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When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More
Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOne afternoon in 2020, early in the pandemic, I met Syl’violet and Matthew for a virtual session. Young, idealistic, deeply in love, they were also prone to dramatic fights. In this session Syl’violet, a vivacious essayist and spoken-word poet, was trying to describe the ways she felt Matthew, a measured medical student, was trying to control her, in this case by trying to dissuade her from buying a slushy. He thought they should keep to a tight budget until after he became a doctor and achieved financial stability. Then she could have “all the slushies you want later.” Syl’violet found his reasoning maddening, especially since he seemed to imply she was reckless.On the face of it, the fight seemed insignificant, but then an exchange took place that changed the tenor of the argument, connecting us to the underlying roots of the issue. “I have trouble envisioning that finish line,” Syl’violet exclaimed, tearing up, “because the plan that he’s talking about? My life has always been: The plan never works. You can do all the right things, you can obey all the right rules and get [expletive].” For a moment, Matthew continued to try to reason with her and convince her of his sound financial strategy. “I know that sounds very conceited, cocky,” he said, to which Syl’violet whipped back: “No! It sounds privileged!” She described her family’s relationship to money; they’d had nothing but trauma for generations. Syl’violet resented Matthew’s pride in his plan. “A privileged setting gave you access to all these things,” she said. “You’re taking ownership over it like, ‘I did it according to plan,’ as if, like, if other people did it according to plan, it would work out.”With the mention of the word “privilege,” Matthew came around to realizing they were talking about forces larger than themselves. Each of them was African American, but he came from a financially stable family; his parents, a firefighter and a bank manager, followed a middle-class trajectory and did well. “Let me rephrase,” Matthew said carefully, signaling to Syl’violet that he could see how his certainty about his future reflected his class background: “I recognize that if it wasn’t for my parents’ credit score, my loans to get — OK — so, I get that.” As the relevance of class and race came into focus, Syl’violet’s rage transformed into deep sorrow, generations of poverty weighing heavily on her. “I cannot stop thinking that we’re going to go bankrupt.” She worried that they might even be evicted. “I wish I could believe what you believe,” she told Matthew. He replied, his voice growing tender: “We have the same life now.” He looked at her, exuding care. “We have to live with the idea, the thinking, the viewpoint, that we’re going to die old together.”Syl’violet and MatthewDina Litovksy for The New York TimesOne of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness and appreciate difference and sovereignty. People talk a good game about their efforts, but it’s quite a difficult psychological task. To be truly open to your partner’s experience, you must relinquish your conviction in the righteousness of your own position; this requires humility and the courage to tolerate uncertainty. Coming to see the working of implicit biases on us, grasping that our views are contingent on, let’s say, our gender, class background or skin color, is a humbling lesson. It pushes us beyond assuming sameness, opening up the possibility of seeing our partner’s point of view.I’ve been working as a psychologist seeing individuals and couples since the mid-1990s, and in the past eight years, I’ve witnessed a tremendous change in the kinds of conversations couples can have. Not long ago, if I would ask a couple about the ways class or race played out between them, I’d typically be met with an awkward shrug and a change of topic. But recent events have reshaped the national conversation on power, privilege, gender norms, whiteness and systemic racism. Together these ideas have pushed us to think, talk, argue and become aware of the many implicit biases we all carry about our identities, unconscious assumptions that privilege some and inflict harm on others. These insights have also made it easier for people to realize there may be plenty of other unconscious assumptions undergirding their positions. I’ve been surprised and excited by the impact of this new understanding, and it has all made my work as a couples therapist easier.There has, of course, been ferocious pushback against many of these ideas, claims that they are divisive or exclusionary. #MeToo, B.L.M. and trans rights have been weaponized in service of the culture wars dominating the media. But in my practice, I’ve found that engaging with these progressive movements has led to deep changes in our psyches. My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being. New words make new thoughts and feelings possible. As a collective we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal.Some five years ago I started working on a documentary series called “Couples Therapy,” created by the filmmakers Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg and Eli Despres and airing on Showtime, that chronicles 18 to 20 weeks of therapy with couples who courageously volunteer to have their sessions filmed. (The couples in this essay were filmed for the show, which makes it possible for me to write about them; only some of those who are filmed end up on air.) We are now several seasons in. I was drawn to the project knowing that the directors were committed to an honest, vérité portrayal of therapy, and to looking at the social factors that thread through people’s lives and relationships.I am also trained as a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is about exploring unconscious motivations behind thoughts or actions. It allows people to gain access to how early experiences — vicissitudes of attachment and trauma — have shaped them, and to expand their capacity for thought and feeling. For couples, I incorporate systems thinking, a practice that focuses on the system — a couple, say or a family — and interprets how each individual unconsciously behaves in ways that serve the system as a whole.But what we mean by “unconsciously” is an ongoing debate. Freud was known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his singular focus on the private, interior world. In particular, he wrote about the epic battle between unconscious drives and forces of civilization. Traditional psychoanalysis has mostly focused on early scenes between the young and their caregivers as shaping the psyche, leaving the sociopolitical context to other disciplines. I am of a later theoretical school that, rather than seeing civilization in conflict with the self, sees the social contract, our relationship to the collectives we belong to, as nested in the deepest corners of our unconscious. For me, psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers.Over the years, I’ve come to see that one of the most pernicious issues couples struggle with is working through wrongdoing and blame. The claim “You hurt me” often sends couples spiraling. People want to feel like good and lovable beings; their intentions make perfect sense to themselves, and they hate being interpreted as selfish. In psychoanalytic jargon we often say, “No one likes being the ‘bad object.’” In fact, there are few things people resist more than being held responsible for causing harm. It immediately threatens to overwhelm the “offender” with shame (Am I a bad person?) and guilt (Have I caused irreparable damage? Should I be punished?). Yet serious hurt that goes unacknowledged leads to the accumulation of resentment and a deadening of the relationship.Our ongoing national conversations about systemic biases have made it easier for couples to acknowledge wrongdoings by easing people into the idea of unconscious complicity. Accepting that you are part of a complex social system and implicated in its biases no matter what you tell yourself can also help you accept that in other aspects of your life, you are partly governed by unconscious forces you do not necessarily recognize. In Freudian terms, the ego is not a master in its own house. In other words, to know if you’ve caused harm, it is not enough to ask yourself, “Did I intend to hurt the other?”; you may need to listen to the feedback of others. These insights can have ripple effects beyond an awareness of specific biases, becoming relevant in many aspects of our lives — in our relationships with partners or children, in reviewing our life history. As my friend Nick described it: “Everything about me was raised to believe I am not racist or privileged, but in recent years I realize how easy certain things have always been for me simply because I’m white. I am humbled. And that has changed the way Rebecca and I talk with each other.”One of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness.A shift in our vocabularies has also played a role. Language tends to evolve to better accommodate experiences of the dominant social group, leaving other experiences obscured from collective understanding, and thus silently perpetuating bias and harm. When these gaps are filled by new concepts, social change can follow. The expanding lexicon around bias and privilege includes terms like “white fragility” or “white tears,” referring to white people’s defensive refusal to fully engage with accountability; other phrases like “virtue signaling,” being “a Karen” or “performative allyship” underline the difference between honest and fake engagement with questions of ethics, morality and responsibility. These terms have implications beyond race, and I’ve seen them work their way into the therapy room. They’ve helped couples see the difference between the wish to receive forgiveness and assurance of your goodness and actual concern for the one you offended. Analysts call this distinction the difference between guilt and guiltiness. Guilt entails feeling bad for having harmed another; guiltiness is the preoccupation with yourself — whether you are or aren’t guilty. This preoccupation is all about warding off shame, which blocks concern for others.Questions of guilt hovered over another couple I worked with. He had recently cheated on his wife. They were generally deeply supportive of each other, but after she found out about his transgression, she was terribly upset and also confused. Their attempts to talk about what happened were halting. #MeToo rhetoric was woven into their discussions, functioning as a superego, shaping and inhibiting what they could even think. She said that she felt that the lessons of the movement were telling her not to forgive but to leave him — “Especially now, if a woman is being wronged, you get out.” It was hard for her to know how she actually felt about it all. Early on, he couldn’t separate remorse from fear. He was terrified of getting into trouble, and guiltiness prevailed. His voice was hushed while he scrutinized me intently, worried about how he would be perceived: “There are a lot of men in this business right now who have taken positions of power and use them to have sex with people.”They were both white and understood their privilege and were apologetic about it. She often undid her own complaints — “I levitate out” — by having the thought, “Oh, poor cis white woman.” He was uncomfortable, too. He talked about reading the news “about another Black or brown person being killed. And it’s just like I feel a little — well, I feel guilty, to be honest, to be sitting here.” The lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement initially can provoke such paralyzing guilt and shame that people become defensive and stop fully thinking. Yet over time, I’ve found, the ideas can inspire deep psychological work, pushing people to reckon with the harm that has been done, the question of whom should be implicated, and the difference between virtue signaling and deeper concerns. These are tough and important lessons that can carry over into intimate relationships. In this case, the husband described a new understanding about the ways he exercised power at work: “Hold on. Have I been an ally? Has it just been optics?” These insights extended even to his way of speaking about his transgression. He had been rationalizing his behavior by saying that his wife was not giving him the attention he needed. But moving beyond what the couple called “optics,” now he was asking himself for a more thorough accounting of what his cheating was really about, and how it affected his wife. He explained how lonely he was if she traveled; he felt left behind and discarded, a feeling deeply familiar to him from early childhood. Acknowledging his vulnerability was hard for him, but it opened up a series of honest conversations between them. “I convinced myself she does not desire me,” he said. “I’m not the popular guy. I’m not the strong guy.” He linked those feelings to insecurities he felt as a teenager, when he suffered chronic teasing from kids at school for being perceived as effeminate.This new, nondefensive way of talking made it possible for her to understand how his transgression hit her where she felt most insecure, and he could see it, generating remorse and forgiveness between them. She described how it had become easier for both of them to “check” themselves for their impact on the other person, and quickly “notice or apologize.” In one session she said, smiling: “You were a jerk to me yesterday, and then you apologized a couple hours later. You recognized that you took out your frustration there on me because I was an easy target.” He realized that he stopped skimming over ways he caused others pain: “I actually was just thinking therapy and the Black Lives Matter movement have made me keenly aware of the words that just came out of my mouth, and the understanding that she reacted adversely to that, instead of me just going, ‘We move on, because that’s awkward.’ There’s a need now to address it.” He continued: “ ‘Did I just upset you? What did I do to just upset you?’”Couples work always goes back to the challenge of otherness. Differences can show up around philosophical questions like what is important to devote a life to, or whether it is ethical to have babies with a climate crisis looming; or it can be closer to home, like whether having a sexual fantasy about a person who is not your partner is acceptable; or even as seemingly trivial as the correct way to load a dishwasher. Whatever the issue, differences can become a point of crisis in the relationship. Immediately the question of who is right, who gets their way or who has a better handle on reality pops up. Narcissistic vulnerabilities about self-worth appear, which then trigger an impulse to devalue the other. Partners try to resolve such impasses by digging in and working hard to convince the other of their own position, becoming further polarized.The challenge of otherness may be easiest to see when we think of racial differences. This was certainly true for James and Michelle. Michelle was a calm, gentle, somewhat reserved African American social worker, and James, at the time a police officer, was a slight, wiry white man whose face did not reveal much feeling. They came in with classic conflicts around division of labor and differing parenting styles, and then the pandemic hit. Quarantined, working remotely and home-schooling their 3-year-old son, they started fighting about Covid protocols. Michelle was aware of the way that Covid was devastating Black communities and wanted to be careful. James, along with his fellow police officers and his conservative parents, thought the concern was overblown. Discussion about how race shaped James and Michelle’s experiences and ideas routinely dead-ended. If Michelle tried to bring up the topic, James would insist, “I don’t see color,” and say he didn’t know what she was talking about. In our sessions, Michelle sounded hopeless: She wanted him to understand how traumatizing Covid had been for Black people. But she was frustrated by his inability to acknowledge real difference, as if everyone was the same race. “He’s of the mind-set that ‘I don’t see color.’” She continued setting out his thinking: “ ‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say because that’s not how I think.’” That point of view “obviously angers me,” she said. James would shrug, expressionless. Michelle was describing the infuriating experience of trying to break through a barrier: Her husband wasn’t consciously aware that whiteness was a perspective that was constricting what he could imagine or comprehend.After George Floyd was murdered and protests of all kinds erupted across the country, the dynamic between James and Michelle started to shift. Psychoanalysts are often interested in people’s fantasies, the scenarios running under the hood of conscious thought that express hidden desires and fears. When I asked James and Michelle about theirs, they shared apocalyptic ones: Each was imagining a full-on race war. Michelle imagined loss of all contact and trust between Black people and white people. James, who seemed uncharacteristically tense, saw himself on one side of a divide and was envisioning an “all-out physical combat.” “With whom?” I asked. “With anybody outside of this household. Anybody that tries to come and take anything from us because they’re struggling to survive and they start looting to feed their family, they’re now coming to my house.” Yet over time, as the conversation about Black lives continued, his own identifications became more complex and nuanced. He still felt loyalty to his fellow police officers and his conservative family, but he became aware that those feelings were now in tension with Michelle’s beliefs and what he was witnessing on the news about police violence against Black men and loud public demand for police reform.Michelle and James with their son.Dina Litovksy for The New York TimesJames’s changing internal landscape was reflected in his clear distress about “the all-out chaos that a large conflict can bring if we’re further divided in this country. You wouldn’t know who to trust from place to place.” Not knowing whom to trust also meant he could no longer trust his old belief system — in which it was clear who was “good” and who was “bad.” This disruption was creating new concerns and fantasies. Rather than fearing looters, he now feared polarization: “Michelle might be able to seek refuge somewhere where I might get shunned, or vice versa.” He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to keep their young child safe.Interestingly, engaging with the question of systemic racism did not polarize Michelle and James but rather helped them do the important psychological work that I doubt I, as their therapist, could have inspired in them on my own. Something began to shift inside James, and he was no longer assuming sameness. He was no longer imposing his version of reality on Michelle, but rather “mentalizing” — understanding his and her mental states as separate and different subjective experiences: thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires. In a meaningful moment he said, “I know it hits her harder than it does me.” I was moved to hear James plainly state: “We can never truly know what each other goes through because we’re not each other. So all we can do is be in as much understanding as possible.” He also recognized that he felt less defensive, “because she’s not directly attacking me.” And he saw a way for the two of them to remain connected, despite their difference. “We could get into a debate or an argument and be on opposite sides of the spectrum, completely juxtaposed, and manage to come through it and learn something about another perspective.”Michelle, who often described herself as guarded, also began to drop her defensive posture. She was looking at him fondly, her voice warmer. “These are things that I never really heard him fully articulate, particularly about his insecurities and feeling caught in the middle. That’s helpful for me to hear, because it makes me more conscious and aware of how he’s feeling.” For the first time, they were each entertaining multiple perspectives. Love is ultimately measured by people’s capacity to see and care about the other person as they are; succeeding in this effort is how people in relationships grow.Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalyst and an academic who serves on the faculty of the N.Y.U. postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis, teaching a course in identity and politics and psychoanalysis with culture in mind. She is also the therapist on the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy.” Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation and cultural studies. Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer who moved to New York in 1991. In 2020, she won the Nannen Prize, Germany’s foremost award for documentary photography. More
