You Got Yr Link Bomb: Better late than never (for me and America)

Image via WikipediaYou Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan's Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

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My apologies for not getting this up sooner. Football and theater stopped me. In any event, here are the stories that caught my eye this week.

• As much as we worship the godfathers of punk/hardcore/indie rock/what have you, it is not a good time to be Greg Ginn. All the '80s i-rockers hate him, and he's basically become a crazy cat lady in Texas. And he hasn't even made the SST or New Alliance back catalog digital. The major benefit of the Guardian's story on SST and the former Black Flag guitarist was that we finally got to report on the Minutemen on Prefix. I had been waiting for that for months.
• Not only did Al Gore officially join the Twitterverse, he came up with some bold new strategies for Web 2.0. What gets lost in all the "I invented the Internet talk" was what the original comment actually was meant to imply: Al Gore was one of the prime movers and shakers in Congress who made the internet happen. It's only natural he'd take to social media so swimmingly.
• David Cromer, Chicago theater hotshot, will see his status in the larger American theater world upgraded after a glowing New York Times profile by Charles Isherwood. One of the biggest lapses in my four years at Chicago was missing Cromer's Our Town. It still pains me to this day that I missed it, and it diminishes my authority on Chicago theater. Trying to graduate was no excuse. Anyway, you'd think after his stunningly brilliant work on the Adding Machine that he would have gotten the attention he needed without a NYT profile. This is long overdue.
• Bullies are wired to be bullies, says a recent fMRI study. This is not just shadenfreude, or lack of empathy, it's a fundamental relishing in seeing nerds take punishment. Of course, rather than being an up to date neuropsychology enthusiast after graduation, I find out about this study in the nerdcore blog io9. I'll defend cognitive neuroscience studies probably more than I should, considering I spent my entire senior thesis dismantling one. Still though, compared to what they considered "chemistry" in the 18th century, fMRIs and EEGs ain't bad.
• What the hell will wonks do after the election? NY Mag's Intelligencer offers some suggestions, but they seem wholly insufficient. The Daily Show mocked potential coverage of the future Obama puppy, but it proved wholly portentious. In short, few things will get the interwebs off like a combination of Obama and puppies. On a side note, I'm surprise the media hasn't latched on to Obama's "mutt like me" comment as much as they have Berlusconi's "even tanned" joke. Is this a sign the media won't touch Obama on race?
• Finally, if you don't plan on having sex for the next few months, you may want to watch this series of videos from a rapper/stripper named Ecstasy, rapping about seducing plus sized women on Queens public access television. I can't tell whether these clips are deeply disturbing or hilarious; the fact that they get an endorsement from Porter Mason, the genius behind the webcomic Bassist Wanted, is probably a good sign.
  

Book Review: Mind to Mind - Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis, edited by Elliot L. Jurist, Arietta Slade and Sharon Bergner

What is the purpose of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis if not to reach an understanding of our own inner psychological workings? That goal is both the grandest and most difficult objective in clinical psychology, and not surprisingly most research has previously focused on the much safer study of habits, affects, and motivations. The ability to mentalize, however, to maintain enough self-awareness both of oneself and of others, is something of a holy grail in clinical practice, and only recently have psychologists begun to make true breakthroughs.

Mind to Mind: Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis is the result of a 2005 conference on mentalization that will be of interest to clinical practitioners, informed-enough patients, cognitive scientists, and philosophers alike. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to a psychotherapeutic topic that is possibly the riskiest and most rewarding of any in the field.

One of the appeals both in the title and the book’s purported goal is the introduction of neuroscience into the psychoanalytic approach. This is obvious a hot new approach in psychoanalysis, one that revitalizes the legitimacy of a declining field. In reality, however, the neuroscience offerings are rather limited, residing mostly in one chapter that essentially provides a functional anatomy of mentalization. The other biological topics take on more of an evolutionary psychology and animal psychology-influenced approach to mentalization. While evolutionary psychological analyses are notoriously spurious, in a subject like mentalization, one which speaks to the very essence of the human mind, such an approach to psychology seems more proper than say, the evolution of canoe-building.

