Salon.com > Andreas Killen

Magnetic headbangers

Tue, 03 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

It seems a bit spooky, even kooky, the way the doctor waves the magnetic paddle over the patient's head -- like something from a science fiction movie or a 19th century laboratory where wax-mustached phrenologists measured heads with calipers. But it also seems to work: Psychiatrists at Yale are using rubber paddles containing figure-eight-shaped electrical coils to effectively treat schizophrenia. Elsewhere, the paddles are being deployed, experimentally, against epilepsy, depression and other diseases of the head. The paddles are the instruments of a new treatment called transcranial magnetic stimulation.

On a recent afternoon at Columbia University's renowned College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Holly Lisanby, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, demonstrates the technique. The paddle is connected to a power source and a computer. When electrical current surges through the coil, it generates a magnetic field. Lisanby holds the paddle directly above the left temple of an imaginary person seated in an old dentist's chair in the center of the room. A flashing window on the laptop displays the disconcerting words "Armed Mode." Lisanby hits a key on her laptop. There's a loud rat-a-tat, like the sound of a staple gun, and then the device falls silent. "Most people describe the sensation as a kind of tapping on the head, like a woodpecker," says Lisanby. The demonstration over, the imaginary patient is presumably on his or her way to feeling better.

Happiness is back

Tue, 01 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Greek philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers placed happiness at the forefront of their thinking, but the 20th century wasn't really a good one for theories of happiness. War, genocide and Sigmund Freud conspired to render it a dubious, even suspect notion. Freud could only offer his patients "ordinary unhappiness" as relief from their neurotic suffering. Todd Solondz's recent film "Happiness" more or less summed up the prevailing sense that happiness had become at best a kind of pathology: a smiley face plastered over the dark nightmare of American suburbia.

But in the strange turn-of-the-century limbo we now occupy -- marked by awesome economic prosperity, mind-boggling advances in science and medicine and a temporary respite from global ideological conflicts -- happiness has moved from the margins of public discourse back to the center. A new generation of thinkers and researchers has appeared, seemingly determined to reclaim the subject of happiness from the pop psychologists and spiritual guides who've milked it for so long. Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association devoted a special millennial issue of its journal, the American Psychologist, to the subject of happiness. And Martin Seligman, former APA president, has spent the past year building a field known as positive psychology -- which explicitly distinguishes itself from the inexorable negativity that has characterized the shrinking profession.

Constipation = civilization

Thu, 22 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

At the height of last fall's scandal surrounding the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" show -- a scandal triggered by a painting of the Madonna festooned with dried elephant dung -- New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered an eloquent plea to the public: "I would ask people to step back and think about civilization. Civilization has been about trying to find the right place to put excrement, and it is not on the walls of museums."

People have long assumed that the fate of civilization hangs on proper potty training. In his new book, James C. Whorton suggests civilization has also flourished because of toilet troubles -- specifically, clogged bowels.

"Inner Hygiene" explores the unhappy modern preoccupation with irregularity and the remedies and devices that have been developed for this affliction. One of the many virtues of the book is that it shows, to some extent inadvertently, that civilization may be more compatible with failed potty lessons than Giuliani would have us believe.

The shape of dreams

Thu, 11 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Talk of dreams dominated my family's breakfast-table conversation. My father was deeply interested in dreams and not squeamish about regaling us with accounts of his nocturnal visitations. As we ate our porridge, he shared his latest with us; along with the usual Oedipal stuff, a recurring favorite of mine involved fishing from the balcony of our house, which led to various Pinocchio-like encounters with sea creatures whose bellies he escaped from to describe in minute detail.

In turn, he encouraged my brother, my mother and me to disclose our dream lives. I worked hard at remembering mine, embellishing and even, on occasion, inventing dreams outright. But none of us could keep up with my father. He was an auteur on a par with Stanley Kubrick or Charlie Chaplin; next to his, my dreams seemed like late-night TV reruns.

What strikes me in retrospect was my father's absolute conviction that dreams have meaning. The skeptics aside, for much of this century my father has been in good company. The man he had to thank, of course, was Sigmund Freud.

Pundits of pain

Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Trauma is becoming institutionalized. Until just a few
years ago, the study of psychological trauma was a
scattered, esoteric enterprise without a
formally recognized presence in the university. But in recent years, trauma studies has become a trendy
interdisciplinary offering at a half-dozen
universities around the U.S. and a handful of others
abroad.

Dr. Stevan Weine, a psychiatry professor at the University of Illinois, recently described his work with Kosovar refugees to a group of students at New York University's International Trauma Studies Program. In 1999, during a visit to Kosovo, Weine spoke with many people who had been raped or tortured. Listening to their stories, he noticed something strange: These people, unlike most of us who have experienced tragedy, were more than eager to talk about what had happened to them. "They wanted," said Weine, "to tell their story to everyone who would listen, especially the media, and above all, Bill Clinton."

Geography of feeling

Wed, 07 Apr 1999 07:00:00 +0000

We interrupt this broadcast for a word from the unconscious ...

There's an old joke in which one psychoanalyst says to another: "Boy, I made the most embarrassing Freudian slip the other day." His colleague asks what happened, and the first explains that the awkward incident had occurred while having dinner with his mother. "What I meant to say, was, 'Mother, would you please pass the salt,'" he explains, "but what actually came out was, 'You bitch, you ruined my entire life.'"

It's easy to make fun of psychoanalysts and their earnest enthusiasm for hidden and not-so-hidden meanings. For Freud, as everyone knows, the unconscious had a way of breaking through the surface of consciousness in slips of the tongue, double-entendres, cigar jokes and so forth. At the time he came up with this notion, it seemed radical, but in our current, post-repressive society there's something quaintly Victorian about it. Who is shocked by unintended meanings nowadays?

Going adjunct

Thu, 17 Sep 1998 10:17:00 +0000

I first noticed my symptoms two years ago. It was January and I was
running a slight temperature. I'd backed out of a visit to my in-laws in
order to attend the American Historical Association conference in New York
City. Hundreds of academics crowded the lobby of the mid-town Hyatt.
Earlier that week, I'd learned that I'd been bumped from one of the
classes assigned to me for the next semester in favor of a full-time
professor. As the day progressed, I grew more and more fever-addled.
Around me milled groups of graduate students in a miasma of anxiety and
halitosis, while the professors schmoozed happily, already anticipating
next year's shindig in Seattle. By Day 2, as I slouched in my seat
listening to a talk on war memorials, I found myself daydreaming about
blowing up the hotel.

Help! I thought. What's going on here? My analyst had no advice.
She'd never heard of such a thing, doubted it was in the literature. I
felt ashamed and tried to keep my sick fantasy to myself, unnerved by the
image of mayhem lurking within my fevered brain.