Category Archives: Podcasts

Dramatizations of Freud’s Dora & the Wolf Man

1 Reply

BBC Radio 4 has produced dramatizations of two of Freud’s most famous cases: Dora and the Wolf Man. Only the audio of the former is available online for the next 5 days. The Wolf Man dramatization will air this Saturday, and should be available online afterwards. Descriptions of both programs from the Radio 4 website follow below.

Deborah Levy’s dramatisation of Sigmund Freud’s iconic case study ‘Dora’ translated by Shaun Whiteside.

1899 finds a father imploring Sigmund Freud to treat his daughter after discovering her intention to end her life. When Dora first comes to Freud she suffers from a loss of voice, a debilitating cough and a limp. Dream analysis is the key to unlocking the causes of Dora’s condition, and as Freud’s treatment continues, secrets, seduction and betrayal are uncovered.

Deborah Levy’s dramatisation of Sigmund Freud’s iconic case study ‘The Wolf Man- The History of an Infantile Neurosis’ translated by Shaun Whiteside.

It is 1910 when the depressed son of a wealthy Russian landowner arrives in Vienna. Sergei Pankejeff, 24 years old, is suffering from debilitating fears and phobias. Freud’s treatment of Pankejeff is centred around an enigmatic dream his patient had as a very young child; a dream of white wolves. Freud invites Sergei to return to his childhood as a means of understanding his current depression. Analysing the child inside the man Freud unlocks the meaning of the wolves that haunt Sergei’s dreams.

Go have a listen before it’s too late!

Share on Facebook

BBC Radio4: The Lobotomists

Leave a reply

After posting about BBC Radio4′s new program A History of the Brain earlier this week, we bring to your attention yet another BBC Radio4 production: The Lobotomists. To mark the 75th anniversary of the first lobotomy performed in the United States, the program explores the work of Portuguese doctor Egas Moniz who first developed the lobotomy (or leucotomy), as well as the work of neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon Sir Wylie McKissock, who took up the procedure in the United States and Britain respectively. The Lobotomists can be heard online here and AHP’s previous posts on Walter Freeman and lobotomies can be found here.

A lengthy description of The Lobotomists is available on the program’s website and reproduced below:

2011 marks a 75th anniversary that many would prefer to forget: of the first lobotomy in the US. It was performed by an ambitious young American neurologist called Walter Freeman. Over his career, Freeman went on to perform perhaps 3,000 lobotomies, on both adults and later on children. He often performed 10 procedures or more a day. Perhaps 40,000 patients in the US were lobotomised during the heyday of the operation – and an estimated 17,000 more in the UK.

This programme tells the story of three key figures in the strange history of lobotomy – and for the first time explores the popularity of lobotomy in the UK in detail.

The story starts in 1935 with a Portuguese doctor called Egas Moniz, who pioneered a radical surgical procedure on the brain. Continue reading →

Share on Facebook

BBC Radio4: A History of the Brain

Leave a reply

Starting today, BBC Radio4 is airing a 10-part series on the history of the brain. A History of the Brain, has been written and produced by historian of psychology Geoff Bunn (left), of Manchester Metropolitan University. As described on the program’s website,

Dr Geoff Bunn’s 10 part History of the Brain is a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe. From Neolithic times to the present day, Geoff journeys through the many ideas of what the brain is for and how it fulfils its functions. While referencing the core physiology and neuroscience, this is a cultural, not a scientific history. What soon becomes obvious is that our understanding of this most inscrutable organ has in all periods been coloured by the social and political expedients of the day no less than by the contemporary scope of scientific or biological exploration.

The first episode in the series, on the topic of trepanation, aired today and can currently be listened to online. Further episodes, each 15 minutes long, air weekdays at 1:45pm on BBC Radio4 and will be available online thereafter. Descriptions of the first 6 episodes in the series – all those airing this week, as well as the episode to air next Monday – are currently available on the program’s website:

In Episode 1: A Hole in the Head, the focus is on trepanation, the practice of drilling holes in the skull believing that such operations might correct physiological or spiritual problems. Trepanation reveals much about the understanding of the brain from Neolithic to recent times. The Ancient Egyptians, however, rarely trepanned, even though their Secret Book of the Physician, one of the oldest medical texts in the world, shows that they recognised how damage to the brain can paralyze limbs on opposite sides of the body. Believing the heart to be the core organ, they discarded the brain altogether at death, since it had no part to play in the afterlife.