One of the most notable innovations of Mind to Mind is its approach to child-parent psychology. While most such studies understandably focus on the parent’s impact on the child, Mind to Mind offers two refreshing chapters on the child’s impact on parent psychology and the parent’s ability to mentalize both the parent’s own and one’s child in relation to the parent. In James E. Swain et al.’s study of infant psychology, we see that parents of newborns often have difficulty rationally mentalizing their children. Most parents see their babies as “perfect” and have irrational fears of their children being vulnerable to catastrophe. The problems extend into childhood for parents, when many parents have difficulty imagining their child’s right to a personal space and personal life in the period when the child is still dependent on the parent’s support. The problems of adoptive childhood are addressed in multiple chapters, as well as the cases of traumatic and abusive experiences with parents. In nearly every case, an abusive relationship with a parent led to an inability of an individual to properly mentalize their own psychology, let alone express healthy empathy of others.

The repercussions of an inability to effectively mentalize are on display throughout Mind to Mind. In the opening chapter by mentalization pioneers Peter Fonagy and Mary Target of the Anna Freud Center at the University College London, we see that criminals who had abusive parents are unable to coherently express self-awareness. What is normally seen as antisocial or even sociopathic behavior is, from this perspective, the result from a confused and retarded development of mentalization as a result of trauma or neglect. In one chapter by Karen Gilmore, we hear the devastating story of Mr. N, an adopted, talented man prone to failure who did not undergo any form of psychotherapy until the age of 28. Despite stories of an excessively tough adopted father, the early death of his adopted mother, and his insecurities regarding his seemingly flawless wife, Mr. N simply could not mentalize at a healthy level, and behaved irrationally and disinterestedly towards his therapist. At the same time, while the five years on therapy ended on sour and incomplete note, Mr. N still gained significant tools to address his psychological problems with introduction to mentalization training. Even a little ability to mentalize can mean significant progress.

In terms of therapeutic practice, two strands of mentalization theory seem to be dominant: Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT), which seeks to intensively train a patient to become more self-aware of his own mind, and Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP), which focuses on making connections of current associations to past experiences in order to awaken a patient’s mentalization ability more subliminally. Both treatments may be crucial for people suffering from Borderline Personally Disorder, and in comparing MBT to TFP, the latter is older, more battle-tested, and more historically successful. In each case, however, the focus is on, according to Otto F. Kernberg, et al., utilizing “implicit and explicit mentalization.” Treatment of borderline personality has its dangers, and traditional practices such as free association and looser talk therapy can be especially pernicious. Yet, breakthroughs in mentalization research have opened up the floodgates to treating a disorder once thought untreatable.

The concluding chapter of the book by NYU Psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg takes on the movie Analyze This in a section titled, appropriately enough, “Mentalize This!” Bromberg sees the Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro movie as an example of the potential dangers that occur in mentalization therapy: in DeNiro’s case, a mafia don doesn’t want to show any signs of vulnerability or worse, weakness over his father’s death. For Crystal’s character, the shrink runs a risk too, as Crystal’s mere association with the inner workings of a mobster’s mind can put his own life in danger.

Bromberg poignantly concludes that to obtain a true breakthrough in therapy, and in mentalization psychotherapy especially, often therapy requires both the therapist and patient to enter emotional and inner psychological territory that they both fear going. Bromberg’s conclusion speaks to the dangers of becoming aware of your motivations, as naked and often negative as they can be. To paraphrase a man who understood human psychology well before Freud, most of all, it's important to thine own mind be true.

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This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Book Review: Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn

Normally, when we read a novel that ends without explaining the plot point, ambiguities, and portents, we usually think the writer has done something. Plot holes are the sign of a lazy, unskilled writer who likes to raise attention to certain themes, but doesn’t know how to follow through on it. With Pharmakon, however, Fierce People author Dirk Wittenborn has turned the plot hole into an aesthetic. In an interview posted online, Wittenborn makes the case that the ambiguities, insecurities, and missing information in our lives are what ultimately define us.

