The tragicomical incidents that occur in an Air Corps psychiatric ward revolve around the personality of an intensely humane and talented young army doctor
Cinema, MD follows the intersection of medicine and film and how filmmakers wrote a history of medicine over time. The narrative follows several main story lines: How did the portrayal of physicians, nurses, and medical institutions change over the years? What interested filmmakers, and which topics had priority? What does film's obsession with experiments and monstrosities reveal about medical ethics and malpractice? How could the public's perception of the medical profession change when watching these films on diseases and treatments, including palliative care and medical ethics? Are screenwriters, actors, and film directors channeling a popular view of medicine? Cinema, MD analyzes not only changing practices, changing morals, and changing expectations but also medical stereotypes, medical activism, and violations of patients' integrity and autonomy. Examining over 400 films with medical themes over a century of cinema, this book establishes the cultural, medical, and historical importance of the art form. Film allows us to see our humanity, our frailty, and our dependence when illness strikes. Cinema, MD provides uniquely new and fascinating insight into both film criticism and the history of medicine and has a resonance to the medical world we live in today.
Ascertaining the genre of this volume has been difficult. It is much more than memoire, book of poetry, case study, dream journal, and travelogue. It is all that, plus their integration into a creative product. It begins before the authors birth, when enterprising Grandfather Joseph Abrahams came to America, soon to meet a mysterious death. The extended family to follow prospered, and his grandson Joseph likewise pursued the American dream, first in Texas, then New England, New York, and during the war years, much of America. In the course of a career in psychoanalysis, he ventured into study of his own inner world for understanding of his life drives. There analysis of his dreams have been central, then a bent for poetry. The result is this volume, centering about a protracted rendezvous with death, surfacing with an epic poem, entitled, A Passionate Psychoanalyst.
Psychiatry and the Cinema explores this complementary relationship from two angles, psychiatrists who have studied the movies and movies that have depicted psychiatry. This second edition has updated this definitive text with a discussion of new trends in psychoanalytically oriented film theory, and an expanded list of movies is analyzed.
The author, was perhaps psychoanalysis's most gifted and eloquent spokesperson. In this volume the author is presented in one of the roles he enjoyed most: communicating to a lay audience his understanding of people and life and his insights into the science and art of psychoanalysis. These important talks profoundly influenced countless professional workers and lay people. The twenty-four public lectures in this remarkable collection are each a gem of wisdom and humor. With deep psychoanalytic wisdom the author addresses such timeless and universal human concerns as love and emotional development; hate, aggression, and war; masculinity, femininity, and sexuality; jealousy, envy, and possessiveness; and the vicissitudes of child rearing and family development. Reading these entertaining public talks of the author now is like reading a chronicle of the great psychosocial issues of the past half-century. One is impressed with not only the wisdom they offer for our current concerns, but also with how revolutionary, original, and prophetic was his thinking.
Over the years the representation of medical personnel has varied from heroes to villains, madmen to bumbling boobs, money grubbers to humanitarians, and compassionate savers to aloof snobs. This comprehensive resource documents all significant appearances of health professionals on film or television.
The stigmatization of mental illness in film has been well documented in literature. Little has been written, however, about the ability of movies to portray mental illness sympathetically and accurately. People Like Ourselves: Portrayals of Mental Illness in the Movies fills that void with a close look at mental illness in more than seventy American movies, beginning with classics such as The Snake Pit and Now, Voyager and including such contemporary successes as A Beautiful Mind and As Good as It Gets. Films by legendary directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Cassavetes are included. Through the examination of universal themes relating to one's self and society, the denial of reality, the role of women, creativity, war, and violence, Zimmerman argues that these ground-breaking films defy stereotypes, presenting sympathetic portraits of people who are mentally ill, and advance the movie-going public's understanding of mental illness, while providing insight into its causes, diagnosis, and treatment. More importantly, they portray mentally ill people as ordinary people with conflicts and desires common to everyone. Like the motion pictures it revisits, this fascinating book offers insight, entertainment, and a sense of understanding.
This is a rare autobiographical history written from the center of the inner circle of psychoanalysis. Today, only a few psychoanalysts remain who have Dr. Rangell's unique, insider's view of the last half century of psychoanalytic history. His close associations with the major contributors to theory during this time permit him to chronicle the constant marriage of people and ideas that has been the hallmark of the psychoanalytic community over the previous decades. His insights are enhanced by his leadership role across the spectrum of psychoanalytic organizations (local, national, and international) that has allowed him to witness and participate in the great debates of our time. Written as Dr. Rangell approached the age of 90, this chronicle possesses the same clarity and incisiveness that has always characterized Rangell's writing. He is still the tough-minded thinker ready to challenge the fuzzy thinking that threatens to split psychoanalysis into factions. In this work, Dr. Rangell gives us his valuable perspective on the significant individuals in psychoanalysis and their ideas: from the early dissension of the 20s and 30s to the war years, to the "golden years" of the 50s and early 60s where complications in the field manifested in the splitting of Institutes. He goes on to cover the turmoil surrounding the theoretical debates of the 70s, followed by his look at the attempt at pluralism in the 80s, the eclecticism of the 90s, and finishing with a discussion of the discipline as it is now. Then, using his own prodigious contributions to the great debates of our time, Dr. Rangell fuses divisive views into a unitary theory of psychoanalysis. This composite theory offers an amalgamated view that provides coherence in place of the fragmentation, personal warring, and disarray that constitutes the present state of psychoanalysis.