Dr. X. offers a brief intro to "mirror neurons" in response to a NYT piece on Mimicry, Persuasion, and Building Rapport.

"Mirroring" is about our mental reflection, or replication, of the behavior of others, usually of our own species or tribe.

Whenever neuroscience finds something which might connect the brain with the mind, folks in my line of work get excited and tend to over-react, as if needy of validation. As Dr X says:

...recently, there has been a backlash against the overselling of mirror neurons, it is clear that researchers who are studying the role of interactional synchronization (and desynchronization) are onto something very powerful.  Gallese wrote an interesting paper connecting this research with a number of psychoanalytic and clinical constructs including "unconscious communication, projective identification, attunement, empathy, autism, therapeutic action, and transference-countertransference interactions." 

As a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, I have always been fascinated with the neurosciences even though I hated Neuroanatomy in med school. (I think I have some LD when it comes to 3-D mental imaging.)

The good Doctor links to a Gallese scientific essay on mirroring and interpersonal  attunement, which may or may not be an over-interpretation of the neuroscience.

In the end, though, the neurosciences offer me nothing in understanding the human mind and human behavior, and probably never will because when we talk about brain and mind we are talking about different levels of organization. The neural operations are assumed, so, when I talk with a person, I am going to be more interested in where they decide to drive their car than in how the carburetor of their car works and, if I see a play, more interested in expression than I am in the physiology of the actors' vocal cords.

Early in his explorations of the human mind and soul, Freud had great hopes of correlating his discoveries with neuroscience. He was, after all, a Neurologist, not a Psychiatrist. I think that, were he alive today, he would still find such correlations difficult.

Editor: The Alan Parsons Project with I Am A Mirror (lyrics here). Echoes of I Am A Camera:

Our blog friend Dr. X linked some more recent research about false autobiographical memories.

We Psychoanalysts know how much a person's memory is a story, and a story which evolves over time, both in detail and in theme. In psychoanalysis (and in analysis only - not in life!), we take the difficult and disciplined - but also luxurious - position of receiving memory (and everything else) as "text" or "narrative" in the pomo sense (although the technique far precedes pomo), and do not worry about its historical factuality because our job is to address psychological "facts" (see Spence and Wallerstein, or the wonderful Roy Schafer whose talk I attended in NYC last month).

In analysis, the potential power of that stance exceeds the power of truth-seeking in the everyday sense. We call it "psychic reality," and we confuse it with reality at our peril: in the human mind, belief, wish and fantasy often trump facts. Sanity lies in making those distinctions. My wise supervisor told me "When patients talk about the past, they are talking about the present. When they talk about the present, they are referring to the past. And they are always talking about the transference."

But that is analysis. In real life, as opposed to the somewhat strange "analytic situation," we analysts tend to be drawn to real hard human facts, like thirsty people on a desert.

That is why we often prefer Dickens and Melville to psychological studies or the New York Times.

Up to 2 billion people on the planet are infected with tuberculosis - one third of the earth's population. That doesn't mean that they have contagious pulmonary TB, just that they contain the bug which has the capacity to attack them viciously at any time, especially if something weakens them, such as HIV, other illness, or malnutrition.

Most of the cases are in Africa and Asia - the so-called TB Belt which, in Africa, overlaps with the HIV Belt. (The combination of HIV and TB is termed "the perfect storm" of infectious disease.) However, over a million Americans are infected with TB.

I learned during my Yale Continuing Medical Education series this weekend that most HIV in the Northeast is transmitted by sharing needles, not via homosexual activity. I also learned that man-to-woman HIV is on the rise in the US. Woman-to-man transmission remains essentially impossible, apparently. I have been told that the rare reported cases were probably guys lying about their IV drug use or their homosexual activities.

In our New England cities, drug addiction, mental illness, HIV and TB is a common mix and a huge challenge to the dedicated docs who try to take care of these people, not only because of the medical difficulties but because these people are not reliable patients. Throw in a pregnancy too and you have a case that could take up half your time taking care of just one of these poor souls, who usually have few-to-no social supports in their lives but who also avoid, or will not cooperate with, government help.

Often, these folks break appointments as often as they make them because their lives are out of control, and nobody has the power to fix that. You send a visiting nurse, and they have moved out. "Lost to follow-up," until they reappear feeling desperately ill again.

During one of the talks, a famous clinical researcher on infectious disease just could not resist gratuitously throwing in a snarky Power Point slide mocking George Bush's intelligence (implicitly comparing it to his own, and "ours"). It always bothers me when these Ivy types (of which I happen to be one, along with Bush with his Yale BA and Harvard MBA) just assume that everyone in their audience has the same view of things...because we are, of course, the elite bien pensant folks, aren't we, all thinking alike?

