Panic and hoaxes

While having coffee and biscotti with a colleague today the conversation turned to Freud, psychoanalysis and his use of the term substrate. “We are only at the beginning of a new science. I was successful in digging up buried monuments from the substrata of the mind.” Later I gave this some more thought while listening to Orson Wells’ 1938 famous hoax, the War of the Worlds broadcast that panicked the American nation.

It's interesting to note that we as users of search engines such as Google seem to be tying our searches for hoaxes and terms involving "panic" in a loosely corelated way (see graph above). 

The graph above illustares the correlation between google searches for hoaxes in history and searches based on the term "panic" using Google's search volume index. The blue graph represents trends for searches for hoaxes.

I'm not sure if Freud's work with hysteria was necessarily linked with panic response. Freud and psychoanalysts of the period were not so interested in thinking about the anxiety attack as a biochemical disorder - they had, after all other stories, narratives such as neurosis and unconscious conflict.

The 1938 broadcast of the War of the Worlds starring Orson Welles and those men from Mars directly spawned a raft of now famous sociological investigations and surveys of the American psyche. It's been said that particular hoax [frightened] some 1.2 million people.

Could a similar hoax work as well today? The temptation is to think that people are less naive and probably cynical to this sort of media manipulation. We're all used to questioning the 'truth' as it is presented to us. We also have many more channels of information to go on. It's not just the Radio anymore. 

In the new connected world the search for the [truth] is only a few keystorkes away. But more importantly, it's like panic has shifted from that of the collective of yesteryear to a new locus -  the individual.

Streaking at the big games

I’m not a huge rugby league fanatic but like the other 2 Million plus viewers I stayed up past 8pm to watch the 3^rd State of Origin match between the Blues and the Maroons last night.

Even if you didn’t watch the match, you will know by now that Queensland ran in for a try as a streaker was being man-handled by security staff in the dying minutes of the game. That gave Queensland another set of six tackles and deprived the Blues, according to sports commentators, the chance to head down the other end to score.

Apparently the same said streaker has some form. During the finals two years ago he stormed on to Allianz Stadium during the sudden-death clash between the Wests Tigers and New Zealand. It’s even rumored that the stunt was the result of a Facebook challenge, which attracted thousands of amused people willing to chip in to pay the fine.

Footy aside, and if for a minute we set aside the notion streakers are usually encouraged by some amount of alcohol, a bet, a challenge or a dare, peer pressure, perhaps even breaking a taboo - why would anyone want to run through a packed stadium stark naked?

Well opinion in the 70's insisted that streaking was not exhibitionism.  An article in the British Medical Journal asserted, "streaking is the antithesis of flashing.  And there is no lingering to see the... look of dawning interest that the flasher so vainly hopes his victim will show." 

Running naked to gain some attention is however a form of egotistically showing oneself off and isn’t exhibitionism sexual in some way.  According to Freud, it's an infantile form of sexual pleasure.  You're being looked at and you're being given attention.  From the moment we're born we have a love of looking… a sexual curiosity, and streaking satisfies that in a way.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on...

Jack Dikian

September 2011

We are such stuff 
as dreams are made on

(The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158)

I know that it’s common nowadays for some to make light of Jung and especially Freud for placing emphasis on dreams.

Some, on the other hand will attest that their dreams are even smarter than them. For example, comments such as “I just had a dream in which I could remember lyrics of a song that I could not recall in my waking life”. Or “In my dream I was able to solve a calculus problem and felt I could solve mental arithmetic fluently and with clarity”.

At the recent convention of the American Psychological Association in San Diego, presenters suggested that dreaming may improve memory, enhance creativity, and help us prepare better for future events.A presentation reported based on word tests, suggests that people who take naps in which they dream are notably better at creative problem-solving than those who don’t. A conclusion that dreaming helps us combine ideas in new ways, and see connections between things that might otherwise seem to be unrelated.

A Harvard psychiatrist Daniel Schachter reported that the same areas in the brain that handle memory, such as the hippocampus, show increased activity when subjects are asked to imagine future events.

One of my personal favourites: Jung, C. G. & Jaffe, A. 1962. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Collins. x