Archive for the ‘Anti-Psychotics’ Category

JUST WHAT DOES ADHD (ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER) LOOK LIKE IN AN ADULT?

Monday, March 21st, 2011
The primary symptoms of ADHD—inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, etc.—don’t really change in adults, but their presentation does. They’re often less pronounced, but seldom do they disappear completely.
It’s important to remember that our adult lives resemble childhood and adolescence in many ways. Instead of going to school, we go to work. But we must still interact with our peers, pay attention to our superiors, and complete our assignments as instructed and on time. In social situations, we interact with others, read their faces and emotions, and react appropriately. The same goes for our interaction with members of the opposite sex. These tasks are often difficult for children with ADHD and equally so for adults with the syndrome.
In adulthood, common signs of ADHD include the following.
An inability to concentrate for any length of time.
An inability to finish assigned projects on deadline.
Poor organizational skills.
Procrastination, especially where work is concerned.
Difficulty in sustaining interest and focus over a length of time or through to completion of a project.
Few interests and hobbies; a tendency toward boredom.
Difficulty interacting with superiors and co-workers (and often family and friends).
Difficulty coping with the small “waits” in life, such as traffic lights, supermarket checkout lines, and business meetings.
Poor memory. Many ADHD sufferers overcome this problem by writing down everything they need to remember throughout the day or placing reminders in visible locations.
Extreme distractibility and restlessness.
Impulsivity, such as blurting out an answer before being asked, interrupting another speaker, or saying something before considering the consequences. This may also manifest in impulsive actions, like frequently changing jobs, impulsively shopping or spending money, impulsive eating, and rapidly changing one’s mind.
An overwhelming need to be in motion. Adults with ADHD usually don’t run around the room like they did when they were children, but it’s not uncommon for them to constantly jiggle a leg, tap their fingers, or suddenly stand up in a meeting and walk out of the room.
An addictive personality.
Poor self-esteem, based on years of perceived failure.
A hair-trigger temper.
A tendency toward physical aggression.
Obviously, not all adults demonstrate every one of these symptoms. And as with any condition, the presentation of symptoms may be very obvious or very subtle. It all depends on the individual. I will illustrate this picture by describing Leslie, who first came to my attention when she was twenty-eight years old.
Leslie, a twenty-eight-year-old woman
Leslie, an attractive, slender brunette, came to see me in a state of great distress and anguish. She informed me that she had moved to a large country town near my northern Connecticut practice determined to start a new life. She hated the southern city she had recently moved from, but now feared the country wasn’t the place for her, either. She felt her life was slipping through her fingers and that she would never have the husband and children she longed for. She hated all the jobs she’d had, did not know what to do with herself, and hoped that by talking to me a few times, she-could make the right decision regarding where to move.
Her mother had died during her sophomore year in college, and since then Leslie had roamed around lost and mainly unattached. She changed colleges several times, took time off in between and took many years to finally graduate. Her older brother had been out of contact for years, and her father, devastated by his wife’s death, had been emotionally unavailable and now was remarried. She did not connect grief regarding her mother’s death to her ten years of wandering. In fact, she asserted, she never even cried and certainly did not miss her mother. She felt she had always been depressed and anxious, “since she was born,” and now it seemed obvious to her why anyone would be so depressed in her situation. She was sure she was getting old, losing her looks, had no talents or intelligence, and feared no man would ever love her because there were so many younger and more attractive women to be had.
As we began to meet frequently and I got to know Leslie better, certain features stood out. One was her emotional storminess. Frequently our sessions were filled with deluges of crying, angry yelling, panicky anxiety, and states of enormous anguish and pain. She would speak continually, moving from one incomplete sentence to another, constantly changing her mind as to what she wanted to say and rarely even attempting to explain any connections between her emotions and an immediate event. It seemed as though she experienced her life as a globally painful experience, with no meaning or reasons, and that all she needed to do in therapy was to show me the pain. She described regularly waking up at night in terror, convinced that it was too late, that she was already growing old and ugly and would never be loved by a man. And she seemed unable to find any way to calm herself down or to soothe herself, other than to put herself into a sleepy state, when she would nap on and off during the day, or to exercise excessively, often running ten miles a day.