Speaking of Moonbats, that reminds me of an email from a medical friend attending a medical conference and giving a talk in San Fran last week. He said that a young and lovely California doc approached him after his talk and said "I just needed to tell you that you have a special, beautiful aura."

I emailed back and asked "Was she hitting on you?"

He replied "I don't think so. I think it's just that California is a different planet."

I said "Guess so, because I think your aura is rather ordinary."

Photo: Robert Koch,  the great man of infectious disease and historic benefactor of mankind, who discovered the TB, Anthrax and Cholera bugs, and created "Koch's Postulates" which made possible the conquest of most of the diseases that ravaged man through history.

I don't know the Clintons. Never met them, and would not presume to speculate about their personal issues - other than the patterns of behavior which have been made public over the years, and now the repeat of their familiar patterns in the primaries. (Who is really running?, I wonder. It's kind of strange, isn't it?) 

So I cannot glibly claim that they are sociopaths, or narcissists, or anything. They might just be old-fashioned, take-no-prisoners, slippery money- and ego- and power-hungry pols with typical politician holes in their superegos (assuming they have functioning superegos). If I were a left-wing Dem, that's probably what I would say in their defence: "National politics is hardball. Everybody does it."

Everything I read in the news illustrates their ruthless and "uncaring" approach to political warfare, but even I would never have expected them to play the race card against a fellow Dem. They have now branded Obama as the "black candidate," and now clearly want him to return, repentantly, to the plantation with Jesse and Al...or they will let the hounds loose to chase him down in the swamp. Mr. Charlie, the boss-man, has warned him.

Their protestations of virtue and "caring" are, and always have been, cloying to me, and so obviously manipulative. They give every impression of having replaced personal conscience with a political pseudo-caring for others - as if the latter could redeem the weakness of the former. (As readers know, I do not want a "caring" politician. I am an American, and can take care of the caring myself, thank you, without a sovereign or a nanny.)

What I do notice, now that Obama has a tiny bit of traction, is how quickly those who do know them and have worked with them are leaving the ship. Already Kerry has, and Gore would if he had the nerve. This tells me that their past loyalty was based on fear and/or convenience - nothing more. These people know what the Clintons are really like.

I suspect that Obama's success has offered a chance for many to come out of the closet and make public the fact that few in politics really care for, trust, or wish to work with these people very much. That says more than any opinion of mine can say. Watch for a flood of Obama endorsements, and watch Sidney Blumenthal taking down their names in his little black book.

Is the MSM-manufactured and -supported Clinton veneer finally cracking? Maybe, but the MSM will plaster it over when the time comes, followed by a fresh coat of pinko paint. (I think it would be a kick to run against the Clintons, but not to run against Obama: he seems likeable and approachable and decent, despite being just another socialist Dem who would like to run my life for me.)

I suspect we have many readers who either live in New York City or who commute to the city daily by train. As an ex-New Yorker, living in Boston and New Hampshire, it is now a special treat for me to hop the train to New York three or four times a year to stay for a few days, usually with the excuse of giving a talk or to attending a medical meeting (which I did this past week and this week-end). I change from Amtrak to a Metro-North express in New Haven, and sometimes spend a day visiting my New Haven friends. I do not shop in NY (well, not very much), but I like to visit my old haunts, and to find new ones.

I got up to the front of the train, next to the driver, just after we took the train bridge from the Bronx to Manhattan:

Coming from Boston, I am greeted by the magnificence of Grand Central Station instead of the execrable Penn Station or the idiotic, government-designed JFK airport. Somehow, this lame snapshot managed to eliminate every bit of the grandeur and scale of Commodore Vanderbilt's creation:

Something new: The Grand Central Market. Wonderful food stalls, and perfect to pick up some stuff on the way home: rare cheeses, imported Italian sausages of every variety, 200 types of olive oil, a bread bakery, a patisserie, pre-cooked goodies and dinners, etc. etc. All of the old, bleak empty spaces of the Station have now been put to good use, and the whole place is like an upscale mall, and busy as can be:

And something old on the lower level: The good old Oyster Bar, with the best oyster stew in the world, and a larger selection of oysters - and fresh seafood in general - than you can find anywhere in the world. The entire Lower Level is now a food court, and good enough that I think people come in off the street for a snack. No chain restaurants - good stuff.

Vanderbilt researchers, studying mice, claim that aggression can be as emotionally rewarding as food or sex.

