Tag Archives: BBC

Weekend Listening with the CBC and BBC

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podcasts combinedA couple of history of psychology related pieces cropped up from podcast land just in time to shift into gear for the weekend. For your listening pleasure, from CBC Radio’s Ideas and BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, episodes on transcultural psychiatry and the early history of Bethlem Royal Hospital, respectively.

 

CBC’s Ideas with Peter Kennedy: Like I Was Talking to Myself in the Mirror 

Synopsis: Early in the twentieth century German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin travelled to Indonesia to see how mental illnesses there compared to what he knew back home. Transcultural psychiatry was born. Today McGill University is a world leader in the research and practice of a branch of psychiatry with links to anthropology, cultural studies and family therapy. David Gutnick steps into a world where treatment relies less on medication and more on talk and understanding.

Click here for highlight clips and reels, and info on the feature psychiatrists.

 

BBC’s In Our Time: Bedlam

Synopsis: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the early years of Bedlam, the name commonly used for the London hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem outside Bishopsgate.

Click here for links and further reading.

History and the Hoffman Report: A Round-Up

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Chances are you, like us, have been following the fall out from the American Psychological Association’s Hoffman Report, which details how the organization colluded with the United States government to ensure psychologists remained part of its torture program. While there are a ton of opinion pieces floating around in the wake of the report, we thought we’d highlight a few pieces that take a particularly historical view on the current situation.

Over on the Hidden Persuaders blog, part of a project on Cold War era brainwashing efforts, Marcia Holmes has written “What we’re reading now: The APA report.” Holmes details the events leading up to the Hoffman Report and situates psychology’s involvement in torture in relation to the emergence of “operational psychology.” The fundamental tension between “operational psychology” and ethics, Holmes argues, may never be resolved. Read the full piece online here.

BBC Radio program Witness has produced an episode on “CIA Mind Control Experiments” in the 1950s. While this piece is not directly about the Hoffman Report, it documents  the long history of relations between psychology and the CIA:

In the 1950s the CIA started attempting to brainwash psychiatric patients. They wanted to develop methods which could be used against enemies in the Cold War. Hear from one man whose father was experimented on in a Canadian psychiatric hospital.

The full 10-minute episode can be heard online here.

Finally historian Laura Stark, writing in Inside Higher Ed, explains “Why Ethics Codes Fail.” Stark, having previously written about the first ethics code adopted by the APA in 1973, argues that,

The APA’s current ethics mess is a problem inherent to its method of setting professional ethics policy and a problem that faces professional organizations more broadly. Professions’ codes of ethics are made to seem anonymous, dropped into the world by some higher moral authority. But ethics codes have authors. In the long term, the APA’s problems will not be solved by repeating the same process that empowers a select elite to write ethics policy, then removes their connection to it.

All ethics codes have authors who work to erase the appearance of their influence. Personal interests are inevitable, if not unmanageable, and it may be best for the APA — and other professional groups — to keep the link between an ethics policy and its authors. Take a new lesson from the Hippocratic oath by observing its name. The APA should make its ethics policies like most other papers that scientists write: give the code of ethics a byline.

Read the full piece online here.

If there are other historically focused responses to the Hoffman Report that we’ve missed please feel free to add them in the comments!

BBC Radio: “The Psychology of War”

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As part of the programme, The War that Changed the World, BBC Radio has aired an episode on “The Psychology of War.” The episode features an expert panel and live audience discussing war’s psychological effects. As described on the BBC Radio website,

One hundred years ago World War One set the course for the twentieth century; for the countries that took part nothing would be the same again. In this worldwide series of events with the British Council, we look at the impact of the war from around the world.

The third debate of the series comes from The Imperial War Museum in London as we explore the psychology of war. What drove men to volunteer for the war? What drove them to the edge of sanity when they got there?

Historian and broadcaster Amanda Vickery is joined by a panel of experts and a live audience to explore the mental impact of fighting the war at home and abroad. World War One experts Dan Todman (Queen Mary, University of London) and Michael Roper (University of Essex) are joined by the celebrated cultural historian, Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck, University of London), who presents her specially commissioned essay, Shell Shock and the Shock of Shells.

