The Psychology Of Violence In Sports — On The Field And In The Stands
By Leonard Glass, MD. Originally published in WBUR’s Cognoscenti. In this Aug. 20, 2011 photo, football fans fight in the stands during a preseason NFL football game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders in San Francisco. (Ben Margot/AP) I thought my mother was a quintessentially maternal woman. But at one of my college’s football games, just before the last crucial goal line play, she yelled out her wish for the rival fullback: “Kill him! Kill him!” she shouted. My father, always much more contained, leaned...
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The Americanization of Narcissism by Elizabeth Lunbeck
Elizabeth Lunbeck Harvard University Press, February 2014 Read an interview about this book in the New Republic. Meet the Author on Tuesday, May 20, 2014 at 7:45pm in the BPSI Library. American social critics in the 1970s, convinced that their nation was in decline, turned to psychoanalysis for answers and seized on narcissism as the sickness of the age. Books indicting Americans as greedy, shallow, and self-indulgent appeared, none more influential than Christopher Lasch’s famous 1978 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. This line of...
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An “Off the Couch” Discussion of the Film Nebraska
By Michele Baker , M.D. The Nebraska of director Alexander Payne and writer Bob Nelson’s movie of the same name, shot in iconic black and white, evokes the childhood of the film’s central character. The elderly Woodrow Grant, brought to life by Bruce Dern, is a man with dementia who has a monomaniacal drive to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, in order to collect the $1 million he delusionally believes he has won in what everyone else in his life knows is a misleading advertising scam. Woody’s sidekick on his poignant road trip is his younger son,...
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