We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
When I read in the news shallow pop psychology takes on the heritability of specific traits, like conservative voting, homosexuality, and alcoholism, I am annoyed by the scientific ignorance of newspaper reporters.
I have planned, for a year, to put some time aside to write a magnum blopus on the subject, but finally realized it's better just to post something on the subject, and forget about letting the "best" be the enemy of the "good enough". Tempus fugit.
There is no doubt that personality traits are inherited. Every grandma, dog breeder, and parent knows this. And every family knows this: Bill is a true "Smith." Sally is a real "Jones." Ally is a real blend. Ted is a clone of Grandpa.
They call this general field of study "behavioral genetics," but it is actually about personality genetics and the heritability of "temperament." When you see identical twins, separated at birth via adoption, smoking the same brand of cigarettes, having the same IQ, and driving similar cars on opposite coasts, you can see it dramatically, but the fact is that the underpinnings - the foundations of personality, are surely inherited.
But they are not inherited like eye color. It's complicated.
But what is done with those foundations is what is most interesting. Free will does exist.
Most of us want to be desirable and desired, and feel terrible if we are not. Obviously, the human species would be long gone if that were not the case. I don't mean just physically, but I do mean at least partly physically. A good lady has many more sources of charm than boobs.
It seems to me that guys tend to outgrow their sexual narcissism - their desire to look physically appealing to females - sooner in life than do ladies. (However, they do not outgrow their interest in females.) On the other hand, guys have, perhaps, more ways of being attractive than ladies have, and they do not have menopause to make them look and feel old.
Why does the subject come up? Because of this report, Why Do Women Have Breasts? That anthropological essay (on pdf) claims that breasts (which are largely absent in the other great apes except while nursing) confer an evolutionary advantage that has nothing to do with sex appeal.
I do not know the answer. I do know that in societies like ours, men love to look at, and to play with, breasties. I have no idea whether that is equally true in the jungle where nobody wears tops.
Our strange pop culture has a habit of identifying, or labelling, "victims," and then idealizing them. I think of this sort of thing as an extension ad absurdum of Marxist victim- and oppression-seeking, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, we posted on the topic of idealizing the cancer victim patient in Pinkapalooza Debunked.
Today, a Psychiatrist with cancer discusses Two Stories we Tell Ourselves about Cancer - "The Fighter" and "The Hero's Journey." He points out that these dramatic narratives may help some people cope with their fear and pain, but the truth is that having cancer simply sucks and messes up one's life.
I believe it is the people without cancer who enjoy these comforting narratives. Those with cancer know better.
Here's further evidence that statins are helpful, regardless of your triglyceride levels. Maybe all guys should take them (per your Doc's advice, of course.)
What are the odds that a patient you see for an initial Psychiatric consultation will show up for a follow-up second office visit? In my experience, around 90%.
What are the odds that a patient you see for an initial consultation, who has a past (not current) history of drug abuse and alcohol abuse and messy relationships, will show up for their follow-up office visit? In my experience, around 25-30% (unless court-ordered).
Which is why I am free to post this at this moment. People who mess things up tend to mess up getting help, too. But those 25% who do show up tend to be powerfully motivated to work on things, are highly helpable, and it is a pleasure and a privilege to help them grow up and take charge of their lives.
I can't imagine why our Editor sent me the link to this topic: Researchers claim foreplay overrated. Sexist, no doubt, because the source clearly has little sensitivity to a lady's need to become, um, interested, when we might be contentedly preparing to teach a class on Freud, or perusing House Beautiful or a gardening catalog.
Unless you happen to be Sean Connery, I advise guys to take the time to apply some of those age-old seduction skills instead of acting like a wild animal. Yes, women enjoy being sex objects just as guys do, but a wholesome, red-blooded lady will make it well-worth the effort if you go the extra mile.
And yes, I do know that guys like to be seduced too. Love it, in fact (but they hate to admit it). Licking them on the ear works well, for some reason, and repeating "My big strong handsome man" while unbuttoning his shirt.
Editor's note: I couldn't resist adding that photo from The 6 Biggest Assholes in the Animal Kingdom. I have no doubt that she is "lying back and thinking of England" because he does not appear to be a particularly sensitive male.
This week we had Joe the Plumber in front of his modest home with an old rusty basketball hoop for his kids, burdened with tax debts but uplifted by his aspirations, and we had Sarah Palin stopping the campaign bus to get diapers at WalMart for her baby.