Leslie’s difficulty in speaking about herself, either in terms of her feelings or in terms of her life history, was another feature. She did not seem able or willing to use language as a way of describing or of investigating pain. She even seemed unable to describe to me, or narrate, her daily experience. However, at times she showed that she had quite an unusually rich vocabulary. And her fund of knowledge indicated an intelligence well above average. She did not have the disordered thoughts characteristic of a psychotic person. In fact, her difficulty in communicating clearly and, I suspected, in thinking clearly mainly centered around her own life story and her emotional states.
Another striking feature was her lack of interests. There seemed to be nothing that she cared about or felt passionately about. She went from one activity to another, taking courses that she dropped after one class, starting jobs that she left within the first week, and meeting people that she lost interest in on the first encounter. For her, any choice about where to live, what to do, or what kind of work to engage in was totally arbitrary, as she had never been interested in anything.
Leslie claimed that she could not understand things, was confused, and had an impaired memory. She said school had always been difficult for her, even though at times she had done well. It was terribly hard for her to remember anything she read, and although she tried to read novels, she couldn’t describe what one was about after she finished it. She claimed that reading anything else was just too much of a struggle and that this was why she could never go to graduate school. She remembered having enormous difficulties organizing her thoughts to write papers. College was a constant nightmare for her.
*31\173\2*

JUST WHAT DOES ADHD (ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER) LOOK LIKE IN AN ADULT?The primary symptoms of ADHD—inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, etc.—don’t really change in adults, but their presentation does. They’re often less pronounced, but seldom do they disappear completely.It’s important to remember that our adult lives resemble childhood and adolescence in many ways. Instead of going to school, we go to work. But we must still interact with our peers, pay attention to our superiors, and complete our assignments as instructed and on time. In social situations, we interact with others, read their faces and emotions, and react appropriately. The same goes for our interaction with members of the opposite sex. These tasks are often difficult for children with ADHD and equally so for adults with the syndrome.In adulthood, common signs of ADHD include the following.An inability to concentrate for any length of time.An inability to finish assigned projects on deadline.Poor organizational skills.Procrastination, especially where work is concerned.Difficulty in sustaining interest and focus over a length of time or through to completion of a project.Few interests and hobbies; a tendency toward boredom.Difficulty interacting with superiors and co-workers (and often family and friends).Difficulty coping with the small “waits” in life, such as traffic lights, supermarket checkout lines, and business meetings.Poor memory. Many ADHD sufferers overcome this problem by writing down everything they need to remember throughout the day or placing reminders in visible locations.Extreme distractibility and restlessness.Impulsivity, such as blurting out an answer before being asked, interrupting another speaker, or saying something before considering the consequences. This may also manifest in impulsive actions, like frequently changing jobs, impulsively shopping or spending money, impulsive eating, and rapidly changing one’s mind.An overwhelming need to be in motion. Adults with ADHD usually don’t run around the room like they did when they were children, but it’s not uncommon for them to constantly jiggle a leg, tap their fingers, or suddenly stand up in a meeting and walk out of the room.An addictive personality.Poor self-esteem, based on years of perceived failure.A hair-trigger temper.A tendency toward physical aggression.Obviously, not all adults demonstrate every one of these symptoms. And as with any condition, the presentation of symptoms may be very obvious or very subtle. It all depends on the individual. I will illustrate this picture by describing Leslie, who first came to my attention when she was twenty-eight years old.