She showed that basic musical ability is present in infants across cultures, laying a foundation for a growing field of study.Sandra Trehub, a psychologist and researcher whose work helped illuminate how children perceive sound, and how lullabies and music fit into their cognitive and social development, died on Jan. 20 at her home in Toronto. She was 84.The death was confirmed by her son Andrew Cohen.Over a half-century as a psychologist at the University of Toronto, where she began working in 1973, Dr. Trehub produced seminal work in the field that is now known as the psychology of music.“Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscience who were studying music at all as a human behavior,” Laurel Trainor, a psychologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in a phone interview. “Sandra said, look, music is universal, we spend a lot of time and energy on music — what is its purpose? Why do we do this?”Dr. Trehub’s research found that there are indeed universally shared responses to music among infants, beginning with sing-song-y baby talk by parents across different cultures.She found that infants prefer certain melodic intervals over others and can grasp the contour and shape of a lullaby. She further established that infants and toddlers can — better than adults — notice differences in some elements of music from other countries and cultures, both tonal and rhythmic. That finding suggested that as people get older, their ability to distinguish discrepancies in unfamiliar music decreases while their ability to notice nuance in familiar music increases.“Sandra was the first psychologist to study musical abilities for their own sake in infants,” Isabelle Peretz, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an email. Before Dr. Trehub, she added, many researchers thought “that musicality was a pure cultural product which was acquired and possessed by a few select people: the musicians.”It is now widely accepted that music is an important developmental tool for everyone, starting in infancy, and that musical fluency among parents can deeply affect their children’s long-term health and mental development.“Her work helps to legitimize early childhood music education, which basically didn’t exist before the 1980s,” Samuel Mehr, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, said by email.Dr. Trehub’s findings might seem intuitive or even obvious now, he added, but that only highlights the importance of her work. “Every bit of research in the psychology of music over the past 40 years can be traced back to Sandra Trehub,” he said.Sandra Edythe Trehub was born on May 21, 1938, in Montreal. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics at McGill University in Montreal in 1959 and her master’s in psychology there in 1971.After completing her doctorate, also at McGill, she began her career as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Some of her earliest work showed how infants as young as one month old could distinguish between speech sounds; in a paper, she wrote that babies would increase their “sucking rate” on an artificial nipple when new vowels were introduced.Using the same methodology, Dr. Trehub went on to show in another paper how babies can distinguish between sounds in some foreign languages better than adults. That finding, said Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, provided the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research demonstrating that babies are born with the ability to pick up on the basic acoustics of any of the world’s languages. The research has served to heighten the importance of early exposure to foreign languages, with continuing ramifications in education.As Dr. Trehub earned tenure at the University of Toronto, her work shifted from speech to music. She published prolifically in journals, including two influential papers in 1977. One showed that the heart rates of five-month-old infants changed when exposed to different rhythms. The other showed that infants can sense the relationships between notes — they can tell when the same melody is transposed to a different key. Dr. Trehub’s research was inspired in part by her own love of music; two of her favorite singers were Leonard Cohen and David Bowie.Dr. Trehub’s marriage to Norman Cohen in 1957 ended in divorce in 1968. She married Ronald Matthews in 1970; he died in 2007. In addition to her son Andrew, she is survived by two more children, Dana and Ira Cohen; her sisters, Estelle Ebert and Maxine Seidman; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.She also leaves an intellectual lineage of psychologists who studied with her and went on to head some of the most active psychology of music labs in the world.Dr. Trainor, one of Dr. Trehub’s early graduate students, remembered going to talks on the psychology of music in the 1980s and ’90s with little more than 10 people in the audience. Now there are conferences with thousands of researchers.“Part of that is a testament to Sandra, and the quality of her work — she couldn’t be ignored,” said Dr. Trainor.Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who wrote more than 30 articles with Dr. Trehub, agreed. “She was like Joni Mitchell,” he said by phone. “In the end, she really got every credit that she deserved.” More
His observations about his 3-year-old daughter’s viewing habits led him to join Joan Ganz Cooney in creating a program that revolutionized children’s television.Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist whose young daughter’s viewing habits inspired the creation of the revolutionary children’s educational television program “Sesame Street,” and whose fund-raising helped get it off the ground, died on Jan. 15 at his home in San Diego. He was 93.His daughter Julie Morrisett confirmed the death.Mr. Morrisett was a vice president of the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation in 1966 when he attended a dinner party in Manhattan hosted by his friends Joan Ganz Cooney and her husband, Tim. During the evening, Mr. Morrisett told the guests that his daughter Sarah was so mesmerized by TV that she would watch the test pattern on weekend mornings until cartoons began.Sarah had also memorized advertising jingles, which suggested to Mr. Morrisett that youngsters might more easily learn reading, writing and arithmetic if they were delivered in an entertaining way.“I said at one point in the conversation, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach young children?’” he said in an interview on “BackStory,” a podcast about history, in 2019, “and her answer was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.’”The idea was intriguing enough for Mr. Morrisett, along with Ms. Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs television programming, and others to begin brainstorming about creating a program for preschoolers, particularly poor children who were likely to fall behind in the early grades, that would educate and amuse them.“‘What if?’ became their operative phrase,” Michael Davis wrote in “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (2008). “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?”At Mr. Morrisett’s request, and with money from the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Ganz Cooney traveled the country interviewing educators, animators, puppeteers, psychologists, filmmakers and television producers to produce a study, “The Potential Uses of Television for Pre-School Education.” That study became the blueprint for “Sesame Street.”Mr. Morrisett focused on raising $8 million to start “Sesame Street,” with about half coming from the United States Office of Education and the rest in the form of grants from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Mr. Morrisett had “magnificent political skills” that helped him raise money, Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “He lived in that rarefied world and had connections. He was so believable and so clear and made so much damn sense.”In a statement, Ms. Ganz Cooney said, “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there is no ‘Sesame Street.’”The series made its debut on public television on Nov. 10, 1969, introducing children to a fantasy world where they could learn numbers and letters with help from a multiracial cast and a corps of Jim Henson’s Muppets that would include Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Elmo.Mr. Morrisett recalled that “Sesame Street” had a curriculum based on continuing research, designed to help children who watched the show succeed in school.