In Pharmakon, a chilling if maddeningly inconsistent novel, we get to the source of Yale psychologist William Friedrich’s research, the mental breakdown and consistent mad killing spree of his patient Casper Gedsic, and circumstances of Gedsic’s subsequent recapture years later after he escapes from a mental asylum. The true facts are never made clear in any of those cases. Yet, rather than leaving gaping holes in Pharmakon that leave us unsatisfied, those ambiguities are what draw us in to the novel, and turn what could have been a turgid academic psychobabble novel into a thrilling, psychologically compelling page-turner. Wittenborn’s innovation here is no small accomplishment.

What is more problematic, however, is Wittenborn’s more superficial methods of disorienting his reader in Pharmakon. The novel switches from first to third person multiple times, and the four books that make up Pharmakon may have been better served as independent or serialized novellas. The problem is not so much the disorienting effect of the change of narrator, but that some of the sections stand out far above the others.

Pharmakon is at its most infatuating in the first book, when we learn of Friedrich’s discovery of a wonder herb used by cannibals in the South Pacific that he hopes to make a fortune off of by turning it into a drug. He works with Dr. Bunny Winton, the lone woman in Yale’s psychology department, who discovered the herb while working as a nurse during World War II. Wittenborn’s grasp of the toils of academic life at Yale in the early '50s is remarkably adept, and the first section is as exciting for the details of the social lives of academics as it is for Friedrich and Winton’s secret project that has them as giddy as schoolchildren.

It is there we meet Casper, whose name is a not-to-subtle allusion to the way he will haunt Friedrich and his family for the rest of their lives. Casper is a mentally unstable loner, the son of a Lithuanian cranberry picker in New Jersey who got into Yale by winning a science competition with a design for an atom bomb. Through taking Friedrich and Winton’s wonder drug, Casper becomes the big shot at the Yacht club, a wizard gold investor and fiancée of the granddaughter of the Governor of Connecticut. As soon as he goes off the drug — or was he still on it? — Casper breaks down, and shows up at Friedrich’s house with a gun in his hand and a list of people to murder.

The tragedies of Book 1 naturally lead to the events of Book 2, where the Friedrichs, now living in New Jersey while William works for pharmaceuticals. The Friedrich child have to grow up with a traumatized mother and a father who shoots down their every action with brazenly honest but emotionally destructive psychoanalysis. We hear it all through the perspective of youngest son Zach, who is too young to remember New Haven, and whose life is inextricably tied to Casper. While the change from third to first person could be jarring, we can overlook it because Zach is so adept at analyzing his family, and has such a fascinating story to tell of family social dynamics, the insecurities and life-altering events of youth and maturation, and the irrevocable damage his father caused for all his children. The two sections seem tied together in ways a lesser writer could never accomplish.

In the final two books, however, Pharmakon truly goes off the deep end. In the third person, we meet up with the adult Zach, now called “Z,” who is a recovering cocaine addict (and not recovering very well) in the '80s. Z still can’t get over the problems of his childhood and his relation to the history of Casper Gedsic. It’s already a problem that Wittenborn’s grasp of tone and milieu of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s is not as strong as that of previous decades. What’s more problematic is his inclination to have Z become partially enlightened about the events of the Friedrichs’ Yale days and the experiments with Casper. It seems that Wittenborn did not have the faith in himself to leave those ambiguities completely unresolved, or to leave the dramatic irony to the reader alone. That inability to go the extra mile dilutes the true ingenuity of Pharmakon’s structure and narrative, and makes the book something much more typical.

Still it does not dismiss just how inventive the novel can be. While Pharmakon is by no means a perfect book, it may in fact be a very important book. In addition to the brilliant use of narrative ambiguities, it touches upon the contradictions of psychological study and analysis, the relationship between genius and insanity, and the role our childhood experiences, or even events that occurred before birth, never truly leave us. Ultimately, the problems of Wittenborn’s superficial devices are just that: superficial. There are a lot of vital, compelling elements at play in Pharmakon, and I suspect those will last longer than the immediate complaints.

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This review was originally published on Blogcritics