The Death of Sigmund Freud

Literary Review – John Gray, The Death of Sigmund Freud, Mark Edmundson

Teens who ‘wait’ more likely to misbehave

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va. December 04, 2007 Dec. 4—CHARLOTTESVILLE—The study was controversial as well as counterintuitive.

Teens who ‘wait’ more likely to misbehave

Young chimp beats college students

Associated Press December 03, 2007 NEW YORK - Think you’re smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

Young chimp beats college students

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department

If you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department.

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department

Talking Back to Prozac

By Frederick C. Crews

The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder
by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane

Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression
by David Healy

During the summer of 2002, The Oprah Winfrey Show was graced by a visit from Ricky Williams, the Heisman Trophy holder and running back extraordinaire of the Miami Dolphins. Williams was there to confess that he suffered from painful and chronic shyness. Oprah and her audience were, of course, sympathetic. If Williams, who had been anything but shy on the football field, was in private a wilting violet, how many anonymous citizens would say the same if they could only overcome their inhibition long enough to do so?

Talking Back to Prozac

Violent Video Games Are Exemplary Aggression Teachers Find Researchers

Like other fathers and sons, Douglas Gentile and his father have spent many hours arguing about video games. What makes them different is that Douglas, an Iowa State University assistant professor of psychology, is one of the country’s top researchers on the effects of media on children. His father, J. [click link for full article]

Violent Video Games Are Exemplary Aggression Teachers Find Researchers

Schizophrenia: The Curse That’s Almost a Blessing

Description: Why is schizophrenia so universal among humans? Is it evolutionarily advantageous? New research says it might actually be too much of a good thing.

Schizophrenia: The Curse That’s Almost a Blessing

Crossing Styx

What happens to children is that they usually pass from believing that everything presented by television is real to a later conviction that “nothing is real.” In other words, the world has become crowded, permeated and possessed by the fictive.

Crossing Styx

Survery: Housing Crisis Stress a Major Health Problem in the U.S.

NEW YORK, Oct. 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/—One-third of Americans are living with extreme stress and nearly half of Americans (48 percent) believe that their stress has increased over the past five years. Stress is taking a toll on people—contributing to health problems, poor relationships and lost productivity at work, according to a new national survey released today by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Money and work continue as the leading causes of stress for three quarters of Americans, a dramatic increase over the 59 percent(1) reporting the same sources of stress in 2006. The survey also found that the housing crisis is having an effect on many, with half of Americans (51 percent) citing rent or mortgage costs as sources of stress this year.

Survery: Housing Crisis Stress a Major Health Problem in the U.S.

Life and Work of Erich Fromm

RAINER FUNK —LIFE AND WORK OF ERICH FROMM —LOGOS 6.3 SUMMER 2007

Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness

Economists and psychologists—and the rest of us—have long wondered if more money would make us happier. Here’s the answer.

Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness

David Barash on Redirected Aggression

The urge to pass along pain lurks behind modern warfare no less than it did behind medieval pageantry.

David Barash on Redirected Aggression

Structures of insanity

Structures of insanity – Times Online

The Public’s Obsession With The Cadaver

The corpses of James Brown, Anna Nicole Smith and Saddam Hussein were voyeuristic spectacles for a public greedy for a last look at celebrity lives, according to an academic speaking at the Death, dying & disposal conference organised by the University of Bath.Despite a lasting taboo over the ‘everyday’ dead of war and disaster, celebrity corpses have come to feed contemporary popular culture’s obsession with the cadaver of forensic investigation. [click link for full article]

The Public’s Obsession With The Cadaver

Loneliness Is Gene Deep

Loneliness is gene deep, its molecular signature is reflected in the lonely person’s DNA. This was the conclusion of a new US study by scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and other US academic centres.The study is published in the latest issue of the journal Genome Biology.The researchers discovered a distinct pattern of gene expression in immune cells of people who are chronically extremely lonely. [click link for full article]

Loneliness Is Gene Deep

Freud’s goddesses

Freud’s goddesses – TLS Highlights – Times Online

The forgetting museum

An obsession with memory blinds us to the abuses of memory, and to the uses of forgetting, argues the British psychoanalyst and author.[Lithuanian version added]

The forgetting museum

Me, Myself, and I–William James and the Wisdom of Religious Solitude

Incharacter.org

Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care

Keeping a preschooler in day care increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive, a study found.

Link to Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care

Numbed by Numbers

Foreign Policy: Numbed by Numbers

Who’s Counting: Pictures, Statistics and Genocide

ABC News: Who’s Counting: Pictures, Statistics and Genocide

Findings: What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing

Scientists say most laughter is a survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit.

Link to Findings: What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing

Essay: Sometimes, the Why Really Isn’t Crucial

The premise that a person can reliably identify the psychic roots of an addiction, or any other act of self-sabotage, is highly overrated.

Link to Essay: Sometimes, the Why Really Isn’t Crucial

After Freud

Essays: ‘After Freud’ by Alexander Linklater | Prospect Magazine June 2006 issue 123

Jog Your Brain

Jog Your Brain
Stimulating creativity that lasts for hours.

The Macbeth effect

Johnjoe McFadden: The evidence is that we ease our consciences by washing. Does the same apply on a global scale? [Guardian Unlimited Comment]

A Self-Critical Eye

A career in art may mean bad body image. [Psychology Today]

Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans

Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans – Los Angeles Times

Why I Hate Beauty

Why beauty makes us miserable. [Psychology Today]

There is no cure

In 1936 Freud wrote a letter to Romain Rolland, offering him a speculation about a particular memory as a 70th birthday gift. The memory concerned a trip Freud took to Athens with his brother, and his own ‘curious thought’ at the sight of the Acropolis: ‘So this all really does exist, just as we learned in school!’ Freud describes himself as two people, one making the comment and the other perceiving it:and both were amazed, although not by the same thing. One of these persons behaved as though . . . he was obliged to believe in something the reality of which had until then seemed uncertain to him . . . But the other person was rightly surprised, because he had not known that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis and this landscape had ever been a matter of doubt. [London Review of Books]

Sigmund the Fraud

The Spectator.co.uk

The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory :: Jenny Diski on Mrs Freud

In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their honorary fellows, Mr Woolf and Mr Cookson. Wives, of either sex, are what keep the universe orderly and quiet enough for the great to think their thoughts, complete their travels, write their books and change the world. Martha Freud was a paragon among wives. There is nothing more liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who’s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that her husband might have been the very person to investigate, but Freud was nobody’s fool and knew when to leave well alone in the murkier regions of his personal life – especially that dark continent in his mind concerning women. [London Review of Books]

Fear: A Cultural History - Joanna Bourke Interview

Fear: A Cultural History – Joanna Bourke Interview

Sleep of reason

Art: The dark impulses that we suppress during our waking hours have long been an inspiration for artists and writers. [Guardian Unlimited Arts]

The evolution of insanity

Australian Financial Review -

Abductive Reasoning (Doubt and About)

Abductive Reasoning (Doubt and About)

Rebecca Saxe: Do the Right Thing

Rebecca Saxe: Do the Right Thing

Call in the Shrinks: philosophy and psychoanalysis

Louise Braddock on the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. [Articles from TPM Online]

Mirror, mirror on the wall, is there anyone there at all? - Health - Times Online

Mirror, mirror on the wall, is there anyone there at all? – Health – Times Online

Gut check

Did Freud give our culture an ulcer complex? [Boston Globe]