By way of contrast, we had Michelle Obama, a highly privileged Limo Liberal with millions in the bank and a $350,000/yr "administrative" job for some hospital or something, ordering lobster, Iranian caviar, and champagne for a snack from room service - and whining all the while about how mean and tough life is in America if you have two kids, as her husband preaches about taking from Joe to give to...whom?
Those are called "defining moments." We shrinks understand defining moments, because those are the moments when patterns come into focus. Me? I love caviar... if I earn it.
"Good character is made up of three parts," according to a British think tank report released last August: "a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one's own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification."
Why it takes a think tank to figure that those things are foundations of good moral character is beyond me. As Sissy notes in "It's the character, stupid," McGuffey's Reader, if not Socrates, has been saying those things for quite a while.
But those things, in themselves, are not "good character." An effective Mafia Don or a dedicated Jihadist probably has those "three parts" too. What I define as "good character" depends on the code which is placed on those foundations, and the extent to which behavior is consistent with it.
That think tank was trying to come up with a morality-free, "value-free," psychologized concept of character.
Why on earth would they waste time trying to do something like that?
He seems like a thoughtful, literate, and kind person - and one of us Psychiatrists who is still willing to regard many human problems as problems of the soul and spirit rather than of "chemical imbalances."
I deeply disagree with his (and Dr. X's) apparent political views, but that's fine with me. Debate is good. Ars P posted a piece on Psychiatrists' coziness with drug companies. He may have a point, but I have never seen this sort of issue in Boston. Furthermore, in my view, Lexapro is manna from heaven for our patients. The guy appreciates Dylan, so he's OK in our book.
Did you know that identical twins, whether they are separated at birth or raised together, are equally similar in personality, intelligence, interests, and habits? It's a stunning fact, I think.
I have been teaching the essentials of human nature and the related genetic foundations of human differences for years, partly because these things are true, and partly to counterbalance the "blank slate" bias in our society that says that we are all somehow equal until parents and our environment get their hands on us. This assumption lies behind the insidious mid- 20th century idea in psychology that Moms are the cause of everybody's problems. (No, I am not denying that events affect us, but only in the most extreme cases do they shape our basic architecture.)
The blank slate assumption, with its denial of human nature, has a lengthy history, but it was picked up most ardently by Marxists who wished very much to believe that social and psychological experts could shape children in such a way as to create "a new man," better suited to their vision of a utopian society (run by them, of course).
Steven Pinker's 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was one of the first non-technical books (along with books like The Bell Curve) to address the subject. Unlike Larry Summers, Pinker was not run out of town for saying the politically incorrect things he says.
David Thompson has a fine brief discussion of this topic, and posted the short and entertaining lecture below by Harvard's Pinker in which he also touches on the topics of the arts and of parenting:
The myth is that like magic, preventive medicine will simultaneously reduce costs and improve health.
Read the whole thing. Sadly, except at the margins, there is little we can to to prevent disease. The wishful thought that we can control fate and the gods never quits, though.
Columbia University is lucky to have Simon Schama on board. I have been a fan since I read his rambling masterpiece Landscape and Memory, and I have attended his lectures on Rembrandt.
You can get a lot out of his rambles through history, art, culture and philosophy. The man has been prolific.
I'm fairly sure I don't agree with his politics (but that's not normally his subject), but he does have a new book out: The American Future: A History.
Although he loves his new home in America, I am going to take a pass this time. I don't need immigrants to talk to me about our future. I have Massachusetts Bay Colony and New Hampshire roots that even Simon might not understand.
My opinion? I like her, but I'm not convinced that she is better informed about the world than I am. Tonight is her last chance to impress. Biden, of course, as a left-wing male, has been given countless opportunities to be a doofus. It's the new double standard - Dems presumed smart; Repubs presumed morons.
Here's Sarah on Hannity radio yesterday (audio only):
As a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, this graph of mentions of "psychoanalytic" from Gene Expression (we linked the article in Graphs on the PoMo Fad) pleases me:
Why does it please me? Because Psychoanalytic ideas were hijacked and distorted by Marxists, Existentialists, the PoMo movement, "progressive educators," academics, and other miscellaneous Leftist or anarchic moonbats - none of whomever understood it at all. The less those people talk about it, the better.
Psychoanalysis is about plumbing the depths of human nature and the human soul. It's closer to anatomy and surgery than it is to "critical theory." It's never PC, it's somewhat dangerous, and it's not for amateurs.