Leslie, a twenty-eight-year-old womanLeslie, an attractive, slender brunette, came to see me in a state of great distress and anguish. She informed me that she had moved to a large country town near my northern Connecticut practice determined to start a new life. She hated the southern city she had recently moved from, but now feared the country wasn’t the place for her, either. She felt her life was slipping through her fingers and that she would never have the husband and children she longed for. She hated all the jobs she’d had, did not know what to do with herself, and hoped that by talking to me a few times, she-could make the right decision regarding where to move.Her mother had died during her sophomore year in college, and since then Leslie had roamed around lost and mainly unattached. She changed colleges several times, took time off in between and took many years to finally graduate. Her older brother had been out of contact for years, and her father, devastated by his wife’s death, had been emotionally unavailable and now was remarried. She did not connect grief regarding her mother’s death to her ten years of wandering. In fact, she asserted, she never even cried and certainly did not miss her mother. She felt she had always been depressed and anxious, “since she was born,” and now it seemed obvious to her why anyone would be so depressed in her situation. She was sure she was getting old, losing her looks, had no talents or intelligence, and feared no man would ever love her because there were so many younger and more attractive women to be had.As we began to meet frequently and I got to know Leslie better, certain features stood out. One was her emotional storminess. Frequently our sessions were filled with deluges of crying, angry yelling, panicky anxiety, and states of enormous anguish and pain. She would speak continually, moving from one incomplete sentence to another, constantly changing her mind as to what she wanted to say and rarely even attempting to explain any connections between her emotions and an immediate event. It seemed as though she experienced her life as a globally painful experience, with no meaning or reasons, and that all she needed to do in therapy was to show me the pain. She described regularly waking up at night in terror, convinced that it was too late, that she was already growing old and ugly and would never be loved by a man. And she seemed unable to find any way to calm herself down or to soothe herself, other than to put herself into a sleepy state, when she would nap on and off during the day, or to exercise excessively, often running ten miles a day.Leslie’s difficulty in speaking about herself, either in terms of her feelings or in terms of her life history, was another feature. She did not seem able or willing to use language as a way of describing or of investigating pain. She even seemed unable to describe to me, or narrate, her daily experience. However, at times she showed that she had quite an unusually rich vocabulary. And her fund of knowledge indicated an intelligence well above average. She did not have the disordered thoughts characteristic of a psychotic person. In fact, her difficulty in communicating clearly and, I suspected, in thinking clearly mainly centered around her own life story and her emotional states.Another striking feature was her lack of interests. There seemed to be nothing that she cared about or felt passionately about. She went from one activity to another, taking courses that she dropped after one class, starting jobs that she left within the first week, and meeting people that she lost interest in on the first encounter. For her, any choice about where to live, what to do, or what kind of work to engage in was totally arbitrary, as she had never been interested in anything.Leslie claimed that she could not understand things, was confused, and had an impaired memory. She said school had always been difficult for her, even though at times she had done well. It was terribly hard for her to remember anything she read, and although she tried to read novels, she couldn’t describe what one was about after she finished it. She claimed that reading anything else was just too much of a struggle and that this was why she could never go to graduate school. She remembered having enormous difficulties organizing her thoughts to write papers. College was a constant nightmare for her.*31\173\2*

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THE WISDOM PARADOX: RUSSIAN MAVERICKS

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a great Jewish-Russian psychologist, was the first to understand the importance of culture, especially language, in shaping individual cognition. He was a polymath by training, a maverick by temperament, and a uniquely colorful personality. His friend Aleksandr Romanovich Luria became his enthusiastic disciple and comrade-in-arms. In the 1920s, while they were very young (Vygotsky in his late twenties and Luria in his mid-twenties), they together began to sketch a uniquely original approach to psychology, which they called “historico-cultural psychology.” The main idea of this approach is summarized in a mysterious sounding but profound premise that the cognitive operations of an individual develop, to a large extent, by way of “internalizing” various externally existing cultural devices. Based on their “historico-cultural psychology,” Vygotsky and Luria went on to study how culture in general, and language in particular, shape individual cognition.
The “historico-cultural psychology” was first presented in a paper titled The Tool and the Symbol, an intellectual manifesto of sorts. Coauthored by Vygotsky and Luria in the late 1920s, it could not be published because it did not adhere to the increasingly oppressive prevailing dogma in the Soviet Union. The original Russian text was lost and only the English translation remained, prepared for a conference in the United States but never actually delivered. Forty years later, in the late sixties, the political climate thawed and their early ideas were exonerated. It was then that Luria discovered, to his dismay, the loss of the Russian original. Not one to be stymied by a challenge and always a practical man, he told me to translate The Tool and the Symbol from English “back” into Russian and make it sound like the original text. With a mixture of awe and amusement, I did just that, and our benign forgery was passed for the real thing. Today, it graces the opening volume of the collection of Vygotsky’s writings, without an explanation of what had actually happened.