“We were spending maybe a third of our budget on that research,” he told WBUR Radio in 2019, “and that was something that commercial television just couldn’t do.”Mr. Morrisett in 2009 with Joan Ganz Cooney at a benefit in New York for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that produces “Sesame Street.”Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesMr. Morrisett was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Oklahoma City, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and Los Angeles. His father, also named Lloyd, was an assistant schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., and later a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, Jessie (Watson) Morrisett, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, Mr. Morrisett studied for two years at U.C.L.A, then earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale in 1956. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but left after two years to work at the Social Science Research Council. He then joined the Carnegie Corporation as the executive assistant to its president, John Gardner. He later became a vice president.Mr. Morrisett never took an operational role at the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street” and other programs, but he was an active chairman of its board until 2000. During that time he was instrumental in the creation and funding of “The Electric Company,” a series that taught language skills to children ages 6 to 10, which was broadcast in the 1970s and rebooted from 2009 to 2011.“He had this wonderful combination of being a child psychologist who was also a champion of media and technology and was research-based, which is the DNA of the company,” Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, said in a phone interview. She added, “He was a pioneer who believed that television could be an educational force.”When “Sesame Street” received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, a gaggle of Muppets onstage shouted “We love you” to Mr. Morrisett and Ms. Ganz Cooney, who were seated in the balcony.In addition to his daughters, Julie Morrisett and Sarah Morrisett Otley, Mr. Morrisett is survived by his wife, Mary (Pierre) Morrisett, and two grandchildren.Julie Morrisett said that, unlike her sister, she didn’t like television. “There’d be no ‘Sesame Street,’” she joked, “if I were the older daughter.”While chairman of Sesame Workshop, Mr. Morrisett was also president from 1969 to 1998 of the Markle Foundation and shifted its focus from medical research and education to supporting the study of mass communication and information technology.In an essay published in Markle’s annual report in 1981, Mr. Morrisett looked at the state of children’s television and advocated for a cable TV network devoted to younger viewers. (He did not mention Nickelodeon, which had started in 1979.)He argued that such a channel had to compete effectively for viewers’ attention, but that “the key for a new children’s television service will be to provide cultural and educational values widely believed necessary for leading a productive and satisfying life in our society.” More
Brené Brown, who had put her podcasts on hiatus last month, returned to Spotify, expressing misgivings about Rogan but noting her contract with the service.The social psychologist Brené Brown said Tuesday that despite misgivings she would resume her two Spotify podcasts, which she had put on hiatus while considering the streaming platform’s policies and responsibilities amid accusations that its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, was spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.After several prominent recording artists, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, announced last month that they were removing their music from Spotify because they were not comfortable sharing a platform with Rogan’s show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Brown had announced that she was indefinitely pausing her podcasts, “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead,” to learn more about Spotify’s misinformation policy.“As you may or may not know, I’m under a multiyear, exclusive contract with Spotify,” Brown explained in a message posted to her website Tuesday about her decision to resume her podcast. “Unlike some creators, I don’t have the option of pulling my work from the platform.”Brown continued to express dismay over having to share a platform with Rogan, whom she criticized for past comments, saying that he had made “dehumanizing” comments about transgender people and referring to a 2011 segment in which Rogan laughed as a visiting comedian boasted about “demanding sexual favors from young female comedians wanting to perform onstage” at a club.“If advertisers and listeners support ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ and Spotify needs him as the cornerstone of its podcasting ambitions — that’s OK,” Brown wrote. “But sharing the table with Rogan puts me in a tremendous values conflict with very few options.”Brown is a professor at the University of Houston whose 2010 TEDx talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” is one of the most popular in TED history; her podcasts are produced by Parcast, a studio known for true-crime and mystery shows that Spotify acquired in 2019.After Young and Mitchell removed their music, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, published the service’s platform rules and said Spotify would add “content advisory” flags on podcast episodes about the pandemic. Over the weekend, Ek confirmed that Rogan had removed a number of episodes after meetings with Spotify executives and after “his own reflections.”Spotify removed the episodes after the musician India.Arie shared a compilation video showing Rogan using a racial slur in past episodes. That prompted an apology from Rogan, who two years ago signed an exclusive multiyear deal with Spotify reported to be worth $100 million.Brown insisted she was not attempting to censor or deplatform Rogan, but rather was concerned with herself and her own audience, and trying to understand how Spotify sees its responsibilities, adding that she thinks podcasters with a wide reach should vet and challenge their guests.“It doesn’t appear to me that ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ takes any responsibility for the health information that it puts out in the world,” she said, “and I do believe that leads to people getting sick and even dying.”The controversy has moved into the political realm in recent days, with former President Donald J. Trump issuing a statement urging Rogan to stop apologizing.On the latest episode of his podcast, released Tuesday, Rogan called the release of the compilation video “a political hit job” but disputed the notion that comedians should never apologize. “You should apologize if you regret something,” he said. More
