Articles

1. Intimate Partners
At first, The Atlantic Monthly wanted to buy the whole book, and devote an entire issue to Intimate Partners. When my publisher nixed that plan, the Atlantic settled on this key chapter; and also, one that appeared in the following issue. But it was this chapter that caused a great stir, and has been used in many courses since that time. Read article
   
2. The Man Who Disappears
 This piece was written to me at the behest of an editor who was a close friend of mine. This experienced had happened to her, and I actually did interview the “shocking betrayer.” He was indeed a man who was unable to follow through on a love relationship. He later married (someone else), and had children with her, but the marriage ended badly. I hope he has gone into therapy; he must realize that he is having a problem! Read article
   
3. Hair Thoughts
 I wrote this for fun; it was an attempt to convey the sense of a harem and the emotional intensity of life inside a high-powered Westport beauty salon. Read article
   
4. The Difference Between Being in Love and Falling in Love
 This article discusses the difference between falling in love - when your body and brain are on a “high” similar to a stimulant such as amphetamines, and you are “crazy in love”—and being in love, when you are in calmer bodily state. The passage from novelty and excitement to long-term attachment is the subject of this piece. Read article
   
5. The More Sorrowful Sex
 This is a longer, more complete excerpt from my book Unfinished Business. It appeared in Psychology Today, and was a discussion of the sexually lopsided numbers when it comes to women and depression. Why do females suffer from depressive disorders so much more than men do? Read article
   
6. HOT STUFF: Anger and How to Handle It
 There is nothing wrong with anger. We all get angry at times. The important thing is how we traverse it—or get stuck on it, and with it. This article contains a nifty little exercise for couples to use when the tensions have mounted and they have gotten into a fight. Read article
   
7. The Man Who Gave Us “Inferiority Complex,” Compensation “Overcompensation” .....This was a cover story I wrote for the New York Times Sunday magazine. It was an assignment - Alfred Adler’s 100th birthday was being celebrated. I hadn’t thought it would be so interesting, but in fact it was fascinating. There is much here about the early Freudian movement—and the splits that were to develop. Read article
   
8. Brain Researcher Jose Delgado asks: What Kind of Humans Would we Like to Construct?
This is another cover article for the New York Times Magazine. It is about electrical stimulation of the brain, and the researchers’ ability to elicit states of anger, fear and contentment by stimulating the brains of chimpanzees (our nearest Primate relatives) with implanted electrodes. It brought in some very negative responses - people didn’t like the idea of brain control—and this made Dr. Delgado feel very annoyed with the author. I had merely described the nature of his very interesting research studies, nothing else! Read article
   
9. From Joy to Depression: New Insights Into the Chemistry of Moods
 This was still another front-page piece for the New York Times Magazine. In it, I described the (then) latest theories about the biochemistry of mood. This article was written at the dawn of the drug revolution; and older methods of treatment of the depressive disorders (e.g., psychoanalysis) were just beginning to give way to the newer, more effective pharmaceutical approaches. However, it would still be many years before drugs like Prozac—that could be given to a patient by his personal physician rather than a psychiatrist—began to appear on the market. Read article
   
10. The Anatomy of Fear
 Again, this was an article written for the New York Times Magazine. In this piece, I look at the things that scare us most—such as getting hurt or killed during the commission of a crime - and the things that scare us the least, such as dying in a household accident or choking to death on a chicken bone. The statistics at the time showed that the chances of dying during the commission of a felony were about the same as the chances of death by choking on a chicken bone. They also showed that the injuries of all kinds during the commission of a crime were in the neighborhood of 100,000 per year, while the chances of suffering serious injury due to a household accident were a huge 4,000,000 per year! Read article
   
11. The Fetus as Guinea Pig
 This was yet another New York Times Magazine article, which dealt with the thorny issue of when a fetus becomes “a person in the whole sense” and therefore entitled to human rights and protection. For this article, I spoke with philosophers, biologists, and a range of other experts. I presented the many complex views and positions on whether fetal materials could be used for research on diseases or whether using such “living” tissues amount to experimentation on human beings—which is banned by the Geneva conventions. As we all know, this is an argument that continues to this day—viz., stem cell research. Read article
   
