McMindfulness

The marketing of well-being

“McMindfulness.” I came across this term for the first time today. I wish I had coined it. It would be nice to be able to make a claim to originality. But coming across the term is almost good enough. It provides a name for a phenomenon that I didn’t even ...

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McMindfulness

Physics Envy

The troubles in psychiatry and psychology

These are troubling times for the mental health field in the United States. A variety of historical developments have paved the road to the current predicament. Following World War II, the federal government and growing mental health lobby began an unprecedented expansion of mental heath services. This expansion in may ...

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Physics Envy

Don’t Worry… Be Happy!

The dark underside of positive psychology

Over the last decade the field of positive psychology has become a burgeoning area of research within academic psychology. Well known figures in positive psychology include Martin Seligman (developer of the well known learned helplessness model of depression and past president of the American Psychological Association), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (creator of ...

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Don’t Worry… Be Happy!

Writing Moves the Sky

“To write is to jump outside the line of the assassins.” – Franz Kafka

First of all I would like to thank the New School, and Edith Kurzweil who invited me to this eighth William Phillips lecture and gave me the opportunity to come to the prestigious New School.

My father Harold Kaplan was a great friend of William Phillips, who published his first short ...

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Writing Moves the Sky

Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud?

The rise, fall, and possible resurrection of psychoanalysis in the United States

For decades psychoanalysis dominated professional approaches to mental health in the United States and had an influential impact on our culture. Starting in the late 1960s, however, psychoanalysis has become increasingly marginalized. Here, I will argue that psychoanalysis has always contained both subversive and conservative threads. As the historian Nathan ...

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Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud?

Throwing Good Money After Bad

The growing emphasis that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is placing on funding research aimed at identifying “biological markers” associated with emotional and psychological problems, to the virtual exclusion of other forms of research relevant to treating mental health problems is deeply troubling. The reasoning underlying this type ...
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