Several experts said Friday that while they personally supported ending Britney Spears’s conservatorship, they thought it unusual that the Los Angeles probate court did so without requiring the pop star to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.“I’m surprised,” said Robert Dinerstein, a disability rights law professor at American University. He said that persuading judges to overturn a conservatorship in the first place is unusual.But when they do, he said, they typically require a psychological evaluation.“Within the relatively rare number of cases where a conservatorship is terminated, it’s even more unusual to do that without proof they had capacity,” Professor Dinerstein said.Judge Brenda Penny, who terminated the conservatorship, said that further psychological assessments of Ms. Spears were unnecessary, because the conservatorship was technically voluntary.Victoria Haneman, a trusts and estates law professor at Creighton University, said California probate code does not require a mental health evaluation for the conservatorship to be terminated. She said the underlying diagnosis explaining why Ms. Spears was put in conservatorship is unavailable because the record is sealed, making it tough to determine what sort of evaluation might have been required to show that the guardianship was no longer needed.Nevertheless, mental issues seemed to be a part of the reason, and so she had expected that an assessment would have been required to answer whether those problems were now in the past, she said.“I am extremely surprised that this conservatorship is ended without an evaluation,” she said.The experts stressed that they were not commenting on Ms. Spears’s mental health status, of which they are not informed — only on the process as they have experienced it.Typically in deciding whether to end a conservatorship, the experts said, a judge will consider whether the conservatee has regained “capacity,” using a psychological assessment and other factors to determine cognitive ability and decision making.This includes whether they can weigh risks and benefits regarding things like medical care, marriage and contracts. The person’s ability to feed, clothe and shelter themselves may also be examined.The purpose of an assessment is to determine whether the conditions that led to the imposition of the conservatorship in the first place have now stabilized or are in the past.Ms. Spears’s case has been considered extremely unusual because while viewed as unable to care for herself by the court, she continued to work extensively as a performing musician and global celebrity, bringing in millions of dollars.The singer herself had insisted that the arrangement end without her having to undergo an additional mental evaluation, and her lawyer had noted that lawyers for her father had agreed that no mental or psychological evaluation was required under California probate court.Zoe Brennan-Kohn, a disabilities rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said though typically some kind of psychological evaluation is part of the process of ending a conservatorship, it “makes sense that there would be no evaluation because everyone agreed.”“If everyone in the picture thinks this person does not need to be in this invasive situation,” she said, “we don’t want courts to be second-guessing that. Everyone said you should end this. I think it’s appropriate that the judge said, ‘Let’s end this.’” More
To get out of conservatorship, the pop star will likely have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, an uneasy melding of legal standards and mental health criteria.Her voice quaking with anger and despair, the pop star Britney Spears has asked repeatedly in court to be freed from the conservatorship that has controlled her money and personal life for 13 years. What’s more, she asked the judge to sever the arrangement without making her undergo a psychological evaluation.It’s a demand that legal experts say is unlikely to be granted. The mental health assessment is usually the pole star in a constellation of evidence that a judge considers in deciding whether to restore independence.Its underlying purpose is to determine whether the conditions that led to the imposition of the conservatorship have stabilized or been resolved.The evaluation process, which uneasily melds mental health criteria with legal standards, illustrates why the exit from strict oversight is difficult and rare. State laws are often ambiguous. And their application can vary from county to county, judge to judge, case to case.Isn’t Ms. Spears’s artistic and financial success proof she is self-sufficient?Yes and no. A judge looks for what, in law, is called “capacity.” The term generally refers to benchmarks in a person’s functional and cognitive ability as well as their vulnerability to harm or coercion.Under California law, which governs Ms. Spears’s case, a person deemed to have capacity can articulate risks and benefits in making decisions about medical care, wills, marriage and contracts (such as hiring a lawyer), and can feed, clothe and shelter themselves.Annette Swain, a Los Angeles psychologist who does neuropsychological assessments, said that because someone doesn’t always show good judgment, it doesn’t mean they lack capacity. “We all can make bad decisions at many points in our lives,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that we should have our rights taken away.”Even so, Ms. Spears’s professional and financial successes do not directly speak to whether she has regained “legal mental capacity,” which she was found to lack in 2008, after a series of public breakdowns, breathlessly captured by the media. At that time, a judge ruled that Ms. Spears, who did not appear in court, was so fragile that a conservatorship was warranted.Judges authorize conservatorships usually for one of three broad categories: a severe psychiatric breakdown; a chronic, worsening condition like dementia; or an intellectual or physical disability that critically impairs function.Markers indicating a person has regained capacity appear to set a low bar. But in practice, the bar can be quite high.“‘Restored to capacity’ before the psychotic break? Or the age the person is now? That expression is fraught with importing value judgment,” said Robert Dinerstein, a disability rights law professor at American University.Records detailing grounds for the petition from Ms. Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, to become his daughter’s conservator are sealed. A few factors suggest the judge at the outset regarded the situation as serious. She appointed conservators to oversee Ms. Spears’s personal life as well as finances. She also ruled that Ms. Spears could not hire her own lawyer, though a lawyer the singer consulted at the time said he thought she was capable of that.Earlier this month, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny said Ms. Spears could retain her own counsel.Does “capacity” differ among states?Yes. Some states, like California, detail basic functional abilities. Others do not. Colorado acknowledges modern advances like “appropriate and reasonably available technological assistance.” Illinois looks for “mental deterioration, physical incapacity, mental illness, developmental disability, gambling, idleness, debauchery, excessive use of intoxicants or drugs.”Sally Hurme of the National Guardianship Association noted: “You could be found to be incapacitated in one state but not in another.”Who performs the psychological assessment?Ideally, a forensic psychiatrist or a psychologist with expertise in neuropsychological assessments. But some states just specify “physician.” Psychiatrists tend to place greater weight on diagnoses; psychologists emphasize tests that measure cognitive abilities. Each reviews medical records and interviews family, friends and others.Assessments can extend over several days. They range widely in depth and duration.Eric Freitag, who conducts neuropsychological assessments in the Bay Area, said he prefers interviewing people at home where they are often more at ease, and where he can evaluate the environment. He asks about financial literacy: bill-paying, health insurance, even counting out change.Assessing safety is key. Dr. Freitag will ask what the person would do if a fire broke out. “I’d call my daughter,” one of his subjects replied.Who chooses the evaluator?Ms. Spears has not been able to choose her evaluators in the past because the conservator has the power to make those decisions. However, if she moves to dissolve the conservatorship, she can select the evaluator, to help build her case. If the conservator, her father, opposes her petition and objects to her selection, he could nominate a candidate to perform an additional assessment. Ms. Spears would likely pick up both tabs as costs of the conservatorship.To avoid a bitter battle of experts and the appearance that an assessor hired by either camp would be inherently biased — plus the strain of two evaluations on Ms. Spears — the judge could try to get both sides to agree to an independent, court-appointed doctor.What impact does a mental health diagnosis have on an evaluation?Many states explicitly say that a diagnosis of a severe mental health disorder is not, on its own, evidence that a person should remain in conservatorship.Stuart Zimring, an attorney in Los Angeles County who specializes in elderlaw and special needs trusts, noted that he once represented a physician with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder who was under a conservatorship. The doctor’s rights were eventually restored after he proved he was attending counseling sessions and taking medication.“It was a joyous day when the conservatorship was terminated,” said Mr. Zimring. “He got to practice medicine again, under supervision.”The association between the diagnosis of a severe mental disorder and a determination of incapacity troubles Dr. Swain, the Los Angeles psychologist.“Whatever they ended up diagnosing Britney Spears with, was it of such severity that she did not understand the decisions that she had to make, that she could not provide adequate self-care?” she asked. “Where do you draw that line? It’s a moving target.”Does the judge have to accept an evaluator’s findings?No, but judges usually do.What standard does a probate judge apply to reach a decision?In most states, when a judge approves a conservatorship, which constrains a person’s autonomy, the evidence has to be “clear and convincing,” a rigorous standard just below the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”But when a conservatee wants those rights restored, many experts believe the standard should be more lenient.Some states indeed apply a lower standard to end a conservatorship. In California, a judge can do so by finding it is more likely than not (“preponderance of evidence”) that the conservatee has capacity. But some states say that the evidence to earn a ticket out still has to be “clear and convincing.”Most states do not even set a standard.“There’s an underlying assumption that if you can get the process right, everything would be fine and we wouldn’t be depriving people of rights,” said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “Our take is that the process is fundamentally broken and that we shouldn’t be using guardianship in so many cases.”If someone is doing well, isn’t the conservatorship no longer necessary?Yes and no. “Judges are haunted by people they have had in front of them who have been released and disaster happens,” said Victoria Haneman, a trusts and estates law professor at Creighton University. “So they take a conservative approach to freedom.”Describing the Kafkaesque conundrum of conservatorship, Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a disabilities rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “If she’s doing great, the system is working and should continue. If she is making choices others disagree with, then she’s unreliable and she needs the system.”Or, as Kristin Booth Glen, a former New York State judge who oversaw such cases and now works to reform the system, put it, “Conservatorship and guardianship are like roach motels: you can check in but you can’t check out.”Can an evaluator recommend a less restrictive approach than a conservatorship?At times. Judge Glen once approved the termination of a guardianship of a young woman originally deemed to have the mental acuity of a 7-year-old. After three years of thoughtful interventions, the woman, since married and raising two children, had become able to participate fully in her life. She relied on a team for “supported decision making,” which Judge Glen called “a less restrictive alternate to the Draconian loss of liberty” of guardianship.A supported decision-making approach has been hailed by the Uniform Law Commission, which drafts model statutes. It has said judges should seek “the least restrictive alternative” to conservatorship.To date, only Washington and Maine have fully adopted the commission’s recommended model. More