We somehow lost the original of this post, with its comments. Sorry -
If I see you run through a stop sign once, my tendency - or bias - is to assume that you are a jerk who does things like that all the time.
That's because my bias is about the stability and predictability of a person's characterologic make-up. That bias - if it is a bias - is called Attribution Error in Social Psychology. After all, your wife might be in labor in the car and you don't give a darn what laws you break to get to the hospital before she dumps the kid on the dirty floor of the old car. On the other hand, you could be a jerk who generally ignores rules.
Indeed it is interesting that folks who have not been in intensive psychotherapy or psychoanalysis often tend to attribute other peoples' behavior on their personalities, but to explain or justify their own behavior in relation to external situations and forces. On the other hand, folks who have been in analysis often tend to over-interpret adaptive, occasional, or "out of character" behavior as internally-directed when it might not be. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Therefore, when we contemplate our own behavior or the behavior of others, we have to negotiate between the Scylla of Attribution Error and over-interpretation, and the Charybdis of Externalization. Therein lies the art of comprehending psychological reality.
We psychoanalysts, when we are doing analytic work anyway, tend to focus more on what we call "psychic reality" - the inner reality - than on external reality. In an almost pomo sense (although I hate the comparison), we approach what we see and are told as a text or a narrative about where a person's head is, mostly regardless of its objective factuality (except in extreme situations).
Why? Because we are paid to try to understand how people's thoughts and fears and fantasies work in order for them to gain better control over their lives. Your dentist doesn't care about your love life, and we don't care very much about your cavities. Our bias is that, most but not all of the time, a person is his own worst enemy.
How did this whole thing come about? Well, it's the history of Psychoanalysis. Freud realized that not every one of his patients in his Neurology practice in Vienna with psychosomatic symptoms could have been sexually abused as they reported (probably some had been, and some not). That line of thought lead him to the notion of "psychic reality" and the role that unconscious fantasy plays in peoples' lives - in this case, mainly unconscious incestuous fantasies, which he correctly observed were universal despite the taboo.
If you are interested in the story, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for our Time is a good place to go. Peter Gay underwent psychoanalytic training and psychoanalysis himself at the New Haven (Western New England) Institute, partly, at least, to understand his subject. One hopes, partly to understand himself better, too.
I do not advise reading Freud's work without a guide. It's too easy to misunderstand, and the translations from the German are imperfect in many ways.
(The idea for this post grew out of a conversation with a colleague, who thought that Obama - and occasionally other politicians - successfully apply these techniques. She suspects that Obama has read Greene's best-seller because of his stated awareness of the effectiveness of his mirroring role, but that's not my motive for this post.)
Robert Greene's book, The Art of Seduction, is the sort-of sequel to his The 48 Laws of Power. Greene is a student of the dark arts. Both books are applicable to politics, business, relationships, and daily life - especially by those with sociopathic inclinations. However, reading these books can help one understand how some people approach their lives.
The game, or art, of seduction is, at its core, not mainly about physical sex. It is not about earnest courtship, nor is it plain old trying to get laid. In its most artful form, sex doesn't occur (although it is indeed generally difficult for guys to refuse an appealing offer). The art of seduction is a game of deception and subtle psychological manipulation. Here's a bit from Ovid on "Promise and Deceive" from The Art of Love:
Don’t be shy of promising: promises entice girls: add any gods you like as witness to what you swear. Jupiter on high laughs at lovers’ perjuries, and orders Aeolus’s winds to carry them into the void. Jupiter used to swear by the Styx, falsely, to Juno: now he looks favourably on his own example. Gods are useful: as they’re useful, let’s think they’re there: take wine and incense to the ancient altars: indifferent calm and it’s like, apathy, don’t chain them: live innocently: the divine is close at hand: pay what you owe, hold dutifully to agreements: commit no fraud: let your hands be free from blood. Delude only women, if you’re wise, with impunity: where truth’s more to be guarded against than fraud. Deceive deceivers: for the most part an impious tribe: let them fall themselves into the traps they’ve set.
As I understand it, the art of seduction in its most evolved form involves becoming a mirror to an innocent or vulnerable female, to engage her narcissism. The mirror is the seducer's tool. The innocent fills in the blank with her own hopes and dreams and fantasies. She cannot know that she - or part of her her unconscious self - is being mirrored: the trick is to engage her into entering an exciting false reality consisting mostly of her own projections and fantasies, and the seducer dances to that music. That mirror becomes the stage for her narcissistic, grandiose, and regressive self. This game is slick, slimy, and rather evil, but it can work.