12. Goodall and Chimpanzees at Yale
 Still another New York Times Magazine article! This was an interview with Jane Goodall, the famed Primatologist and a description of her tremendously successful visit to Yale. Goodall, author of In The Shadow of Man, brought with her a remarkable film (shot by her husband, Hugo Van Lawick). It showed scenes of daily life at the Gombe Stream reserve in Africa, where she lived among and studied a troupe of chimpanzees. The film showed some remarkably “human” interchanges between the chimps—such as embracing, patting and kissing. Also, there was some John Wayne-like male posturing! Goodall’s four jam-packed lectures —and her subsequent interview with me—were extremely intriguing, informative and just plain fun. Read article
   
13. Hangover
 I wrote this on assignment for The New York Times Magazine. It was published on December 30, 1973; that is, on the eve of the coming New Year. Although I wrote it in a humorous voice, I hadn’t realized that there was so much serious information about hangovers that I could convey to the many readers who would be suffering the many aftereffects of their celebrations a few days hence! Read article
   
14. The Happiness Syndrome
 This was one of my humorous articles - and it was so much fun to write! In it, I posed the question: Is happiness an abnormal state? Quoting from an article published by English psychologist Richard Bentall, I describe what he terms “the happiness syndrome.” I also describe the state called “pronoia”—the opposite of paranoia—which is characterized by believing people like and admire you, in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary! Read article
   
15. He and She: The Sex Hormones and Behavior
 What, actually, is a sex hormone? How do sex hormones affect our development during pre-natal life? Is there a link between certain behaviors and male and female sex hormones—for instance, a link between testosterone and aggression? These are among the issues explored in this piece, also written for The New York Times Magazine. Read article
   
16. In the ‘Therapeutic Community,’ Patients are Doctors
 This was the first article that I ever published in The New York Times Magazine. I had spent 6 months on a new kind of ward at the Grace-New Haven (now Yale-New Haven) hospital, studying the new kind of therapy being offered to psychiatric inpatients there. I wrote a description of that form of treatment—it is called “milieu therapy” and came into much wider usage eventually—but it represented a radical shift at the time, a move away from the traditional psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of mental disorders. I sent it to the Times magazine cold—I had no contact or connection. Imagine my happy shock when they called me a week later to tell me that my piece had been accepted! The editor didn’t change a single word—which never happened to me again. Read article
   
17.

Oh, For A Decent Night’s Sleep! A Clinic for Insomniacs
 Once again, this article became the cover piece for the New York Times Magazine. It is an article about the architecture of sleep—the differing brain wave patterns as we pass through the differing phases of sleep from Alpha, Stage 1 all the way down to Delta, Stage IV, the deepest phase of sleep. For this piece, I spent a period of time at a clinic for sleep disorders at Dartmouth-Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. The article covers everything you need to know about normal sleep and the disorders of sleep. Insomniacs—those who have trouble falling asleep—will be glad to learn that theirs is the easiest of sleep problems to cure. Read article
   
18.

Tuning Down With TM
 On assignment for the New York Times Magazine, I took a course in Transcendental Meditation at Yale’s Hendrie Hall, which at that time housed both part of the music school and the New Haven chapter of SIMS-IMS (Students International Meditation Society-International Meditation Society). There, I was tutored in TM, and eventually given my own mantra. I did have a distinct response to TM—a wonderful floating feeling—and I believed (alas, wrongly) that I would practice it for the rest of my life. As a result of the article’s publication, I was asked to appear on a new TV program called Good Morning America. I believe that it was the 1st or 2nd time that the program ever aired. Read article
   
19. The Mind of the Unabomber
 I published this article in The New Republic, to which I am a Contributing Editor. It was an exploration of the kind of narcissistic disorder that could have propelled this man’s heinous behavior. Rather than dismiss him as a “full service maniac,” as one writer had done, I took a hard look at Kacznski’s grandiosity—his need to show the society where it had gone astray, and his rage at having his wisdom go unattended and unheard. Read article