Shrinkrap

Jamie Elkon Blog

Author: Jamie Elkon

  • Lost and found

    My mother was a complex, wounded woman and when I lost her as a young boy the pain robbed me of a part of my internal ‘density’. No longer able to use her for dialysis, to make sense of the world for me, I began to grow apart, diffuse. My legs grew thin, my spine curled to protect my heart and I developed asthma as I literally struggled to catch my breath. The deeper wound was the sense of betrayal I felt in the natural order of the Universe. I swore and cast fury to the heavens and tried to crush faith beneath my heel. But in spite of myself, no matter how betrayed and abandoned I felt, I never lost my capacity to love.

    Many of the psychologists I know have been deeply wounded by life. Perhaps that is what has brought us to this work. A pack of hungry, wounded healers. There is no doubt that the ability to relate intimately to the often eviscerating pain of the human condition has forged a deep empathic link within, but it also allows me to appreciate and seek out joy.

    Sometimes as I write my ‘mourning’ pages, I reflect wryly on the powerful, hypnotic intensity of my underlying complexes. I have always been attracted to ‘complex’,wounded women (the link does not escape me). At the first hint of attraction, the young boy scout rescuer within perks up and gathers his first aid kit and sets off on yet another doomed escapade to rescue a fragment of his lost mother in another. How cliched, a therapist with mother issues…

    As I move into mid-life, my repetitions have become painfully clear and even though the complex plays its flute, I am more able to move my limbs in the direction of healing. Its power is finally waning, now though, it’s a question of courage, for to discover ones truth is one thing but to have the balls to live in alignment with it is quite another.

  • The cloud appreciation society.

    Bugger…was the word I woke up with at 3am, a rather odd word to wake up with, rather like waking up next to a stranger and wondering what they’re doing in your bed. This sense of dislocation lingers as I sit with you and my warm cup of tea, as if part of me is still dreaming. I wonder who else is awake at this time? Criminals, miscreants, perverts, lovers, coke heads, the broken hearted, the lonely, the jet lagged, emergency room staff, someone sitting holding the hand of a loved one as they slip away, a newborn’s first breath. So many stories being told all the time, even at this time.

    As I watch my mind move it seems that I am rediscovering a sense of being marveled by the world, like a young curious boy. It may be linked to my growing practice of the art of not taking it all too seriously and letting things go. Perhaps I then have more space inside of me to wonder at the sheer infinite number of curiosities in this world. I am watching myself shed my absolutes, my certainties, my fear. I’m exploring the space between black and white and its certainly not grey.

    Today I’m going to find a beautiful place with lots of trees where I can lie down on soft grass and watch clouds pass overhead. How are you going to spend your precious self today?

  • A thought and some inspiration for wednesday

    A thought and some inspiration for wednesday

    A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor

     

    And a bit of fun. (An important thing to have!)

    http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_pretor_pinney_cloudy_with_a_chance_of_joy.html

  • Exquisite Courage

    Having just returned from an intensive immersion weekend retreat just outside Cape Town, it feels important to briefly reflect on what happened and what is going on inside me before it evaporates.

    I went with a diverse group of ‘seekers’ that i have have known for just over three months and this was an opportunity to spend 3 full days with them. What never fails to amaze me on these types of experiences (I have done my fair share of experiential weekends in an effort to catch a glimpse of myself), is the tenacity and courage of the Human Spirit.

    I was the only man on the retreat which was an incredible opportunity to be with women in an emotionally intimate way without it being contaminated by anything sexual. Rather, the space and containment lent itself to the spiritual and offered a fragment of what true relatedness between the sexes can be, a meeting of loving, creative and resilient energies.

    There were moments of sharing from a place of exquisite, poignant, courageous vulnerability. Tears ( which can mean so many different things, grief, relief, knowledge…) flowed as we each reluctantly cracked open our defences and offered hidden parts of ourselves to each other. It was a relief to be there not as a therapist, but as another human looking to let go, integrate and evolve. Those few days were another powerful reminder of just how similar our internal landscapes are, how each of us compensates for our psychic wounds in different but agonizingly familiar ways. How we all flow towards healing, even if we struggle against the current.

    There are many of us who are private and experience this kind of relational intimacy as excruciatingly painful. Although I push myself into these spaces, they are certainly not comfortable, but the release of the repressed psycho-spiritual dross created through denial, repression and avoidance allows for more circulation through our psyche and moves stale energy through the system into the open. I often retreat to isolated places on my own to have deep conversations with myself but there is something extraordinarily powerful about having the courage to do it in a group.

