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In early 6th century Athens (BCE), it was all the rage. Introduced by Thespis, play-acting quickly attained widespread popularity among the Athenians who, like most people, were looking for diverting forms of entertainment to fill the evening hours. On one such evening the aged patriarch Solon, celebrated lawmaker and civic founder, was persuaded to attend
As vocalist Elaine Mitchener prepares to perform Peter Maxwell Davies’s explosive 1969 monodrama at London’s Wigmore Hall, David Grundy details past renditions and speaks with Mitchener about new intersectional perspectives on the piece
Poor Will’s Almanack for the third week of Early Fall, the transition to the Blackbirds in the Cornfields Moon, the first week of the Sun in Libra.
One of the earliest stains on the legacy of psychiatry, my medical specialty, dates to the American 1840 census, when the US government first began systematically collecting information on “idiocy” and “insanity.” According to the results, the purported rates of mental illness among free blacks in northern cities were deemed to exceed those among enslaved blacks in the south by an 11-to-one ratio. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, a notoriously strident defender of slavery, seized upon the results as “proof” that “the African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy...
“Can you imagine if you presented Freud to Jane Austen?”: Josh Cohen on literature and psychoanalysis The analyst and writer's latest work, How to Live. What to Do., is a mix of case studies from his consulting room, personal reminiscence, and literary reference points. How should we conceive the relationship between fiction and psychoanalytic thought? What is the largest area of overlap, or the most fruitful point of connection? There’s a boisterous history of literary interpretation with analytic leanings – one thinks of the American scholar Peter Brooks in Reading for the P...