The “historico-cultural” approach to psychology forged by Vygotsky and Luria came increasingly under fire, and so was their crosscultural fieldwork with the tribes of Central Asia. The last straw came when Luria went to what is now Uzbekistan to conduct experiments with the native tribe members. The results of the study were fascinating. Optic illusions, commonly found among the members of modern Western society, could not be replicated with the Uzbek tribesmen. This suggested that even the most basic aspects of perception were under some degree of environmental and cultural control. Luria wired an exuberant telegram to Vygotsky, who had stayed behind in Moscow, consisting of four fateful words: “Natives have no illusions,” followed by a row of exclamation marks. In the spirit of the times, the cable was intercepted and censored. In a society built on illusions, “having no illusions” could be easily construed as dangerous political blasphemy. Luria suddenly found himself in extremely hot water, denounced by the authorities as, among other things, a “Russian chauvinist,” a surreally hypocritical accusation considering Luria’s Jewish background and the tacit Russian chauvinism practiced by the Soviet empire itself. As a result of the incident, the crosscultural research was shut down and Luria was able to publish his Uzbek findings only four decades later, after the tentative political thaw of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, Vygotsky and Luria found themselves increasingly under attack by the authorities, and the specter of arrest and deportation to a labor camp was looming increasingly ominous. As the 1930s unfolded, things were changing from bad to worse. For individual scientists, the threat of possible repercussions for political nonconformism ranged from public denunciation to murder.
Vygotsky s fate was dramatic and poignant. In 1934 he died at the age of thirty-seven and his ideas were suppressed in the Soviet Union for decades and were revived only many years later. His widow told me, years after his death, that she was convinced that his early death by tuberculosis was a blessing, because it had saved him from a far more tragic end; had he lived a year or two longer his life would have likely ended violently in the Gulag. Today, Vygotsky is regarded as one of the most seminal figures in twentieth-century psychology and cognitive science.
Aleksandr Luria, on the other hand, lived a long life and went on to become one of the world’s best-known neuropsychologists. He was able to successfully navigate the Soviet political minefield and met with great, worldwide scientific acclaim and recognition in his own lifetime. He also became my mentor and my friend.
Luria would probably have never become a neuropsychologist had he inhabited a more benign environment. In the beginning of his career, the brain was relatively peripheral to Luria’s agenda, and his first study of brain damage was designed to make a point that Luria himself later dismissed as naive and misguided: that the problem-solving skills of aphasic patients, deprived of the benefits of language, would deteriorate to the level of chimpanzees. This, of course, did not happen.
Luria s early interests and his early work concerned the relationship between culture and the mind, how the shared knowledge of society becomes the personal knowledge of the individual. Luria’s early research was mostly developmental and crosscultural in nature, and he looked forward to a lifelong career in this field. But it was not to be. As the Soviet Union changed in the late twenties and early thirties, the exuberance of the first years of revolution gave way to the undisguised tyranny of the state, and authorities were increasingly applying Marxist doctrine to police every aspect of science. Among other things, this resulted in the denunciation of genetics and cybernetics as “bourgeois pseudoscience,” and at the same time in the promotion of illiterate neo-Lamarckism in biology and agriculture.
In this climate, Luria’s career took a very different direction. It was then that Luria, already a full professor of psychology at Moscow State University, went to medical school and subsequently began his association with the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery. This association was to last for almost forty years and provided Luria with the base for his groundbreaking work in neuropsychology. I have always suspected that Luria retreated into neuropsychology because it was less ideologically charged than other fields of psychology, and thus was relatively immune from the Party censorship.
World War II was Russia’s great tragedy but also the country’s only moment of relative glory under the Soviets. It was the only time in the seventy-three-year-long history of the Soviet regime that the interests of the state and the interests of the people were not at loggerheads when they intercepted in the collective effort to repel the Nazi invasion; it was the only event culminating in a victory as opposed to the string of colossal tragic failures that befell the country before and after the war. For Luria the war provided both the purpose and the opportunity that tied him to neuropsychology for the rest of his life. He was charged with the task of developing neurorehabilitative methods for the wounded soldiers. In this capacity, he found himself surrounded with an abundance of penetrating gunshot wounds, which were to serve as the basis for his systematic investigation of brain-mind relations. This research culminated in two books that established him as the world’s preeminent neuropsychologist: Traumatic Aphasia and Higher Cortical Functions.