    And now, as I return once more to my vocation, I continue to hear life narratives that never fail to humble me, to you all, I salute you…

  • Packing for the heartland of fear.

    Suppose that what you fear
    could be trapped,
    and held in Paris.
    Then you would have
    the courage to go
    everywhere in the world.
    All the directions of the compass
    open to you,
    except the degree east or west
    of true north
    that lead to Paris.
    Still, you wouldn’t dare
    put your toes
    smack dab on the city line.
    You’re not really willing
    to stand on a mountainside
    miles away,
    and watch the Paris lights
    come up at night.
    Just to be on the safe side,
    You decide to stay away completely
    out of France.
    But then danger
    seems too close
    even to those boundaries,
    and you feel
    the timid part of you
    covering the whole globe again.
    You need the kind of friend
    who learns your secret and says,
    “See Paris first.”

    Truman Cooper

  • An Ode To Insomnia

    I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be clean, the floorboards of their skulls well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of their bed. The night sometimes feels like the hardest time to be alive and 2:47 a.m. knows all my secrets.

    So I got up and put on my trusty slightly battered head torch and stole out of the house quietly and peddled the silent streets. Perplexed sentries blinked uncertainly as I waved. I roamed my garden and put my fingers into the soil.
    I drew a picture of my dream fragments and tried to bake a cake. And now as the silent hours fade with a low hum, my eyelids start to droop and I notice that i have flour on my sleeve.

  • The Pursuit of Happiness

    The Pursuit of Happiness

    What Happy People Do Differently.

    One of life’s sharpest paradoxes is that the key to satisfaction is doing things that feel risky, uncomfortable, and occasionally bad.

    The secret of happiness is a concern of growing importance in the modern era, as increased financial security has given many the time to focus on self-growth. No longer hunter-gatherers concerned with where to find the next kill, we worry instead about how to live our best lives. Happiness books have become a cottage industry; personal-development trainings are a bigger business than ever.

    The pursuit of happiness is not a uniquely Western phenomenon either—in a study of more than 10,000 participants from 48 countries, psychologists Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia discovered that people from every corner of the globe rated happiness as being more important than other highly desirable personal outcomes, such as having meaning in life, becoming rich, and getting into heaven.

    The fever for happiness is spurred on, in part, by a growing body of research suggesting that happiness does not just feel good but is good for you—it’s been linked to all sorts of benefits, from higher earnings and better immune-system functioning to increased creativity (although Van Gough may have disagreed).

    Most people accept that true happiness is more than a jumble of intensely positive feelings—it’s probably better described as a sense of “peace” or “contentedness.” Regardless of how it’s defined, happiness is partly emotional—and therefore tethered to the truth that each individual’s feelings have a natural set point, like a thermostat, which genetic baggage and personality play a role in establishing. Yes, positive events give you a boost, but before long you swing back toward your natural set point.

    True happiness lasts longer than a burst of dopamine, however, so it’s important to think of it as something more than just emotion. Your sense of happiness also includes cognitive reflections, such as when you give a mental thumbs-up or thumbs-down to your best friend’s sense of humor, the shape of your nose, or the quality of your marriage. Only a bit of this sense has to do with how you feel; the rest is the product of mental arithmetic, when you compute your expectations, your ideals, your acceptance of what you can’t change—and countless other factors. That is, happiness is a state of mind, and as such, can be intentional and strategic.

    Regardless of your emotional set point, your everyday habits and choices—from the way you operate in a friendship to how you reflect on your life decisions—can push the needle on your well-being. Recent scholarship documenting the unique habits of those who are happiest in life even provides something of an instruction manual for emulating them. It turns out that activities that lead us to feel uncertainty, discomfort, and even a dash of guilt are associated with some of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences of people’s lives. Happy people, it seems, engage in a wide range of counterintuitive habits that seem, well, downright unhappy.

    The Real Rewards Of Risk

    When anxiety is an optimal state

    It’s a Friday night and you’re planning on meeting friends for dinner. If you want to ensure that you’ll go home full, you grab pizza or burgers. If you instead pick a cuisine you’ve never tried before (Ethiopian—sure, why not?) you run the risk that you won’t like your injera and wat that much—but you might also uncover a surprising delight.

