S1E40 - Peter Kramer - Fiction in an Age of Lies
We met with psychiatrist, professor emeritus and best selling author, Peter Kramer, to explore depression, antidepressants and his fiction and non-fiction body of work. His most recent novel is Death of the Great Man, a political who-done-it satire about the improbable clinical relationship between a narcissistic despot and his psychotherapist. Our conversation covered equal parts general psychiatry and book discussion. His clinical work has served and shaped Kramer’s work as a novelist. As Jennifer Egan described in an earlier Grey Matter episode, Kramer sees literature as a unique vehicle for putting ourselves into other peoples’ shoes. This is similar to the task of the psychotherapist, who seeks to assist patients by getting into their minds to spur them to self-examination. Spoiler alert - the Great Man is fashioned after Donald Trump. Among the many dimensions of the book, it wants us to think about standing behind and accepting someone who uses lying as a prime political technique. Other themes are selfishness versus selflessness, intimacy versus autonomy, death, truth, and the perils of giving way to despotism over the long term. Woven throughout the conversation is commentary on the efficacy of antidepressants and their impact on personality, depression as a multi-system disease, “retirement” when still working, psychiatrists giving advice, self-assessment, non-attachment, the Media’s portrayal of mental health, psychiatric diagnoses using bots, the fluidity of diagnoses, Freud, sidelining intellectuals, and the difficulty of “out-trumping” Trump. Join us.
Biography
Peter D. Kramer is the author of eight books, including Against Depression, Should You Leave?, Ordinarily Well, the novels Spectacular Happiness and Death of the Great Man, and the international bestseller Listening to Prozac. His essays, op-eds, and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Dr. Kramer hosted the public radio program The Infinite Mind and has appeared on the major broadcast news and talk shows, including Today, Good Morning America, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and Fresh Air. For forty years, Dr. Kramer practiced psychiatry in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. He now writes full time.
Conversation recorded on June 23, 2023.