by Lawrence Bush on May 12, 2012
Edwin S. Shneidman, a psychologist who co-founded America’s first comprehensive suicide prevention center in Los Angeles, was born in York, Pennsylvania on this date in 1918. Shneidman was a pioneer in suicide prevention at a time when the topic was generally shunned. When he founded the Los Angeles center in 1958, there was no such thing as a suicide-prevention hotline or even significant research into the psychology of suicide. Within thirty years of the Center’s founding, the L.A. suicide rate had been cut in half. In 1966, Shneidman organized a national suicide prevention project that cultivated the growth of more than 100 centers, nationwide, in only three years. He also founded the American Association of Suicidology, served as the first professor of thanatology at UCLA, and wrote more than twenty books before dying in 2009 at age 91.
“Sociologists have shown that suicide rates vary with factors like war and unemployment; psychoanalysts argue that it is rage toward a loved one that is directed inward; psychiatrists see it as a biochemical imbalance. No one approach holds the answer: It’s all that and more.” —Edwin S. Shneidman
by Lawrence Bush on March 23, 2012
Radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who tried to integrate Freudian and Marxist theory but ended his career pursuing pseudoscientific theories and being harassed and ultimately imprisoned by the U.S. government, was born in Galicia on this date in 1897. Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and believed the social conditions in which people lived to be among the causes of neurosis. Reich was an advocate of free clinics for working-class people, and was also a sexual liberationist who encouraged birth control, economic independence for women, permissiveness towards adolescent sexuality, and other innovations that were largely ahead of his time. His witnessing of Nazism’s rise in Germany led him to theorize that sexual repression and “body armor” made people receptive to fascism, and that sexual orgasms and escape from bourgeois sexual morality were critical to political liberation. These ideas became culturally potent after his death during the “Make Love, Not War” 1960s. Reich came to live in the U.S. in 1939, by which time he was experimenting with nudity and touch in psychoanalytic sessions and was building “orgone boxes” and other contraptions expressive of a pseudoscientific cosmology and, very likely, of a mentally ill mind. The FBI investigated him as an immigrant with communist affiliations, and the Food and Drug Administration got on his case and ultimately imprisoned him for selling his orgone boxes. Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957; he was 60 years old.
“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.” —Wilhelm Reich
by Lawrence Bush on December 6, 2011
Linguist, philosopher, and political radical Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1928. A professor at MIT for 55 years and the author of more than 100 books, Chomsky opened up a modern understanding of linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology, with insights about language leading to insights about human nature and our mental architecture. Chomsky has also been a lifelong critic of unregulated capitalism, imperialism, and political authoritarianism. His father was a professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and a member of the IWW, and Chomsky’s politics reflect, in many ways, anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist perspectives. He has been highly critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and what he calls “Israel’s very clear choice of expansion over security.” Chomsky has been awarded honorary doctorates by some forty universities. The world’s largest garden gnome, in Accord, New York — the hometown of JEWDAYO — is named “Gnome Chomsky.”
“Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” —Noam Chomsky
by Lawrence Bush on September 22, 2011
After suffering multiple surgeries over the course of sixteen years for cancer of the jaw, Sigmund Freud committed suicide with morphine injections in London on this date in 1939, with the help of a friend, Max Schur. The pioneer of psychoanalysis and a “paradigm shifter” of Western culture at large, Freud began his career as a neurologist (examining cerebral palsy and aphasia) before developing his theories of the unconscious mind, the mechanisms of repression, the centrality of sexual drives, and the use of extensive talk therapy to increase self-knowledge and achieve freedom from compulsive behavior. Among his followers who ultimately launched their own influential schools of psychotherapy were Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler. Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, only to be driven out of Austria by the Nazis in 1938 (four of his sisters perished in concentration camps). While Freud’s ideas and techniques have been marginalized, to some extent, by contemporary neuroscience, and by debates about whether they are scientifically valid, Freud remains, in the words of David Stafford-Clark, “a man whose name will always rank with those of Darwin, Copernicus, Newton, Marx and Einstein; someone who really made a difference to the way the rest of us can begin to think about the meaning of human life and society.”
“Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” —Sigmund Freud
Edwin S. Shneidman, a psychologist who co-founded America’s first comprehensive suicide prevention center in Los Angeles, was born in York, Pennsylvania on this date in 1918. Shneidman was a pioneer in suicide prevention at a time when the topic was generally shunned. When he founded the Los Angeles center in 1958, there was no such thing as a suicide-prevention hotline or even significant research into the psychology of suicide. Within thirty years of the Center’s founding, the L.A. suicide rate had been cut in half. In 1966, Shneidman organized a national suicide prevention project that cultivated the growth of more than 100 centers, nationwide, in only three years. He also founded the American Association of Suicidology, served as the first professor of thanatology at UCLA, and wrote more than twenty books before dying in 2009 at age 91.
