Book Reading at NYAM: SUPERHEROES & SUPEREGOS by Sharon Packer, MD

NYAM Author Night Series: Superheroes and Superegos Analyzing the Minds Behind the Masks
Location: The New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York, NY 10029

https://www.nyam.org/events/nyam_register.php?id=582

Speakers: Sharon Packer, MD

This comprehensive collection of essays written by a practicing psychiatrist shows that superheroes are more about superegos than about bodies and brawn, even though they contain subversive sexual subtexts that paved the path for major social shifts of the late 20th century.

Psychiatrist and social advocate Fredric Wertham lobbied against comics because of their sexual and sadistic subtext and their potential to reverse women’s roles and encourage same-sex behavior. However, Wertham’s McCarthy Era stance forgot that early superhero comics foretold Hitler’s threat—and offered solutions.
Superheroes have provided entertainment for generations, but there is much more to these fictional characters than what first meets the eye. Superheros and Superegos: Analyzing the Minds Behind the Masks begins its exploration in 1938 with the creation of Superman and continues to the present, with a nod to the forerunners of superhero stories in the Bible and Greek, Roman, Norse, and Hindu myth. The first book about superheroes written by a psychiatrist in over 50 years, it invokes biological psychiatry to discuss such concepts as “body dysmorphic disorder,” as well as Jungian concepts of the shadow self that explain the appeal of the masked hero and the secret identity.
Readers will discover that the earliest superheroes represent fantasies about stopping Hitler, while more sophisticated and socially-oriented publishers used superheroes to encourage American participation in World War II. The book also explores themes such as how the feminist movement and the dramatic shift in women’s roles and rights were predicted by Wonder Woman and Sheena nearly 30 years before the dawn of the feminist era.
Highlights
Looks at cultural psychology as much as individual psychology to analyze the political backdrop of superhero stories
Explores the importance of the secret self, the shadow self, and myths of metamorphosis, and shows how superheroes function as wounded warriors in contemporary society
Shows how the teenage creation of Superman of 1938 was prophetic and speculates whether the rise in superhero cinema in the 21st century may be equally prophetic of political catastrophes to come

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Schedule of Events:
Registration: 5:30 — 6:00 PM
Program: 6:00 — 7:00 PM
Registration Options:
This event is free but pre-registration is required
Copies will be available for purchase.
Sharon Packer, MD, is a practicing psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Bronx, NY. Her published works include Dreams in Myth, Medicine, and Movies and Movies and the Modern Psyche.

Registration Options: https://www.nyam.org/events/nyam_register.php?id=582
General Admission / Free

February 15, 2010 Tags: superheroes superegoes superman psychiatry psychoanalysis medicine Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments

The Tragedy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville

As the writer for this neuroscience website, I feel impelled to comment on the tragedy in Alabama which allegedly has been perpetrated by a, a “Harvard trained neuroscientist” as she is now commonly called in the media. I am a neuroscientist partially trained at Harvard. Though I doubt this gives me any special insight, it does make me feel somewhat connected to this. There is even another connection. A friend of mine with whom I have co-authored one paper is also a co-author on several papers and abstracts with this person. In fact, her name seemed strangely familiar to me, though I am quite sure I have never met her. But I had read (or at least perused) the papers she co-authored with my friend and that is probably why I remembered her name.

Who knows what to say about such horrible things? Should schools have courses in how to cope with career problems? Would that have helped? She did not get tenure. To those of you who have ever been on an academic track, you know how tough that is. But it’s not terrible enough for it to make any sense to kill someone. Most of us are going to have to get through many unfortunate events. We are going to lose contracts, grants, and—yes—jobs. We are going to submit papers and some of them are going to be rudely rejected with unflattering comments about our abilities. Loved ones will reject us and, yes, people we love are going to die and/or be killed. Is there a way to learn to cope with these things? Or do we say that most people can cope and the few who cannot are crazy? I don’t know.

Speaking of coping, think of the families of those who were killed. Think of those who were injured. Think of the perpetrator’s own family. All this because someone did not get tenure? There is a huge disconnect here. What I am going to write next may sound ridiculously obvious and it is probably one of those things that will not do anyone any good. But just in case it might help someone, I am going to write it anyway.