“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”

I cannot speak about mice, but every psychiatrist - and every person - knows that this is a fact for human beings. Freud, who thought harder about these things than most people, found it necessary to hypothesize a "death instinct": "an urge inherent in all organic life to restore an earlier state of things" (SE 18:36). It is a drive towards destruction. He could not make sense of human behavior and human thoughts without it.

Indeed, Freud mocked critics of that instinct theory as “…little children [who] do not like it when there is talk of the human inclination to ‘badness’…”.

The trick to a sane life is to keep all of these "instincts" on a tight-enough leash that they do not senselessly destroy one's life. Ideally, our conscience does that job for us, to help maintain our self-respect, if not the respect of others.

This piece from Obama's website indicates that he and others like Barbara Boxer support the notion of government benefits for military employees discharged due to Personality Disorders. (the link came to me via Opie via our Editor)

Being politicians, this is probably pure pandering rather than ignorance. Fact is that Personality Disorders cannot be acquired. They generally become evident in adolescence, if not earlier - but they cannot be created by military service or by anything else.

Since the most common seriouspersonality disorder in males is the untreatable Antisocial Personality (known to laymen as sociopaths, or people with no conscience, who lie easily, believe themselves to be above the rules of civil society, treat others as useful objects, and have minimal capacity for guilt - those without souls, as they used to say), one must wonder how many of these discharges are of people who did not belong in the service in the first place, would not follow the rules, and created problems for everybody else.

In the sane, good old days, they were known as "trouble-makers." Now they have a diagnosis. And, God knows, if we get Hillarycare, somebody equally sociopathic will probably try to make money pretending to "treat" these folks - on my nickel.

Wacky as it may sound to some, the only "cure" for this problem I have ever seen is for them to find God and to be deeply changed. And, even then, sometimes they just convincingly fake it to get out of trouble.

The New York Sun reports that those who give generously are happier people. Is that news?

The problem with the article is the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Do happy people give, or does giving make people happy? Or are there other variables that independently produce those results, as it turned out with eating broccoli?

I think that happy people take joy in much of what they do, whether it is giving or anything else. Still, giving is a pleasure for many reasons. Receiving isn't always enjoyable, for even more complicated reasons.

As regular readers know, we all seem to have been thinking recently about the cost of liberty and the human ambivalence about freedom. See, for a few examples:

Freedom? No thanks, and a word about Erich Fromm

Is Liberty Obsolete?

Of mice and men: Dems want the US to be like Denmark

Live Free or Die. How come Liberals never talk about Liberty?

Individual liberty erodes, one little trans-fat molecule at a time

The dignity trap of "positive liberty"

Liberty

"Freedom to" vs. "freedom from," the duties of citizenship, plus Dostoevsky

Shrinks, Thoreau, Pencils and Freedom

A few Sundays ago our preacher spoke provocatively about the cost of Grace. We want to think of Grace as being, by definition, a freebie. My pastor says not. Roger Kimball recently discusses the cost of freedom. Perfect.

Freedom and liberty are costly in money, lives, bruises, setbacks, and effort. And freedom is messy, too. All valuable things are costly, like relationships with man or God. Over time, the Left has actually managed to find a way to permit people's consciences to allow them to accept things and money from their neighbors which are not willingly given. Old-fashioned American dignity would not permit that.

In the end, the issue is whether we, as citizens, want to pay the price, or whether we want somebody else to pay for it like the old bowl of lentils. There is no free lentil lunch.

The infant in all of us wants everything good to be free to us, like mother's milk. If adults want to live in freedom, they need to get beyond that, because liberty is not for babies. Good things are costly.

Related: Popular Dictators at Econlog, and The Allure of Tyranny by Stephens at Opinion Journal.

A caveat: This is the sort of piece that I am always reluctant to write. I write this as a favor to our Editor but, in general, I am a skeptic about making any depth psychological speculations about groups of people, or about anyone I do not know in depth. It is all too easy to say that anyone who disagrees with me about something is either crazy or stupid, and that is not the respectful American way - nor is it necessarily accurate either.

What are we to make of this report from Gallup?

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

Dems see themselves as more mentally/emotionally impaired. (In an egregious logical error (cum hoc ergo propter hoc), the article suggests an independent causal relationship wherein party identification effects emotional well-being.)

Although I have no idea about whether a self-report of "mental health" has any validity at all, I would speculate that Republicans, statistically, with the Conservative and Libertarian flavorings of many Republicans, may tend to be more optimistic, hopeful, self-reliant, and to feel less needy and to feel less deprived. In other words, happier and probably better-adjusted people.