When the game is played in its purest form there is no consummation: the seducer disappears in victory, leaving the innocent in despair, holding nothing but a cracked mirror. If the seducer falls in love with his mirrored creation, as in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, the seducer has failed in his game by entering the looking glass world rather than remaining a disengaged puppeteer.
The chosen victim must be either innocent or vulnerable in some way, because a sophisticated victim might very well be playing her own game - and beat you at it.
The art of seduction, when done "right," is about the enactment of a subtly homoerotic dynamic wherein the seducer guy reflects back an image of the female as she wants to be, or as she regressively is. Thus the best seducers can be those men with "sensitive," "feminine" sides - "metrosexuals," or even the sexually ambivalent, because they are the best at reflecting the feminine.
The classic writings on the art of seduction, besides Ovid, must include Les Liasons Dangereuses, written in 1782 by Pierre LaClos, to which the expression "revenge is a dish best served cold" has been often erroneously attributed.
They must also include Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer. That review begins:
His preparatory remarks follow Ovid, the most famous of his literary precursors, when Johannes writes, "the fishing is always best in troubled waters. When a young miss is agitated, one can successfully risk much that otherwise would miscarry." One could also see thematic parallels between this and Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons', although it is uncertain Kierkegaard had opportunity to read that work. He also strikes a major theme of Ovid's Amores' when he writes, "A rendezvous is usually regarded by lovers as the most beautiful moment."
There are even internet communities that teach and practice the seductive arts. Here's one such site. A cursory view of their sites makes the accurate point that success in seduction has nothing to do with a fellow's appearance or background - just his skill at the game. However, for these people online, unlike the classic form of the game, consummation seems to be the trophy. Scoring, but not stupid drunk scoring - deftly engaging the lady emotionally first with the "bold move" carefully planned and timed.
Greene's book goes through the essential tactics of the art, which he lists as the following:
Choose your victim well Create a false sense of security Send mixed signals Appear to be an object of desire - create triangles Create a need by stirring anxiety and discontent Master the art of insinuation Enter their spirit Create temptation Keep them in suspense Use the demonic power of words to sow confusion Pay attention to detail Poeticize your presence Disarm through strategic weakness and vulnerability Confuse desire and reality - the perfect illusion Isolate your victim Prove yourself Effect a regression Stir up the transgressive and the taboo - they are exciting Use spiritual lures Mix pleasure with pain Give them space to fall - the pursuer is pursued Use physical lures Master the art of the bold move and Beware the aftereffects...
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
She could become a transformative political presence.
So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.
And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there.
We are ramping up to one heck of an angry political season - and it really pisses me off.
I don't mind a little emotion and enthusiasm in a national election. Silly and immature as it may be, it's the American way to idealize candidates and then to devalue them once they have to start making real decisions.
Gov. Palin has been a lightning rod for several reasons. 1. She's the new breed - the "new feminist" - who seems happy 2. She's prettier than Madeleine Albright or Hillary Clinton. 3. It's difficult to attack McCain himself. 4. She's not a representative of the "elite" 5. She's a serious political threat and the other side wants to damage her as fast as possible.
...hell hath no fury like a leftist who encounters a female or African-American who doesn't need him. Thus, the high-tech lowbrow lynching of Clarence Thomas and the current unseemly attacks on Sarah Palin. How else to account for the shroud of discreet silence over the John Edwards affair vs. the airing of every possible rumor and smear about Palin and her children?
James Lewis at RCP similarly has Palin and the Narcissistic Left. I do not approve of using shrink terms to put people down, but he does have a point.
Indeed, politics can become a playground for the acting out of our most immature and primitive selves if we aren't careful, or a stage on which we project our internal issues and dynamics. Perspective and reason fly out the window and are replaced by hatred or love or whatever. That's why it can get so sick. In the process, reality, dignity, and even relationships can be lost.
A quote from this excellent piece about men, which was linked earlier by our NJ and thus doesn't count as a new post during Maggie's vacation break:
As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.
In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.
Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.
Saving the males – engaging their nobility and recognising their unique strengths – will ultimately benefit women and children, too. Fewer will live in poverty; fewer boys will fail in schools and wind up in jail; fewer girls will get pregnant or suffer emotional damage from too early sex with uncaring boys. Fewer young men and women will suffer loneliness and loss because they’ve grown up in a climate of sexual hostility that casts the opposite sex as either villain or victim.
