Joey Ramone, Punk’s Influential Yelper, Dies at 49. He and I graduated from the same high school in the same year, but were only faces to each other.

Blogger, the tool I use to produce FmH, has struck a deal with Trellix that sounds like it will assure Blogger’s survival and, hopefully, improvement. Blogger functions will be packaged with “other (Trellix) site- building tools, bringing the
Web log concept to a wider audience”, as The New York Times (link above) puts it… for better or worse. The renowned Dan Bricklin was apparently instrumental in getting this to happen; here’s his account, from his (non-Blogger) weblog. While we’re on the Blogger subject, The Guardian UK has a step-by-step guide to the simple act of creating a weblog with Blogger.

The dialogue among four real-life psychoanalysts about the psychotherapy subplot on The Sopranos continues.

The four of us, as professional shrinks, keep raising a nagging
question, but none of us has thus far tried to answer it in detail.
Namely, does it make sense to try to treat a sociopath like Tony
in therapy? For one of the maxims of clinical experience that
everyone repeatedly hears in their training is that it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to treat sociopaths
psychotherapeutically. Although the meaning of this adage may be
clear to us–and I’m not sure that’s even true–we can’t just
assume that the readers of our exchanges know what we are
getting at.

So I will take a stab at trying to put the problem in nontechnical
terms. The question we have to ask ourselves about all our
patients is whether there is a healthy enough core to their
personalities–formed through the experience of being loved and
cared for as a small child–for them to become engaged in a
psychotherapeutic relationship.

The way analysts think about treatment is that it is the elucidation of unconscious processes — motives, conflicts — that improves a patient’s life, but that there is profound resistance (also unconscious) on the patient’s part to examining such issues. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy and classical psychoanalysis (which is not depicted on The Sopranos, and is more intense, involving sessions several times a week often using the “classical” couch, free association, the silence and impassivity of the analyst etc.) the therapist’s skill lies in knowing how to help the patient to get better despite her/his profound attempt to subvert the effort. This relies in large measure on entering into a relationship with a patient which will inevitably recreate all the patient’s dilemmas and conflicts in negotiating all their relationships, while the therapist remains aware enough of her/his own unconscious issues in doing business with others that they do not interfere. The shorthand terms for these two aspects of the relationship are, respectively, transference and countertransference. Examination of the patient’s complexities of feelings and reactions in this context is how learning and change take place.

These four psychoanalytic commentators find the TV depiction, in a sense, trite, because there is so much “acting out” on the part of the patients —

in other words, they are avoiding any sort of in-depth
look at their complex feelings (envy, hostility, dependency,
longing, etc.) toward their therapist and the therapeutic
relationship by seducing someone who’s the “next best
thing”–another patient of their therapist’s.

— but also on the part of the therapist, who “inadvertently” double-booked Tony and the Annabella Sciorra character, with predictable consequences. One would interpret this as representing Dr. Melfi’s unconscious way of extricating herself from the erotic bind between herself and Tony, and it compounds her actions of the previous week in sending Tony’s wife Carmela to a “hatchet man” therapist who, in premature bluntness unthinkable to any seasoned therapist (but presumably expectable to Dr. Melfi, as he was her teacher), pushed her to leave Tony.

The question is raised whether the writers are competently depicting an unsophisticated and out-of-control therapy or incompetently attempting to depict a sophisticated one. In any case, if you’re interested, you’ll learn alot about how psychoanalysts think by listening to them muse about the same show you’ve watched; scroll down to the first of the readers’ comments at the bottom of the column for an astute comment about what you might learn about yourself too. [Is this — by which I mean both the psychiatric plot and reading the commentary on it — interesting to any viewers of this show besides mental health professionals like myself? One FmH reader has already weighed in emphatically in the negative…]

Slate

Windows XP Hits Home. I don’t know who Andy Patrizio is, but he really likes the public beta of the Windows XP Home Edition. “Windows XP in its current state is an improvement over Windows ME
and a much better choice for a stable OS than Windows 2000. When it’s
finally released this fall, it will likely be worth the upgrade.” Wired

Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered: a testament to an obsession with Dr. Pepper; lists and rates the dozens of imitators, most of which are named “Dr. something-or-other“. Who knew??

Pulitzer Prizes in Arts Awarded: composer John Corigliano, playwright David Auburn (Proof), W.E.B. DuBois biographer David Levering Lewis, historian of the American Revolution Joseph J. Ellis, poet Stephen Dunn (Different Hours), novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), and Herbert P. Bix for Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan in nonfiction. The interesting thing about this New York Times article is that it dwells in an unprecedented gossipy manner on descriptions of the winners’ reactions to the news.

The early-adopter wars: “Stodgy companies are
paying big bucks to
learn about the
trendsetting tastes of
‘alpha consumers.’

The problem with all this is fairly obvious. There’s no doubt
that trendsetters (if any still exist after the bursting of the
new-economy bubble) are swell people: They create cool
art, sell ingenious drugs and open boutiques on Elizabeth
Street that specialize in things like inflatable burlap dresses.
What’s less clear is why mainstream conglomerates like
Taco Bell and Motorola should use their recondite
preferences as a basis for brand positioning.

[The article gives a rundown of what you ought to be finding ‘wired’ and ‘tired’ if you’re a trendsetter. Me? never heard of virtually any of the cool stuff…] Salon

“Crisis Inflames Bias Against Asians; Ethnic stereotypes in broadcast, print media prompt protests.” David Anderson at Metaforage pointed to this article in the same breath as he reflected on my coverage of Johnny Hart’s fundamentalist boldness in “B.C.” . He finds it all a sign of things to come now that the likes of Li’l George rule the roost. But the jingoistic anti-foreigner vitriol which makes me feel so embarrassed to be an American has happened every time there’s an international crisis with a nation whose people don’t look, talk, or worship like us. I still cringe when I think of the anti-Arab sentiment I heard during the Gulf War. And we have never seemed to grasp the distinctions between a people and their rulers, hating the one for the evils or failings of the other. Hating, and usually killing them with our sanctions…

Bush’s Budget: The Winners and The Losers. Washington Post

“To rely on the
[Federal] Reserve as a remedy for an emerging recession is optimism carried to
the point of foolishness.” — John Kenneth Galbraith. The Cult of Greenspan: He’s been worshipped as a god since he became Fed chairman in 1987 and, even though extremely offensive to populist sentiment, seemingly above criticizing. But it seems to be coming apart at the seams abit. Boston Phoenix