    Truly happy people seem to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that sustained happiness is not just about doing things that you like. It also requires growth and adventuring beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone. Happy people, are, simply put, curious. In a 2007 study, Todd Kashdan and Colorado State psychologist Michael Steger found that when participants monitored their own daily activities, as well as how they felt, over the course of 21 days, those who frequently felt curious on a given day also experienced the most satisfaction with their life—and engaged in the highest number of happiness-inducing activities, such as expressing gratitude to a colleague or volunteering to help others.

    Yet curiosity—that pulsing, eager state of not knowing—is fundamentally an anxious state. When, for instance, psychologist Paul Silvia showed research participants a variety of paintings, calming images by Claude Monet and Claude Lorrain evoked happy feelings, whereas the mysterious, unsettling works by Egon Schiele and Francisco Goya evoked curiosity.

    Curiosity, it seems, is largely about exploration—often at the price of momentary happiness. Curious people generally accept the notion that while being uncomfortable and vulnerable is not an easy path, it is the most direct route to becoming stronger and wiser. In fact, a closer look at the study by Kashdan and Steger suggests that curious people invest in activities that cause them discomfort as a springboard to higher psychological peaks.

    Of course, there are plenty of instances in life where the best way to increase your satisfaction is to simply do what you know feels good, whether it’s putting your favorite song on the jukebox or making plans to see your best friend. But from time to time, it’s worth seeking out an experience that is novel, complicated, uncertain, or even upsetting—whether that means finally taking the leap and doing karaoke for the first time or hosting a screening of your college friend’s art-house film. The happiest people opt for both so that they can benefit, at various times, from each.

    A Blind Eye To Life’s Vicissitudes

    The benefit of seeing the forest but not the trees

    A standard criticism of happy people is that they’re not realistic—they sail through life blissfully unaware of the world’s ills and problems. Satisfied people are less likely to be analytical and detail-oriented. A study led by University of New South Wales psychologist Joseph Forgas found that dispositionally happy people—those who have a general leaning toward the positive—are less skeptical than others. They tend to be uncritically open toward strangers and thus can be particularly gullible to lies and deceit. Think of the happy granny who is overcharged at the car dealership by the smiling salesperson compared with more discerning, slightly less upbeat consumers.

    Certainly having an eye for the finer points can be helpful when navigating the complicated social world of colleagues, acquaintances, and dates—and it’s something the less sunny among us bring to bear. In fact, Virginia Commonwealth University psychologist Paul Andrews has argued that depression is actually adaptive. Depressed people, the logic goes, are more likely than others to reflect on and process their experiences—and thereby gain insight into themselves or the human condition—albeit at an emotional price. A little attention to detail helps with a more realistic evaluation of the social world.

    Yet too much attention to detail can interfere with basic day-to-day functioning, as evidenced by research from Queen’s University psychologist Kate Harkness, who found that people in a depressed mood were more likely to notice minute changes in facial expressions. Meanwhile, happy people tend to overlook such second-to-second alterations—a flash of annoyance, a sarcastic grin. You probably recognize this phenomenon from interactions you’ve had with your partner. While in a bad mood we tend to notice the tiniest shifts and often can’t seem to disengage from a fight (“I saw you roll your eyes at me! Why did you do that!?!”), whereas when we’re in a good mood, we tend to brush off tiny sleights (“You tease me, but I know you love being around me”). The happiest people have a natural emotional protection against getting sucked in by the intense gravitational pull of little details.

    Similarly, the happiest people possess a devil-may-care attitude about performance. In a review of the research literature by Oishi and his colleagues, the happiest people—those who scored a 9 or 10 out of 10 on measures of life satisfaction—tended to perform less well than moderately happy people in accomplishments such as grades, class attendance, or work salaries. In short, they were less conscientious about their performance; to them, sacrificing some degree of achievement seems to be a small price to pay for not having to sweat the small stuff.

    This is not to say that we should take a laissez-faire attitude to all our responsibilities; paying attention to detail is helpful. But too much focus on minutiae can be exhausting and paralyzing. The happiest among us (cheerfully) accept that striving for perfection—and a perfectly smooth interaction with everyone at all times—is a loser’s bet.

