Freud and Zen?

The Times has a most interesting spread on Western traditional attitudes about the mind and self-analysis and what Zen philosophy's answer is to both.

Here's a paragraph.

"...Rubin was convinced that “the marriage of Buddha and Freud” would benefit both disciplines. “When you combine the best of Buddhism and psychoanalysis,” he told me one day last winter, “you get a full-spectrum view of human nature focused on both health and spiritual potential as well as on the psychological forces we struggle with and the obstacles we unconsciously put in our way.” But people at the conference still seemed bunkered in their doctrines, and he often found himself tacking between camps. He was scheduled to summarize a dialogue between a Buddhist and a psychoanalyst, but he was suddenly struck by the fallacy that enlightenment meant complete freedom from self-deception.."

Read it all here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Ari Gold Is the Making of Entourage

(Jeremy Piven's character of 'Ari Gold' is on the right.)

I was never interested in the HBO show Entourage. For some reason its charm never rubbed off on me. But when Jeremy Piven was awarded a third Emmy in a row for his portrayal of Hollywood super agent Ari Gold, I thought I would give it a bit of a chance. Season 5 is the only one I watched and I'm glad I did because during the experience I got to learn about the character of Ari Gold. There are a lot of snore moments in this show and the only reason to watch it, per me, is to see Jeremy Piven's Gold in action.

Ari makes other hyperactives feel gotten. He gets the pace of life of a hyperactive and he unapologetically humanizes the essence of an overachiever.

Yes, he resorts to crudeness quite often but what makes him likable, even relatable, is his brutal honesty vis-a-vis those he truly loves and appreciates.

The episode length is perfect for those of us who are a) pressed for time or b) are of the hyperactive persuasion. Another thing I discovered in the episodes of Entourage, Season 5 is that the subtext of gender is quite fascinating. I read up on the show and many of the reviews say that some have a hard time with the show's premise. More specifically, the show does not have many strong female characters and it's too much representative of male speech.
I am not one of these people.
To those who say that the show lacks strong female characters, I say, I see you and I raise you Dana Gordon. Even Amanda.
The show's creator Doug Ellis wrote a show about the lasting value of true friendship within the bounds of solid homosociality and that it is, de facto, the only thing one needs to survive the plastic nature of Hollywood.

Let me provide a bit from the show. In here one sees Ari Gold in a therapy session with his wife.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph per starpulse

Mel Brooks Medley

The tip of the hat goes to Mel Brooks this month.
I just looked at his High Anxiety again and was reminded yet again why I've always reacted well to his craft. Brooks, in my view, is one of the very few comedians who knows how to read and, in turn, humanize the intellectual.

If you have not seen High Anxiety yet, might I suggest that you give it a try? Those of you fellow Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm fans will most certainly delight in it. Brooks is also featured in a full season of Curb when Larry accepts to star in The Producers.

Here is the official trailer of the 1977 film. Mel Brooks plays a renowned psychiatrist with a crippling diagnosis called high anxiety. It's spectacularly funny. By the way, Brooks' character is offered the position of 'chair of psychiatry' in a California-based institution called The Clinic for the Very, Very Nervous. Very funny, very good.



Whereas this is from Mel Brooks' film History of the World.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Popularity, High School, and Adult Life

It's not all fun and games for the popular students in high school, study says.

"The cult of popularity that reigns in high school can look quaint from a safe distance, like your 20th reunion. By then the social order may have turned over like an hourglass: teenagers who were socially invisible have emerged as colorful characters, confident, transformed. Others seem preserved in time, same as ever, while some former princes and queen bees are diminished or simply absent, now invisible themselves.
...
Popularity, even the likable kind, can have costs. In his continuing study, Dr. Allen has found that the most socially skilled students are three times as likely to be drinking by age 14 as those outside the group. Up through age 18, they are also more likely to commit vandalism, smoke marijuana and shoplift. They are, in short, seemingly more vulnerable to peer pressure and expectations.

Some of those behaviors may just be due to increased opportunity and access: you can’t sample from the buffet if you’re not invited to the party.

But that is ultimately for the teenagers who see it unfolding every day to assess. If high school is the first time young people take on a public identity, it is also the best vantage point for seeing the blessings and risks of social charm.

Maybe that’s why some teenagers can seem at once so self-deluded about their own standing and fascinated by the doings of the in group. They know intuitively that a crucial part of a high school education happens outside the classroom, in Popularity Studies 101."
Read all here.