In Episode 2: The Blood of The Gladiators, the focus is Ancient Greek scholarship, with Hippocrates’ astonishingly prescient belief in the brain as the chief organ of control and his debunking of the myth of the ‘sacred disease’ with his assertion that epilepsy was the result of natural causes. Yet the belief that a cure lay in the magical properties of blood persisted for centuries. Continue reading →

Share on Facebook

Roundtable Discussion: Psychoanalysis & Politics

Leave a reply

A round-table discussion on Psychoanalysis and Politics was held in London earlier this month on May 4th. Arranged by the Departments of Psychosocial Studies and of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck University of London, the Freud Museum, and the Raphael Samuel History Centre the discussion explored various facets of the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. The event included opening remarks and discussion by professor of modern history, Sally Alexander and three talks: Masculinity and its Vicissitudes in the early 20th Century, by historian Timothy Ashplant; Nazism and Psychoanalysis in the 1940s and beyond, by historian Daniel Pick; and Forms of Denial and Re-remembering, by psychologist Stephen Frosh. Complete audio of the event, including audience questions following the talks, can be both heard online and downloaded here.

Share on Facebook

The Anatomy of Melancholy on BBC’s In Our Time

Leave a reply

The most recent episode of BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time is on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, or The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. The program is described on its website as follows:

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Robert Burton’s masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy.

In 1621 the priest and scholar Robert Burton published a book quite unlike any other. The Anatomy of Melancholy brings together almost two thousand years of scholarship, from Ancient Greek philosophy to seventeenth-century medicine. Melancholy, a condition believed to be caused by an imbalance of the body’s four humours, was characterised by despondency, depression and inactivity. Burton himself suffered from it, and resolved to compile an authoritative work of scholarship on the malady, drawing on all relevant sources.

Despite its subject matter the Anatomy is an entertaining work, described by Samuel Johnson as the only book ‘that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.’ It also offers a fascinating insight into seventeenth-century medical theory, and influenced many generations of playwrights and poets.

With:

Julie Sanders
Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham

Mary Ann Lund
Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester

Erin Sullivan
Lecturer and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.

The episode can be heard online here.

Share on Facebook

Podcast: Discussions in the History of Psychology

Leave a reply

Fans of the This Week in the History of Psychology (TWITHOP) podcast series will be pleased to learn that another podcast in this vein has been made available online. Discussions on the History of Psychology is a new venture by TWITHOP producer Christopher Green. In the inaugural episode, recorded during last year’s Cheiron conference in Syracuse, Vincent (Vinny) Hevern of Le Moyne College, Robert (Bob) Kugelmann of the University of Dallas, and Henderikus (Hank) Stam of the University of Calgary sat down with with Chris Green to discuss the history of humanistic psychology.

The podcast discussion runs about 45 minutes in length and addresses the contributions of such seminal figures within humanistic psychology as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. This discussion of humanistic psychology may be of interest not only to historians of psychology, but also those who teach on the topic and their students. The full podcast can be heard online here.

Share on Facebook

Mind Changers: Tajfel’s Minimal Groups

Leave a reply

The BBC Radio 4 programme Mind Changers has just released an audio podcast, Henri Tajfel’s Minimal Groups.

Tajfel’s (right) 1970s research with minimal groups aimed to uncover the minimal conditions necessary for prejudice to develop. For the purposes of the study, participants were divided into two groups based on largely irrelevant information. Although the boys assigned to each group did not know the other group members, had no contact with them, and no expectation of contact with other group members in the future they nonetheless began to identify with their group and to demonstrate a preference for the group’s other members. The findings from Tajfel’s minimal group studies were instrumental to his development, along with John Turner, of social identity theory (SIT), which holds that individuals identify with the groups to which they belong and that they have a tendency to advantage their ingroup.