Today, we are grateful that his complex life path took him to neuropsychology; without him neuropsychology would not be what it is today and, very possibly, simply would not be. Luria anticipated and in fact embodied, before virtually anyone else, the kind of fusion of psychology and brain science that we have witnessed over the last few decades under the name of “cognitive neuroscience.” In Luria’s time, and even a generation later, precious little interaction existed between the two disciplines. Even as recently as the seventies and eighties, a generation after Luria made his seminal contributions, academic psychology was dominated by people who were not only ignorant about the brain but proud of being ignorant. An infatuation existed with the thoroughly bogus notion that it is somehow possible to study cognition in its Platonic isolation, while leaving someone else to worry how it was “implemented” in the brain.
Today, the intellectual legacy of Vygotsky and Luria is pervasive, firmly embraced by the West and the East alike. It is no longer a solely Russian intellectual tradition, but rather a universal one, expanded and transformed in the process. Nor is Russia any longer the most fertile ground for their intellectual legacy to blossom. One can plausibly argue that today the most innovative continuation of Vygotskian and Lurian traditions takes place in North America and elsewhere in the West. In that sense, these traditions have shared the fate of another great Russian import, Stanislavsky’s school of acting, which set firm roots in the United States in the form of Lee Strasberg’s “Method.”
*20\302\2*

THE WISDOM PARADOX: RUSSIAN MAVERICKSLev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a great Jewish-Russian psychologist, was the first to understand the importance of culture, especially language, in shaping individual cognition. He was a polymath by training, a maverick by temperament, and a uniquely colorful personality. His friend Aleksandr Romanovich Luria became his enthusiastic disciple and comrade-in-arms. In the 1920s, while they were very young (Vygotsky in his late twenties and Luria in his mid-twenties), they together began to sketch a uniquely original approach to psychology, which they called “historico-cultural psychology.” The main idea of this approach is summarized in a mysterious sounding but profound premise that the cognitive operations of an individual develop, to a large extent, by way of “internalizing” various externally existing cultural devices. Based on their “historico-cultural psychology,” Vygotsky and Luria went on to study how culture in general, and language in particular, shape individual cognition.The “historico-cultural psychology” was first presented in a paper titled The Tool and the Symbol, an intellectual manifesto of sorts. Coauthored by Vygotsky and Luria in the late 1920s, it could not be published because it did not adhere to the increasingly oppressive prevailing dogma in the Soviet Union. The original Russian text was lost and only the English translation remained, prepared for a conference in the United States but never actually delivered. Forty years later, in the late sixties, the political climate thawed and their early ideas were exonerated. It was then that Luria discovered, to his dismay, the loss of the Russian original. Not one to be stymied by a challenge and always a practical man, he told me to translate The Tool and the Symbol from English “back” into Russian and make it sound like the original text. With a mixture of awe and amusement, I did just that, and our benign forgery was passed for the real thing. Today, it graces the opening volume of the collection of Vygotsky’s writings, without an explanation of what had actually happened.The “historico-cultural” approach to psychology forged by Vygotsky and Luria came increasingly under fire, and so was their crosscultural fieldwork with the tribes of Central Asia. The last straw came when Luria went to what is now Uzbekistan to conduct experiments with the native tribe members. The results of the study were fascinating. Optic illusions, commonly found among the members of modern Western society, could not be replicated with the Uzbek tribesmen. This suggested that even the most basic aspects of perception were under some degree of environmental and cultural control. Luria wired an exuberant telegram to Vygotsky, who had stayed behind in Moscow, consisting of four fateful words: “Natives have no illusions,” followed by a row of exclamation marks. In the spirit of the times, the cable was intercepted and censored. In a society built on illusions, “having no illusions” could be easily construed as dangerous political blasphemy. Luria suddenly found himself in extremely hot water, denounced by the authorities as, among other things, a “Russian chauvinist,” a surreally hypocritical accusation considering Luria’s Jewish background and the tacit Russian chauvinism practiced by the Soviet empire itself. As a result of the incident, the crosscultural research was shut down and Luria was able to publish his Uzbek findings only four decades later, after the tentative political thaw of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.Meanwhile, Vygotsky and Luria found themselves increasingly under attack by the authorities, and the specter of arrest and deportation to a labor camp was looming increasingly ominous. As the 1930s unfolded, things were changing from bad to worse. For individual scientists, the threat of possible repercussions for political nonconformism