The New Psychology
In May 1927, a wealthy New Yorker wrote a check for $5,000 and handed it to his psychoanalyst to personally give to Sigmund Freud in Vienna. The man felt the treatment he received had been so valuable...
View ArticlePillow Talk
In June 1957, a book hit the shelves that quickly became the stuff of cocktail party chatter. As its title suggested, Robert Elliot Fitch argued in his "The Decline and Fall of Sex" that much of the...
View ArticleAmerica's Love Affair With the Supernatural
Boo! Ghosts, psychics, and all other expressions of the supernatural are everywhere you look these days, in case you’ve been in a cave recently. The supernatural- phenomena that cannot be explained by...
View ArticleThe Psychological Approach to Studying Consumer Behavior
One day in Vienna in 1930, the owners of a new laundry asked an instructor at the city’s famed university to help them grow their business. Many Austrian women were reluctant to send out their laundry,...
View ArticleMuch Ado About Dying
In June 1921, Vernon Kellogg, a notable biologist, reflected on death after having an experience that was far more personal than his scientific study of it. On a recent train trip from Chicago to...
View ArticlePsychodesigning
In August 1949, Leopold Kleiner, a Manhattan architect and designer, made quite a name for himself by announcing that homes for extroverts should be designed differently than those for introverts....
View ArticleAmerica's “Sexidemic”
For a people who supposedly love sex, Americans have had no shortage of problems with it. Since the end of World War II, in fact, we’ve had a contentious relationship with sexuality, the subject a...
View ArticleWhy People Believe Weird Things
Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have all come forward with theories to explain, as Michael Shermer expressed it as the title of a book, “why people believe weird things.”read more
View ArticleFreud on Madison Avenue
In 1957, an intense, very real fear regarding a new form of advertising swept across the American landscape. It was called subliminal advertising- a major portion of a psychological phenomenon known as...
View ArticleDeath, American Style
Many of us can personally testify that there is often a heavy cost of living longer, healthier lives. The end of life is now frequently a prolonged period carrying a heavy emotional, ethical, physical,...
View ArticleThe Couch and the Cold War
In April 1950 at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York, Harold Kelman, president of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, made a rather bold statement before a group of his colleagues. Psychoanalysis...
View ArticleThat Book by That Indiana Professor
While Alfred C. Kinsey has been justifiably criticized for some if not all of his methods, no other single individual had a bigger impact on the trajectory of sex in America. read more
View ArticleStop Making Sense
Belief in the supernatural and paranormal- phenomena that cannot be explained by natural laws or understood in terms of scientific knowledge- is a widespread and enduring dimension of the human...
View ArticleAn Area of Vast Dark Ignorance
With the impact of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male still very much felt five years after its appearance, Alfred Kinsey’s second volume in his planned series of books about sex in America was...
View ArticleHe Who Dies Last Wins
In April 2008, Michael Kinsey mused over the intersection between death and baby boomers for The New Yorker. Kinsey, the well-known journalist and pundit, was one of the few critics to recognize the...
View ArticleAn Adequate Body of Sexual Information
Until the mid-1960s, what were commonly called “marriage manuals” were one of the very few resources for couples experiencing problems in the bedroom. Although they were certainly better than nothing,...
View ArticleThe American Way of Swinging
Swinging (or mate swapping or group sex) had probably always been around to some extent in America but the wild west of sexuality in the 1970s was the ideal climate for it to thrive. In his 1971 Group...
View ArticleBisexual Chic
About forty years ago, bisexuality rather suddenly became considered quite stylish in America and much of Europe, a symbol of sophistication and confidence. As gays did a decade or so earlier,...
View ArticleThe Playboy Mansion for the Masses
The Reagans, along with their goal of restoring traditional values to the nation, may have been moving into the White House in January 1981, but Americans were not quite ready to end the...
View ArticleDeathbed Tweeting
With NPR host Scott Simon tweeting his mother’s deathbed vigil, more attention is thankfully being given to how Americans die. Twitter offers the real possibility of bringing death into the open as it...
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