Boredom's Paging

My main preoccupation is not boredom but rather some measure of anxiety associated with the fleeting nature of time.
Obviously, I experience boredom too. The only times I do so, however, is when I'm divorced from my quotidian program and structure. Travel is one thing that makes boredom pop up. Gadgets that stop working when there are still hours left before departure time, would be one instigator to boredom. Another scenario would be waiting for hours at a doctor's office where phones are supposed to be off and the magazines are at least a year old. Add a lack of personal computers and books in your bag and that translates to inevitable yawning and incessant staring at some big clock from the 80's that's gracing the wall.

However, boredom is not only a high-frequency lexeme in many people's vocab, it's also a high-frequency human experience. A bit from a gripping Times article says:
"Psychologists have most often studied boredom using a 28-item questionnaire that asks people to rate how closely a list of sentences applies to them: “Time always seems to be passing too slowly,” for instance.

High scores in these tests tend to correlate with high scores on measures of depression and impulsivity. But it is not clear which comes first — proneness to boredom, or the mood and behavior problems. “It’s the difference between the sort of person who can look at a pool of mud and find something interesting, and someone who has a hard time getting absorbed in anything,” said Stephen J. Vodanovich, a psychologist at University of West Florida in Pensacola.

Boredom as a temporary state is another matter, and in part reflects the obvious: that the brain has concluded there is nothing new or useful it can learn from an environment, a person, an event, a paragraph. But it is far from a passive neural shrug. Using brain-imaging technology, neuroscientists have found that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks, according to Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis.

That slight reduction can make a big difference in terms of time perception. The seconds usually seem to pass more slowly when the brain is idling than when it is absorbed. And those stretched seconds are not the live-in-the-moment, meditative variety, either. They are frustrated, restless moments. That combination, psychologists argue, makes boredom a state that demands relief — if not from a catnap or a conversation, then from some mental game."
Read more here.

When do you tend to experience boredom and how do you grapple with it?
graph per photogabble

Truman Show Delusion

Pointer via the Colbert Report.
This is actually real. It's what researchers in Montreal are calling "Truman Show Delusion."
A bit says:
"Typically, the Truman Show Delusion is a combination of paranoia, grandiosity and ideas of reference, which means that patients believe they are receiving signals specifically meant for them from a newscast or something like that." said Dr. Gold, adding that since he started presenting these cases at conferences two years ago, colleagues have informed him of six more examples."
Read more here.
graph per bravotv

Narci-what?

A friend of mine trained in Clinical Psychology tends to use phrases like "wiped out frontal lobe" or "boundary-marking" and so on and so forth. Granted, in her rhetoric such terminology makes sense as it is endemic to her field.
However, I have noticed that more often than not certain words seem to be used in a decontextualized fashion. During an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David dealt with the concept of therapy, I remember my laughter was laced with some measure of anxiety as well. "Oh man, LD is totally right." Often I hear things like, "he/she is projecting" or "I think he/she suffers from a narcissism disorder" and so forth. What's interesting, however, is that such diagnoses are not uttered by professionals like my friend, the clinical psychologists, but rather by those informed in fields other than psychology.
Here is another example.
A friend of mine called me up the other day and, as usual, we had a most interesting repartee. He ended the conversation by saying, "yeah, I won't be calling her any more. I mean, she talks like a therapist. Every time I talk to her I feel like something's the matter with either one of us. I never used to think I was a, uhm, well, a, uhm, disorder."
So, today's feature on the NY Times was of much interest to and mine as it elegantly deals with psychological discourse and erroneous usages in pop culture. Here is a bit:

"We love to label the offensive behavior of others to separate them from us; it’s their problem, not ours. And labels have their periods of vogue (see “chauvinist”).

“Narcissist” is among our current favorites. It has been splashed at bad boyfriends, successful executives, reality show contestants, users of YouTube and Facebook, and, obviously, celebrities.

But while it has acquired a silly elasticity, it has also acquired rich layers of meaning. For though the word has a derogatory stamp, the very people we label narcissistic often are those who attract as well as repel us."
Read more here.
graph per ny times

A Boy Named Sue and a Girl Named James

The NY Times has a most interesting article today on choices some parents name when naming their children.
What happens to children with names like, Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, and Helen Troy?
Yes, they are all real names of real people taken our of census records from 1790 to 1930.
Just what happens to children who are named in a rather idiosyncratic way?
The article explores different scenarios.
A favorite bit:
"“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

After hearing that, I began to reconsider my own name. Although I’d never shared Sue’s Oedipal impulse — I realized my father couldn’t have anticipated “Music Man” — I’d never appreciated those playground serenades, either. But maybe they served some purpose after all. So today, to celebrate the Boy Named Sue paradigm shift, I’m using my middle name in my byline for the first time."