    The Unjealous Friend

    We’re buoyed by others’ good fortune

    You’ve heard it a million times: The definition of a good friend is one who’s there to lend a hand in times of need. In a recent Gallup World Poll, the biggest predictor of happiness at work was whether or not a person had a best friend they could call on for support. It makes sense, then, that we often assume that a good friend is the one who takes us out for beer and sympathy after we get passed up for a promotion—or that we’re being one when we pick up our buddy at the bar after his post-layoff binge leaves him too drunk to drive.

    Indeed, such support softens the blow of difficult life circumstances by helping the sufferer move past them. Still, new research reveals a less intuitive idea about friendship: The happiest people are the ones who are present when things go right for others—and whose own wins are regularly celebrated by their friends as well.

    Support for this idea comes from psychologist Shelly Gable, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues, whose research revealed that when romantic partners fail to make a big deal out of each other’s success, the couple is more likely to break up. On the flipside, when partners celebrate each other’s accomplishments, they’re more likely to be satisfied and committed to their relationship, enjoying greater love and happiness.

    Outside of your primary relationship, however, why would capitalizing on others’ success make you happier? Why should you support your born-lucky buddy by listening to him detail yet another sexual conquest when you’re spending far too many Friday nights reading zombie comic books? For one thing, he really does need you. The process of discussing a positive experience with a responsive listener actually changes the memory of the event—so after telling you about it, your friend will remember that night with the model as even more positive than it was, and the encounter will be easier for him to recall a few years down the line when he’s been dumped. But equally important, you’ll get to “piggyback” on your friend’s positivity. Just as we feel happier when we spend money on gifts or charitable contributions rather than on ourselves, we feel happier after spending valuable time listening to the accomplishments of friends.

    In life, it seems, there are an abundance of Florence Nightingales waiting to show their heroism. What’s precious and scarce are those people who can truly share in others’ joy and gains without envy. So while it might be kind to send flowers to your friend when she’s in the hospital for surgery, you’ll both derive more satisfaction out of the bouquet you send her when she finishes medical school or gets engaged.

    A Time For Every Feeling

    The upside of negative emotions

    The most psychologically healthy people might inherently grasp the importance of letting some things roll off their backs, yet that doesn’t mean that they deny their own feelings or routinely sweep problems under the rug. Rather, they have an innate understanding that emotions serve as feedback—an internal radar system providing information about what’s happening (and about to happen) in our social world.

    Happy, flourishing people don’t hide from negative emotions. They acknowledge that life is full of disappointments and confront them head on, often using feelings of anger effectively to stick up for themselves or those of guilt as motivation to change their own behavior. This nimble mental shifting between pleasure and pain, the ability to modify behavior to match a situation’s demands, is known as psychological flexibility.

    For example, instead of letting quietly simmering jealousy over your girlfriend’s new buddy erode your satisfaction with your relationship, accept your feelings as a signal, which allows you to employ other strategies of reacting that are likely to offer greater dividends. These include compassion (recognizing that your girlfriend has unmet needs to be validated) and mindful listening (being curious about what interests her).

    The ability to shift mental states as circumstances demand turns out to be a fundamental aspect of well-being. Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno found, for instance, that in the aftermath of 9/11, the most flexible people living in New York City during the attacks—those who were angry at times but could also conceal their emotions when necessary—bounced back more quickly and enjoyed greater psychological and physical health than their less adaptable counterparts.

    Opportunities for flexible responding are everywhere: A newlywed who has just learned that she is infertile may hide her sense of hopelessness from her mother but come clean to her best friend; people who have experienced a trauma might express their anger around others who share similar sentiments but conceal it from friends who abide by an attitude of forgiveness. The ability to tolerate the discomfort that comes from switching mind-sets depending on whom we’re with and what we’re doing allows us to get optimal results in every situation.

    Similar to training for a triathlon, learning the skill of emotional discomfort is a task best taken on in increasing increments. For example, instead of immediately distracting yourself with an episode of The Walking Dead or pouring yourself a whiskey the next time you have a heated disagreement with your teenage son, try simply tolerating the emotion for a few minutes. Over time, your ability to withstand day-to-day negative emotions will expand.