The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding, but they're very selective in what they want to "understand".
If causes and explanation are indeed a serious enterprise and not merely a convenient partisan game, then it needs to be recognised that causality is one thing and moral responsibility another, though the two are related.
and:
Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don't murder people when they are angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder. That cause somehow gets a free pass from the hunters-out of causes.
My only disagreement with the article is that it seems to assume that the terrorism apologists are sincere in their positions and postures - which I feel is naive. Thus Norm's great analysis will have no impact on any of the hard Left, reflexively anti-Western readers of the Guardian (in which the piece appears).
After all, what is the "root cause" of the anti-Western reflex of the Left? Whatever it is, it isn't ignorance (except in the young). Intellectual integrity - and even integrity - mean nothing if you can convince yourself that your mission is to save the world via Lefto-Fascism - or just to try to promote yourself! You rise above such bourgeois hang-ups. Just like the Jihadists...hmmmm. Read the entire - link above. And read my piece on related subject on Maggies last week.
"American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life." Chronicle. A quote:
A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel science, the science of happiness. Mainstream publishers are learning from the self-help industry and printing thousands of books on how to be happy. Doctors offer a wide array of drugs that might eradicate depression forever. It seems truly an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.
Smileyface is an abomination. Up here in Yankeeland, a smiling face means that you are probably a car salesman. Keep your inner emotions to yourself.
In the aftermath of the Edwards scandal, I was considering writing a bit about male sexuality, about how it is part of male biology to desire to spread their seed far and wide, into every pretty thing they see. To win, to possess, and to enjoy.
That drive is just one more thing that makes life difficult for men: these temptations are extremely difficult to resist.
Much stronger issue for guys than for gals - but the desire is not absent in gals either. But that is not exactly new information. Nor is it new information that couples make attachment committments to each other for rational as well as emotional reasons, or that humans have religion-guided consciences that elevate them a little bit above monkeys.
Having realized I had nothing new to add to the subject, I'll just post this quote from Ben Stein:
I am sorry that John Edwards had an affair with a campaign worker. But I am not surprised. Men like to have affairs. Men like to have sex with new women. That's just how men are and always have been.
I am not surprised that a major Presidential candidate and former V.P. nominee of a major party had an affair. Politicians are men and they have all of the yearnings and drives that other men have. They do not check their flaws and essential elements at the Capitol cloakroom.
Editor: Since we are exposing today the earth-shattering fact that men are powerfully attracted to charming and seductive females, I thought that Theo image might help drive the point home.
The American Founders knew it: recognizing man’s innate capacity for evil, they designed a system of checks and balances to thwart the accumulation of power by any group, lest the entire enterprise fall into wicked hands. They knew the battle for liberty would never end, Benjamin Franklin famously warned we would have to fight to keep our republic.
All of this wisdom has been dangerously undermined by the foolish notion that man is basically good, that all men are basically the same, and that all we need do is to permit history to take its preordained course. Are these not the tenets of contemporary education? Are our children not forbidden to criticize “others,” whether of different pigmentation or religion? Has debate on our university campuses not turned into the moral equivalent of the Inquisition? And it rests on the sands of a demonstrably false vision of man. We are not naturally inclined to do good. Quite the contrary...
Well, I might quibble with that. Mankind is naturally inclined to do both good and evil, but it is surely naive to expect morality in power politics.
Of course we are. 
We have posted on 
This week we had Joe the Plumber in front of his modest home with an old rusty basketball hoop for his kids, burdened with tax debts but uplifted by his aspirations, and we had Sarah Palin stopping the campaign bus to get diapers at WalMart for her baby.
Did you know that identical twins, whether they are separated at birth or raised together, are equally similar in personality, intelligence, interests, and habits? It's a stunning fact, I think.
Columbia University is lucky to have 
If I see you run through a stop sign once, my tendency - or bias - is to assume that you are a jerk who does things like that all the time.
(The idea for this post grew out of a conversation with a colleague, who thought that Obama - and occasionally other politicians - successfully apply these techniques. She suspects that Obama has read Greene's best-seller because of his stated awareness of the effectiveness of his mirroring role, but that's not my motive for this post.)
As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.
"American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life." 
In the aftermath of the Edwards scandal, I was considering writing a bit about male sexuality, about how it is part of male biology to desire to spread their seed far and wide, into every pretty thing they see. To win, to possess, and to enjoy.