You can listen to this episode here and explore other episodes in the series here. You can also enrol in the Open University’s accompanying free online course, “World War 1: Trauma and Memory,” here.

The Anatomy of Melancholy on BBC’s In Our Time

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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.

Mahler and Freud on BBC Radio 3

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For the next seven days, BBC Radio 3 has made freely available this week’s Sunday Feature, Walking with Freud. The program documents a famous walk around Leiden taken by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud in 1910. As described on the BBC Radio 3 website,

100 years on, composer David Matthews and psychoanalyst Anthony Cantle retrace the walk that Mahler and Freud famously took around the Dutch town of Leiden.

On 26th August 1910, Gustav Mahler took a four hour walk with Sigmund Freud. Mahler’s marriage to Alma was in tatters and, on the edge of a breakdown, he’d telegraphed Freud asking for an urgent consultation. Freud was on holiday with his family in Leiden, Holland and asked Mahler to make the journey from Vienna to Leiden, which he duly did.

These two great Viennese Jews met for the only documented time in their lives in Leiden. They walked around the city for 4 hours and in that time, Mahler poured his heart out to Freud….

In this programme, David Matthews and Anthony Cantle visit Leiden 100 years on, to walk and talk together about this tantalising episode which is close to both of their hearts. Not only do they retell the story of the meeting and give it a context, but as a composer and psychoanalyst, they also bring their own professional and personal insights to the story.

The full hour long program can be heard here.

The History of the World in 100 Objects

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The British Museum and BBC Radio 4 have teamed up to present A History of the World in 100 Objects. As described on the program’s website,

At the heart of the project is the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 objects. 100 programmes, written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, and focusing on 100 objects from the British Museum’s collection. The programmes will travel through two million years from the earliest object in the collection to retell the history of humanity through the objects we have made. Each week will be tied to a particular theme, such as ‘after the ice age’ or ‘the beginning of science and literature’, and the programmes will broadcast in three blocks, in January, May and September.

Thus far, 15 of the 100 objects have been revealed in BBC Radio 4 podcasts. Among the online accompaniments to the project are a blog, as well as an interactive interface where users can explore the objects selected by the British Museum and the BBC.

Additionally, users can contribute to a digital museum on the project’s site by uploading an image of an object of their own. Once the image has been uploaded, users are asked to “Describe the object and its history – where the object came from, when it was made, its colour and size. You can also add links to other sites”. What items of relevance to the history of psychology would you like to see added to the BBC’s history of the world site?

A History of the World in 100 Objects

General, Links, Resources, ,

The British Museum and BBC Radio 4 have teamed up to present A History of the World in 100 Objects. As described on the program’s website,

At the heart of the project is the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 objects. 100 programmes, written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, and focusing on 100 objects from the British Museum’s collection. The programmes will travel through two million years from the earliest object in the collection to retell the history of humanity through the objects we have made. Each week will be tied to a particular theme, such as ‘after the ice age’ or ‘the beginning of science and literature’, and the programmes will broadcast in three blocks, in January, May and September.

Thus far, 15 of the 100 objects have been revealed in BBC Radio 4 podcasts. Among the online accompaniments to the project are a blog, as well as an interactive interface where users can explore the objects selected by the British Museum and the BBC can be explore.

Additionally, users can contribute to a digital museum on the project’s site by uploading an image of an object of their own. Once the image has been uploaded, users are asked to “Describe the object and its history – where the object came from, when it was made, its colour and size. You can also add links to other sites”. What items of relevance to the history of psychology would you like to see added to the BBC’s history of the world site?

BBC Replicates Milgram

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Stanley MilgramThe BBC presented a(nother) successful replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment back in May, 2009. It is written up (with video excerpts) in The Situationist. Not surprisingly, 9 of the 12 participants gave electric shocks all the way to the highest level. This follows a successful replication conducted by psychologist Jerry Berger (UC Santa Clara) that was presented on ABC last year (see AHP’s post about the American Psychologist writeup here).