    The Well-Being Balancing Act

    Pleasure and purpose work together

    Even the most ardent strivers will agree that a life of purpose that is devoid of pleasures is, frankly, no fun. Happy people know that allowing yourself to enjoy easy momentary indulgences that are personally rewarding—taking a long, leisurely bath, vegging out with your daughter’s copy of The Hunger Games, or occasionally skipping your Saturday workout in favor of catching the soccer match on TV—is a crucial aspect of living a satisfying life. Still, if you’re primarily focused on activities that feel good in the moment, you may miss out on the benefits of developing a clear purpose. Purpose is what drives us to take risks and make changes—even in the face of hardship and when sacrificing short-term happiness.

    Working to uncover how happy people balance pleasure and purpose, Colorado State’s Steger and his colleagues have shown that the act of trying to comprehend and navigate our world generally causes us to deviate from happiness. After all, this mission is fraught with tension, uncertainty, complexity, short bursts of intrigue and excitement, and conflicts between the desire to feel good and the desire to make progress toward what we care about most. Yet overall, people who are the happiest tend to be superior at sacrificing short-term pleasures when there is a good opportunity to make progress toward what they aspire to become in life.

    If you want to envision a happy person’s stance, imagine one foot rooted in the present with mindful appreciation of what one has—and the other foot reaching toward the future for yet-to-be-uncovered sources of meaning. Indeed, research by neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison has revealed that making advances toward achievement of our goals not only causes us to feel more engaged, it actually helps us tolerate any negative feelings that arise during the journey.

    Nobody would pretend that finding purpose is easy or that it can be done in a simple exercise, but thinking about which activities you found most rewarding and meaningful in the past week, what you’re good at and often recognized for, what experiences you’d be unwilling to give up, and which ones you crave more time for can help. Also, notice whether your answers reflect something you feel that you ought to say as opposed to what you truly love. For example, being a parent doesn’t necessarily mean that spending time with your children is the most energizing, meaningful part of your life—and it’s important to accept that. Lying to yourself is one of the biggest barriers to creating purpose. The happiest people have a knack for being honest about what does and does not energize them—and in addition to building in time for sensory pleasures each day, they are able to integrate the activities they most care about into a life of purpose and satisfaction.

    There’s More To Life Than Being Happy

    Nobel Laureate Albert Schweitzer once quipped that “happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.” Despite the apparent luster of achieving a predominantly positive state of mind, critics argue that the pursuit of happiness is a misguided goal—it’s fleeting, superficial, and hedonistic.

    Research backs up some of these claims. Studies by psychologist Ed Diener show that people actually pay an emotional price for intensely positive events because later ones—even moderately pleasant ones—seem less shiny by contrast. (Sure, getting a raise feels terrific, but it might mean you fail to fully appreciate your son’s performance in the school play that afternoon.)

    Perhaps more damning is a series of studies led by University of California, Berkeley psychologist Iris Mauss, which revealed that people who place a premium on being happy report feeling more lonely. Yes, being happy might be healthy—but craving happiness is a slippery slope.

    As well-being researchers, we don’t deny the importance of happiness—but we’ve also concluded that a well-lived life is more than just one in which you feel “up.” The good life is best construed as a matrix that includes happiness, occasional sadness, a sense of purpose, playfulness, and psychological flexibility, as well autonomy, mastery, and belonging.

    While some people will rank high in happiness and social belonging, others will find they’ve attained a sense of mastery and achievement. This approach appreciates that not only do people differ in their happiness matrices—but they can shift in their own respective matrices from moment to moment.

    For instance, your sense of autonomy might spike dramatically when, as a college freshman, you shift from living under your parents’ rules to the freedom of dorm life—and then plummet a decade later when you become a parent and must sacrifice even the ability to choose your hours of sleep. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that coeds have greater well-being than new parents. Rather, each group is experiencing a unique flavor.

    Parsing the good life into a matrix is more than linguistic trickery; shifting toward a mixed-bag view of well-being opens more paths to achieving a personally desirable life. Enjoying success in even one area of the matrix can be a cause for celebration.

    And finally, Happiness By Numbers…

    40

    The percentage of our capacity for happiness that is within our power to change, according to University of California, Riverside researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky.

    85

    Number of residents out of every 100 who report feeling positive emotions in Panama and Paraguay, the most positive countries in the world.

    20

    The percentage of the U.S. population wealthy enough that their feelings of happiness are not affected by fluctuations in Americans’fiscal cycle.