ranged from public denunciation to murder.Vygotsky s fate was dramatic and poignant. In 1934 he died at the age of thirty-seven and his ideas were suppressed in the Soviet Union for decades and were revived only many years later. His widow told me, years after his death, that she was convinced that his early death by tuberculosis was a blessing, because it had saved him from a far more tragic end; had he lived a year or two longer his life would have likely ended violently in the Gulag. Today, Vygotsky is regarded as one of the most seminal figures in twentieth-century psychology and cognitive science.Aleksandr Luria, on the other hand, lived a long life and went on to become one of the world’s best-known neuropsychologists. He was able to successfully navigate the Soviet political minefield and met with great, worldwide scientific acclaim and recognition in his own lifetime. He also became my mentor and my friend.Luria would probably have never become a neuropsychologist had he inhabited a more benign environment. In the beginning of his career, the brain was relatively peripheral to Luria’s agenda, and his first study of brain damage was designed to make a point that Luria himself later dismissed as naive and misguided: that the problem-solving skills of aphasic patients, deprived of the benefits of language, would deteriorate to the level of chimpanzees. This, of course, did not happen.Luria s early interests and his early work concerned the relationship between culture and the mind, how the shared knowledge of society becomes the personal knowledge of the individual. Luria’s early research was mostly developmental and crosscultural in nature, and he looked forward to a lifelong career in this field. But it was not to be. As the Soviet Union changed in the late twenties and early thirties, the exuberance of the first years of revolution gave way to the undisguised tyranny of the state, and authorities were increasingly applying Marxist doctrine to police every aspect of science. Among other things, this resulted in the denunciation of genetics and cybernetics as “bourgeois pseudoscience,” and at the same time in the promotion of illiterate neo-Lamarckism in biology and agriculture.In this climate, Luria’s career took a very different direction. It was then that Luria, already a full professor of psychology at Moscow State University, went to medical school and subsequently began his association with the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery. This association was to last for almost forty years and provided Luria with the base for his groundbreaking work in neuropsychology. I have always suspected that Luria retreated into neuropsychology because it was less ideologically charged than other fields of psychology, and thus was relatively immune from the Party censorship.World War II was Russia’s great tragedy but also the country’s only moment of relative glory under the Soviets. It was the only time in the seventy-three-year-long history of the Soviet regime that the interests of the state and the interests of the people were not at loggerheads when they intercepted in the collective effort to repel the Nazi invasion; it was the only event culminating in a victory as opposed to the string of colossal tragic failures that befell the country before and after the war. For Luria the war provided both the purpose and the opportunity that tied him to neuropsychology for the rest of his life. He was charged with the task of developing neurorehabilitative methods for the wounded soldiers. In this capacity, he found himself surrounded with an abundance of penetrating gunshot wounds, which were to serve as the basis for his systematic investigation of brain-mind relations. This research culminated in two books that established him as the world’s preeminent neuropsychologist: Traumatic Aphasia and Higher Cortical Functions.Today, we are grateful that his complex life path took him to neuropsychology; without him neuropsychology would not be what it is today and, very possibly, simply would not be. Luria anticipated and in fact embodied, before virtually anyone else, the kind of fusion of psychology and brain science that we have witnessed over the last few decades under the name of “cognitive neuroscience.” In Luria’s time, and even a generation later, precious little interaction existed between the two disciplines. Even as recently as the seventies and eighties, a generation after Luria made his seminal contributions, academic psychology was dominated by people who were not only ignorant about the brain but proud of being ignorant. An infatuation existed with the thoroughly bogus notion that it is somehow possible to study cognition in its Platonic isolation, while leaving someone else to worry how it was “implemented” in the brain.Today, the intellectual legacy of Vygotsky and Luria is pervasive, firmly embraced by the West and the East alike. It is no longer a solely Russian intellectual tradition, but rather a universal one, expanded and transformed in the process. Nor is Russia any longer the most fertile ground for their intellectual legacy to blossom. One can plausibly argue that today the most innovative continuation of Vygotskian and Lurian traditions takes place in North America and elsewhere in the West. In that sense, these traditions have shared the fate of another great Russian import, Stanislavsky’s school of acting, which set firm roots in the United States in the form of Lee Strasberg’s “Method.”*20\302\2*

Posted in Anti-Psychotics | No Comments »