scientific problems in the same way. The generated mathematical model ‘works’ but the model is uninterpretable and does not help us understand anything about what’s being studied.

Similarly, while the experimental psychologist’s dream for more than a century has been to work with large data sets to have confidence in our conclusions about the mind, the reality, currently being realised, may actually make the mind redundant in the majority of the commercial world.
 

Link to Business Week article (via @ivanoransky).

A history of killing

The psychology of murder is the topic of a fantastic edition of ABC Radio’s All in the Mind that looks at the changing motivations behind the most serious of crimes.

You might think that the reasons for committing murder have been relatively constant across time, even if the perceived necessity has been been changed by modern society.

But it turns out that the social psychology of murder has changed radically in the last 500 years.

Honour and shame are no longer considered to be the most important psychological factors in determining social standing and murder is no longer considered an acceptable way of redressing the balance.

Pieter Spierenburg: Basically it means that honour moves away from being based on the body, being tied to the body, being based on preparedness to defend yourself and your dependants, and that you get other sources of honour that for example economic success or that even in a later period what they called sexual purity is a source of honour, being a good husband, a good head of the family, things that people take pride in and that becomes a source of honour— a man can be honourable without being violent…

James Gilligan: The more people have a capacity for feelings of guilt and feelings of remorse after hurting other people, the less likely they are to kill others. I think in the history of Europe what one can see is a gradual increase in moral development from the shame / honour code to the guilt / innocence code.

The programme not only tracks the history of murder and its motivations but looks at this is dealt with in modern day prison systems and violence prevention programmes. A fascinating look at a violent act.
 

Link to All in the Mind on ‘Murder in mind’.

Not in your wildest dreams

Scientific American has just started a new series where scientists describe questions which fascinate them but which they don’t think can be answered by science.

The first article is by sleep and dream neuroscientist Robert Stickgold who wonders whether we could ever understand the significance of dreams.

The idea: Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity…

The problem: The difficulty in exploring this idea is that how meaningful something is might be too hard to measure. “It’s a bit like beauty — it’s in the mind of the beholder,” Stickgold says. “It’s not like heart rate or the level of electrical conductivity of the skin, which you have outside evidence of. If a person says something is meaningful, you’re not sure how to measure that, and you’re not sure how, if at all, that applies to others. One has to come up with a meaningful definition of meaningful.”

 

Link to SciAm ‘Too Hard for Science?: The sense of meaning in dreams’.

Slumber therapy

A delightful moment from a New York Magazine article where a guy who had four psychoanalysts in a row fall asleep on him goes back to each to find out why:

I ask him about falling asleep, and he says, cheerfully, “I have no memory of that whatsoever.” This is surprising, considering he passed out cold, I exited quietly, and we later spoke about it intensively. “What did I say?” he asks. That I had been locking him out with emotionally evasive speech. “What did you say?” he asks. That that was a bullshit answer. He pauses. He smiles. “Good for you.”

The piece is a little heavy on therapy talk but has some great observations of psychoanalytic culture. Oh, and the ending is wonderful.
 

Link to New York Magazine ‘The Sleeping Cure’.