  • A thought for today

    A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Since my house burned down, I now own a better view of the rising moon. -Mizuta Masahide, poet and samurai (1657-1723)

  • Let’s talk about sex…

    I often find it fascinating how sensitive many of us are when talking about sex. In gym changing rooms I listen to men talking about their sexual conquests, while others steal anxious glimpses of their genitals. I hear the repressed homoerotic impulses of many men locked in loveless heterosexual relationships. I watch some women trying unsuccessfully to cover their latest installment of fifty shades with their hands as they wait for their children at the school gate.

    Sexual curiosity is natural and yet historically, society has ruthlessly suppressed our healthy exploration and expression of sexuality, often with dire, sometimes tragic consequences (think Catholic Church, sexual violence, the proliferation of extreme pornography), it with this in mind that I set off looking for studies that would penetrate through our repressive cognitive defenses into the often confusing world of female sexuality. I found a couple but the following study was by far the most entertaining…

    ” A growing body of scientific research that suggests that female sexuality is an underestimated force that is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emo­tional intimacy and safety, and is not, as is often believed, better made for monogamy than the male libido. But much remains to be understood. Daniel Bergner’s recent overview of research in the field, What Do Women Want?, reports on a variety of surprising new studies. In one such study, both heterosexual and homosexual men and women were shown a variety of different pornography videos. Their reactions to the videos were gauged by both self-reporting via keypad and scientific instruments measuring their physiological reactions. In the case of men, there were close correlations between the two. For the women, there were wide discrepancies. Why the mysterious difference? One theory is that society has given men more freedom to be honest — even with themselves — about their sexuality than women:

    “This is what [Dr. Meredith Chivers’] female subjects did as they sat on a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small, dimly lit lab in Toronto, where she first told me about her experiments. Semireclining on the La-Z-Boy, each subject watched an array of porn on an old, bulky computer monitor. The two-inch-long glassine tube of the plethysmograph beams light against the vaginal walls and reads the illumination that bounces back. In this way, it measures the blood flow to the vagina. Surges of blood stir a process called vaginal transudation, the seeping of moisture through the cells of the canal’s lining. So, indirectly, the plethysmograph gauges vaginal wetness. It was a way to get past the obfuscations of the mind, the interference of the brain’s repressive upper regions, and to find out, at a primitive level, what turns women on. …

    “Women with women, men with men, men with women, lone men or women masturbating — Chivers’s objective num­bers, tracking what’s technically called vaginal pulse amplitude, soared no matter who was on the screen and regardless of what they were doing, to each other, to themselves. Lust was cata­lyzed; blood flow spiked; capillaries throbbed indiscriminately. The strength of the pulsings did hold a few distinctions, varia­tions in degree, one of them curious: [the women were also shown the species of ape known as bonobos having sex and] the humping bonobos didn’t spur as much blood as the human porn, but with an odd exception. Among all women, straight as well as gay, [a] chiseled man ambling alone on the beach — an Adonis, nothing less — lost out to the fornicating apes. What to make of such strangeness?

    “There was some further discrimination on the part of the lesbians. Over the series of studies Chivers did — to be sure her data were no fluke — they were a little selective; amplitude leapt more during videos starring women. Yet the lesbians’ blood rushed hard during scenes of gay male porn. When Chivers analyzed the evidence, transmitted from vaginal membranes to sensor to software, when she set it out in graphs of vertical bars, the female libido looked omnivorous.

    “The keypad contradicted the plethysmograph, contradicted it entirely. Minds denied bodies. The self-reports announced in­difference to the bonobos. But that was only for starters. When the films were of women touching themselves or enmeshed with each other, the straight subjects said they were a lot less excited than their genitals declared. During the segments of gay male sex, the ratings of the heterosexual women were even more muted — even less linked to what was going on between their legs. Chivers was staring at an objective and subjective divide, too, in the data from the lesbians: low keypad scores whenever men were having sex or masturbating in the films.

    “She put heterosexual and homosexual males through the same procedure. Strapped to their type of plethysmograph, their genitals spoke in ways not at all like the women’s — they responded in predictable patterns she labeled ‘category spe­cific.’ The straight men did swell slightly as they watched men masturbating and slightly more as they stared at men together, but this was dwarfed by their physiological arousal when the films featured women alone, women with men, and, above all, women with women. Category specific applied still more to the gay males. Their readings jumped when men masturbated, rocketed when men had sex with men, and climbed, though less steeply, when the clips showed men with women. For them, the plethysmograph rested close to dead when women owned the screen.