The Mind Changers podcast on Tajfel’s minimal group research is described as follows:

Henri Tajfel’s interest in identity and group prejudice was sparked by his own experiences as a Polish Jew during the Second World War. As Professor of Social Psychology at Bristol university he developed a series of experiments known as the Minimal Group Studies, the purpose of which was to establish the minimum basis on which people could be made to identify with their own group and show bias against another.

Claudia Hammond re-visits the Minimal Group Studies of 1971, where Tajfel and his collaborators got boys at a comprehensive school to view abstract paintings and then assigned them to the ‘Klee’ group or the ‘Kandinsky’ group, apparently because of the preferences they declared, but in fact entirely at random. Even though the boys didn’t know who else was allocated to their group, they consistently awarded more points to their own group than to the other. So even though who belonged to which group was meaningless, they always tended to favour their own. Continue reading →

Share on Facebook

Mind Changers: Marshmallow Study Podcast

1 Reply

The BBC Radio 4 programme Mind Changers has just released an audio podcast, Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Study. Mischel (left), currently Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology at Columbia University, began his now famous “marshmallow experiments” in the late 1960s and 1970s. In these experiments children were offered a marshmallow or, if they would wait, two marshmallows. Whether a child could resist eating the marshmallow, and the length of time over which they could delay gratification were then recorded. These findings were then analyzed in relation to the child’s future success. The findings from Mischel’s marshmallow experiments have been influential with respect to decision-making, self-control, and “willpower” research. The Mind Changers podcast on Mischel’s research is described as follows:

The psychologist Walter Mischel made his name with his ground-breaking book, Personality and Assessment, in 1968. He followed up with a classic experiment which is still running today.

Seeking to understand how the impulsive behaviour of his own three daughters at age 3 became increasingly regulated and planned by age 4 or 5, Mischel set up his experiment in delayed gratification at the Bing Nursery at Stanford University. Over 6 years he asked more than 300 4-year-olds to decide whether to have one marshmallow right now, or wait and get two, and he examined the cognitive processes which enabled some children to wait.

Hearing by chance how these 4-year olds were getting on in high school years later, Mischel realized that whether or not they’d been able to resist eating one marshmallow in order to get two was now showing a strong correlation with their achievements at school, and even with whether or not they were over-weight. Following the same cohort at 10-year intervals, he’s shown that those who were able to hang on for two marshmallow were less likely to drop out of college, use cocaine, or even go to prison. Continue reading →

Share on Facebook

Interview with Antidepressant-Critic Irving Kirsch

1 Reply

Irving Kirsch, Ph.D.The website behaviortherapist.com has posted an interview with Irving Kirsch (pictured right), the well-known critic of the efficacy of antidepressant pharmaceuticals. Kirsch made a name for himself with a series of studies that showed that most of the effect commonly attributed to antidepressants is actually a placebo effect. Although the difference between the effect of antidepressants and placebo alone attains statistical significance, the size of the difference is, Kirsch says, “vanishingly small.” He also argues that this near-non-effect holds for different levels of depression, and for different classes of antidepressants,such as SSRIs (e.g., Prozac) and  SSRE(nhancer)s. Continue reading →

Share on Facebook

Origins of Personal Construct Psychology

Leave a reply

The April 10th episode of All in the Mind, a podcast series produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), explores the origins of psychologist George Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology, including the philosophical antecedents of such a psychology. Presented by science journalist Natasha Mitchell, “You, the Scientist! Personal Construct Psychology” asks,

What makes you ‘You’? Personal Construct Psychology argues everyone constructs and tests their own internal models of reality, and that therapists shouldn’t cast themselves as the all-knowing ‘expert’. We are all scientists of the self. This week, confrontations with a shocking serial killer, the philosophical heritage of psychology and the moral limits of acceptance.

All in the Mind‘s “You, the Scientist! Personal Construct Psychology” can be heard online here.

Share on Facebook