He was a New York psychiatrist who went to Hollywood to help lay down guidelines for sex and violence in films. Not everyone was pleased.Dr. Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist who as head of Hollywood’s movie rating board in the early 1970s established himself as filmgoers’ sentry against carnal imagery and violence, died on April 13 in Manhattan. He was 96.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his stepdaughter Jennifer Klein.An author, professor and management consultant who had always been intrigued by corporate ladder-climbing, he jousted with egocentric studio executives, producers, directors and actors — providing ample grist for his 1979 book, “Me: The Narcissistic American.”From 1971 to 1974, Dr. Stern was the director of the self-policing Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America, which had been founded only a few years earlier. It replaced the rigidly moralistic Production Code imposed in the early 1930s and censoriously administered by Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian deacon and former national Republican Party chairman.The new ratings board, which was struggling to gain credibility when it began, graded films by letter to let moviegoers know in advance how much violence, sexuality and foul language to expect on the screen.The board’s decision that a film merited a rating of R, or restricted, might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17; an X rating would bar anyone under 17 altogether.Dr. Stern recast the PG (parental guidance) category to include a warning that “some material might not be suitable for pre-teenagers.” He also tried, but failed, to abolish the X rating — on the grounds, he told The Los Angeles Times in 1972, that it wasn’t the job of the Motion Picture Association to keep people out of theaters. (The X rating was changed to NC-17 in 1990, but its meaning remained unchanged.)Not until last year, with the release of “Three Christs,” a movie about hospitalized patients who believed they were Jesus, did Dr. Stern receive a screen credit (he was one of the film’s 17 producers). But the lack of onscreen recognition belied the power he wielded as director of the board, which privately screened films and then voted on which letter rating to impose.Even some critics gave the new letter-coded classification the benefit of the doubt in the early 1970s, agreeing that its decisions, in contrast to those of the old Production Code, were becoming more grounded in sociology than theology. Still, two young members of the rating board, appointed under a one-year fellowship, wrote a scathing critique of its methodology that was published in The New York Times in 1972.They accused Dr. Stern of megalomaniacal meddling, editing scripts before filming and cropping scenes afterward, and of tolerating gratuitous violence but being puritanical about sex. They claimed, among other things, that he had warned Ernest Lehman, the director of “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972), that focusing on masturbation in the film version of Philip Roth’s novel risked an X rating.“You can have a love scene, but as soon as you start to unbutton or unzip you must cut,” Dr. Stern was quoted as saying in The Hollywood Reporter about sex in movies.The Times article prompted letters praising Dr. Stern from several directors, including Mr. Lehman, who said that Dr. Stern’s advice had actually improved his final cut of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” To which The Times film critic Vincent Canby sniffed, “If Mr. Lehman was really influenced by Dr. Stern’s advice two years ago, then he should sue the doctor for malpractice.”Dr. Stern argued that the rating system, while imperfect, served several goals. Among other things, he said, it fended off even more restrictive definitions of obscenity by Congress, the courts and localities; and it warned people away from what they might find intrusive as mores evolved and society became more accepting.“Social growth should make the rating system more and more obsolete,” he told The Los Angeles Times.Members of the movie rating board privately screened films and then voted on which letter rating to impose. An R rating might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17.Motion Picture Association of AmericaAaron Stern was born on March 26, 1925, in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Benjamin Israel Stern, was a carpenter, and his mother, Anna (Fishader) Stern, was a homemaker. Raised in Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay, he was the youngest of three children and the only one born in the United States.After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1947, he earned a master’s degree in psychological services and a doctorate in child development from Columbia University, and a medical degree from the State University of New York’s Downstate Health Sciences University.In addition to his stepdaughter Ms. Klein, he is survived by his wife, Betty Lee (Baum) Stern; two children, Debra Marrone and Scott Stern, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; two other stepchildren, Lauren Rosenkranz and Jonathan Otto; and 13 grandchildren.Dr. Stern was introduced to Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association, by a neighbor in Great Neck, N.Y., Robert Benjamin, an executive at United Artists. He initially began reviewing films for the association and was recruited by Mr. Valenti to run the ratings administration in mid-1971.He left there early in 1974 to join Columbia Pictures Industries and eventually returned from Los Angeles to New York, where he revived his private practice. He also taught at Yale, Columbia, New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and he served as chief operating officer of Tiger Management, a hedge fund, and a trustee of the Robertson Foundation.A veteran educator at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Dr. Stern, with his wife, donated $5 million in 2019 to endow a professorship and fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine to treat patients with pathological personality disorders. The gift was in gratitude for the care he had received during a medical emergency.Dr. Stern had been interested in narcissism even before he went to Hollywood, but his experience there proved inspirational.In “Me: The Narcissistic American,” he wrote that babies are born narcissistic, unconcerned about whom they awaken in the middle of the night, and need to be disciplined as they mature to take others into account.“When narcissism is for survival, as with the infant and the founding of a country,” he wrote, “it is not as destructive as when one is established, successful and affluent.”In 1981, Mr. Valenti told The Times that he had “made a mistake of putting a psychiatrist in charge” of the ratings system. Dr. Stern replied, “I am at a loss to respond to that.”But he had acknowledged, when he still held the job, “There’s no way to sit in this chair and be loved.” He was constantly second-guessed.Why give “The Exorcist” (1973) an R rating? (“I think it’s a great film,” he told the director, William Friedkin. “I’m not going to ask you to cut a frame.”) Why originally give Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) an X for a ménage à trois filmed in high speed? (“If we did that, any hard-core pornographer could speed up his scenes and legitimately ask for an R on the same basis.”) Later, as a private $1,000-a-day consultant, he helped edit Mr. Friedkin’s “Cruising” (1980), about a serial killer of gay men, to gain an R instead of an X.“You can only rate the explicit elements on the screen — never the morality or the thought issues behind it,” Dr. Stern said in 1972. “That is the province of religion, leaders, critics and each individual.” More
Pandemic tensions led HBO to make a new version of the therapy drama, which stars Uzo Aduba and aims to reduce stigmas about mental health care.The writer Jennifer Schuur (“My Brilliant Friend,” “Unbelievable”) has seen the same therapist every week for 17 years. “It is one of the most significant relationships of my life,” she said. Sometimes friends and family question that longevity. More