    “As for the bonobos, any thought that something acutely primitive in male sexuality would be roused by the mounting animals proved wrong. The genitals of both gay and straight men reacted to these primates the same way they did to [mere] landscapes, to the pannings of mountains and plateaus. And with the men, the objective and subjective were in sync. Bodies and minds told the same story. How to explain the conflict between what the women claimed and what their genitals said? …

    “The discord within Chivers’s readings converged with the results of a study done by Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University, [whose work demonstrates that men are much more honest about their sexual experiences and preferences than women. She] was emphatic about the contortions imposed, the compressions enforced. ‘Being a human who is sexual,’ she said, ‘who is allowed to be sexual, is a freedom ac­corded by society much more readily to males than to females.’ ”

    Daniel Bergner
    Title: What Do Women want
    2013.

  • To sleep, perchance to dream…

    In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud argued that, far from being random events, dreams were full of hidden meanings that were projections of the dreamer’s secret hopes and wishes. In effect, Freud identified the unconscious, a realm of thought beyond the mind’s control that colours our desires and intentions. Every night when a person went to sleep, Freud said, the mind cloaked these thoughts in symbols that could be uncovered and interpreted with the help of a therapist. Without dreams, our unconscious concerns would be so overwhelming that few of us could function. …

    Perhaps unfairly, Freud’s theories soon became reduced to the view that everything in a dream had a sexual meaning that reflected and uncovered long-repressed urges from childhood. One review of Freudian literature found that by the middle of the twentieth century, analysts had identified 102 stand-ins for the penis in dreams and ninety-five symbols for the vagina. Even opposites — flying and falling — were called symbols for sex. Freudians pointed out fifty-five images for the act of sex itself, twenty-five icons of masturbation, thirteen figures of breasts, and twelve symbols for castration.

    In the mid-twentieth century, dream research became stagnant until a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland named Calvin Hall decided to catalogue what people dream about. Hall spent more than thirty years gathering dream reports from everyone who would share them. By the time he died in 1985, Hall had synopses of more than fifty thousand dreams from people of all age groups and nationalities. From this large database, he created a coding system that essentially treated each dream like it was a short story. He recorded, among other things, the dream’s setting, its number of characters and their genders, any dialogue, and whether what happened in the dream was pleasant or frightening. He also noted basics about each dreamer as well, such as age, gender, and where the person lived.

    Hall introduced the world of dream interpretation to the world of data. He pored through his dream collection, bringing numbers and statistical rigor into a field that had been split into two extremes. He tested what was the most likely outcome of, say, dreaming about work. Would the dreamer be happy? Angry? And would the story hew close to reality or would the people in the dream act strange and out of character? If there were predictable outcomes, then maybe dreams followed some kind of pattern. Maybe they even mattered.

    Hall’s conclusion was the opposite Freud’s: far from being full of hidden symbols, most dreams were remarkably straightforward and predictable. Dream plots were consistent enough that, just by knowing the cast of characters in a dream, Hall could forecast what would happen with surprising accuracy. A dream featuring a man whom the dreamer doesn’t know in real life, for instance, almost always entails a plot in which the stranger is aggressive. Adults tend to dream of other people they know, while kids usually dream of animals. About three out of every four characters in a man’s dream will be other men, while women tend to encounter an equal number of males and females. Most dreams take place in the dreamers’ homes or offices and, if they have to go somewhere, they drive cars or walk there. And not surprisingly, college students dream about sex more often than middle-aged adults.

    Hall’s research deflated the idea that dreams are surreal.

    The plot may not follow any logical order and characters may have strange requests, but the dream world isn’t that far from reality. More important, dreams tend to be unpleasant. Hall found that the average dream is filled with characters who were aggressive, mean, or violent. Dreamland, in short, sounds a lot like the worst days of primary school.

    But disagreement remains over the purpose of dreams. In one theory, Ernest Hartmann, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine sees dreams as a form of built-in nocturnal therapy. In dreams, he says, the mind takes what is new or bothersome and blends it into what the brain already knows, making the new information seem less novel or threatening. Hartmann argues that the life of early man was filled with the kind of traumas — watching friends gored by animals with sharp tusks or fall through holes in the ice and drown, just to give you two possibilities — that few people experience today. It is possible that those who were able to regain their emotional balance after living through a traumatic event and processing the material in dreams were more likely to survive over the long run than those who consciously ruminated on the negative effects of trauma.