Even if you lose that job, that grant, that contract, or whatever wonderful thing you want and deserve due to the total and complete unfairness of another person or persons, it is never going to be helpful to try to kill or injure that person. If you start thinking that it would be worthwhile to do so, go immediately to a competent mental health provider. If you ever think doing something like that is a good idea, something has gone wrong with your thinking and you need to get help right away. I know this sounds obvious, but perhaps we should have courses that just drum this into everybody’s head to give them something to hold onto when their thinking goes astray. Maybe in such a case, it would not work. But in any case, if anyone tellls you that he or she is going to do such a thing, then get help for that person immediately. At least if you are sane you can hopefully recognize when someone else might be going astray. While I do not like the idea of “snitching” on people in general, if you think that someone is likely to hurt himself or others, you just have to do it.

Sorry for the moralizing, but this story really “hit a nerve.”

February 13, 2010 Tags: neuroscience tenure murder education Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments

At Last—Some Good News About Aging

I had long hoped that there might be some good news about getting older. A study described in Medicne World at

http://medicineworld.org/stories/lead/1-2010/older-brains-make-good-use-of-useless-information.html

shows that what might be thought of as a defect in the functioning of older brains, loss of the ability to filter out seemingly irrelevant information, appears to have an upside. The older learners bond items that younger brains do not and this may give them additional ability in making decisions. Perhaps this is one of the sources of wisdom, an attribute traditionally associated with age and experience. But, in a sense, this is like what is sometimes said of software, i.e. “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” At least on the surface, this idea seems to make sense.

Now, bring on the wisdom.

February 10, 2010 Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments

New Drug for MS

A new medication, dalfampridine (sold under the name Ampyra) has been approved by the FDA for multiple sclerosis. The new medication does not cure MS or even block the MS attacks. But it reportedly helps patients with MS to walk faster (and presumably better).

How does it do this? Dalfampridine is a potassium channel blocker. In the process of nerve conduction potassium channel opens at a certain point to shut off the action potential. Blocking the channel a bit allows the potential to last a little longer and this helps the impulse propagate through areas of damaged myelin.

For many years this drug as been known under another name, 4-aminopyridine (4-AP). Previously it had been believed that 4-AP was too toxic to use clinically. But Biogen seems to have reduced the toxicity by using a time released formulation. Thus it was approved by the FDA. The list of possible side effects is long, however, and it includes such items as seizures and relapses of MS itself. So this is not something to be taken lightly. But as after marketing experience accumulates it may take its place as another tool in the MS treatment toolbox. By the way, if you look this up you may encounter the name fampridine rather than dalfampridine. They are the same drug. Fampridine=dalfampridine=4-aminopyridine=4-AP. They are all names for the same chemical.

February 8, 2010 Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments

Identifying the Specific Cell Type

The RSS feed on the right side of this page picked up an interesting article in Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2009 Aug;19(4):415-21. Epub 2009 Aug 10, by SP Brown and S Hestrin of Stanford. It’s one of those things that seem obvious in a sense but are really very difficult to do. The title of their paper is “Cell-type identity: a key to unlocking the function of neocortical circuits.” What they show and discuss is the idea that one has to precisely identify the type and individual behavior of both the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons in any given neuronal circuit and then test the circuit by activating and recording from the cells in order to figure out what the circuit is doing. Of course, cell identification is becoming more and more doable with specific antibodies and stains to identify receptors and other neuronal structures. And the equipment and methods for neuronal stimulation and recording are becoming better and better.

You can find a link to the abstract of their article at

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19674891?dopt=Abstract

To get the whole paper, one needs to be a subscriber to the journal (or to buy that specific article at a rather steep price). But if you are affiliated with an institution with a science library you may be able to get it without an individual subscription or payment. If you need access to this paper or any other paper and do not have an institutional or personal subscription to the journal, you might find the advice in the following article to be useful

http://www.neurospotlight.com/id22.html

This describes how to legally get access to the full text of many journal articles that you might otherwise think are unavailable to you.

September 16, 2009 Posted in: Uncategorized No Comments