That is pure speculation, but it matches my personal experience that Lefies tend to be more bitter and dissatisfied - also with no relationship to income, education, church-going or age.

Externalization is a dangerous defence mechanism. It distorts reality by permitting a person to imagine that happiness and peace of mind - and likewise unhappiness - are usually generated externally rather than from within.

Also, as I have mentioned in the past, I see a difference in the "transference" towards government between Conservatives and others. I think that those who are more prone to unconscious parental transferences are more likely to turn to, rely upon, and to trust or hope to trust, the State. Am eagerness for childlike transferences in adulthood is not a predictor of emotional well-being.

Conservative-Libertarian types like me, I think, tend to view the people involved in politics and the State as being at least if not more venal, self-serving, corrupt, egotistical, foolish and ineffective as other areas of human endeavor like business, academia, non-profits, etc.

I like to think that this view has been arrived at through a lifetime of experience, a lifetime's interest in history and public affairs, and repeated (very educational) disappointments and disillusionments during my foolishly naive, idealistic, Liberal youth. Experience and psychoanalytic training powerfully introduced me to the dark side of human nature - against my will.

Yes, mine is the old story: mugged by reality. Literally mugged too, once, by a couple of barbarians with a handgun, in Boston. Alas, I was innocent and unarmed at the time, and therefore unable to give them a little toxic-lead lesson about my view of reality and of citizenship.

"I gave at the office, pal." Boom!

I was invited by our editor to comment on a piece, Talking Back to Prozac, in the paleo-Commie and reliably long-winded NY Review of Books.

The essay/book review by Frederick Crews is semi-hysterically worried about antidepressants, but the real theme motivating the essay seems to be the astonishing and scandalous fact that Big Pharma makes money from developing and selling medicine.

Well, slap me with a mackeral and call me Mildred. That's terrible news. Maybe non-profits, or the government, or the UN should be developing the new treatments, and giving them away for free.

OK, one of the books, the one by Christopher Lane - How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, sounds like it makes some good points. Everything is pathologized today (and granted a fancy diagnosis to get insurance coverage) - and every child is supposed to be perfect. The assumption is that we/they could be, if only the government or somebody really smart ran the world, like the people at the New York Review of Books.

I don't have time to comment further, except to say that antidepressants - the older ones, and the SSRIs and the hybrids, have, overall, been a great boon to mankind. The point is correct that depression and anxiety disorders are not really a "chemical imbalance" - except in the case of true Bipolar Disorder (and not the faux bipolar disorder that everybody and their kid and cousin is diagnosed with these days). That would be equivalent to claiming that a headache is a Tylenol deficiency. Anxiety and depression are usually symptoms of complicated mental states - time-consuming, expensive, and often frustrating if not impossible to get a grip on.

Some people chose to try to get to the bottom of it, some choose the band-aid alone, and some people refuse medicine. It's a free country.

I have always valued Joyce McDougall's A Plea for a Measure of Abnormality: I am not a psycho-utopian, or any other kind of utopian, but I think we all should be grateful for what the drug companies do. Eliminating pain is God's work. And no, shyness is not a disease.

Feeling like a fraud or impostor is not a "syndrome," but it's a not-uncommon feeling, and sometimes it's a symptom.

Sometimes feeling fraudulent it can be a reflection of reality: many do not feel that they know all they should, or have all of the skills they believe they should have, to present themselves as sufficiently expert in something - and they might be right. That's the point Right Wing Prof is making in his piece about the "impostor syndrome" in academics. Feeling like an impostor can be simply the result of a forceful self-critique. For example: "Here I am applying for a job teaching literature, and I can't remember a darn thing about Beowulf."

Similarly, many people puff themselves up, polish their presentations to the world, to conceal their flaws and weaknesses and to exaggerate their strengths. It often makes sense in life to do so - to put one's best foot forward - but at some point it can also leave a person prone to feeling that his life is an act or a sham, with only the illusion of substance or authenticity. For examples, "I know I'm a coward, but I need the world to see me as brave," or "I know I'm no genius, but I need people to think I'm a sophisticated intellectual." (Related: our recent post on masquerades and Social Signaling)

Getting one's confidence in line with one's personal reality, one's potential, and one's achievements, without false humility and without false advertising, is not always easy.

There are also more neurotic reasons for a person to have, as a symptom, a feeling of fraudulence, such as masochistic self-doubt or failed narcissism, but I won't go into those right now.

Mirror neurons might help to explain empathy, and even autism. h/t, Flares

Almost everybody is diagnosed as Bipolar nowadays. h/t, Dr. X