News Ain't What it used to Be

1970s reflections again!

Around 10 years ago I saw the late, great Daily Telegraph  journalist Bill Deedes talking about changes in international reporting since the 70s. Bill's career started in the 30s as an African reporter, immortalised in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop  novel as William Boot reporting on the the Second Italo-Abyssian War of 1936.

With the emergence of online & 24 hour news coverage current affairs would appear to have benefited. Bill highlighted the opposite had happened.  International reporting on Africa had plummeted since the beginning of the 80s, and the new technology was being used to circulate an increasing national, media & celebrity news.  This pattern has continued spiraling like a tornado. Only some Twitter accounts & channels like Al Jazeera  provide blockade against the 'celebrity' news garbage.

I was always interested in international affairs; being an 'odd' child ie preferred books to football (greatly preferred), and my father's years in North Africa, the Middle East and  Korea provided a family interest in everything Arab, Israeli & further horizons.

The big international events in my early childhood were the arrival of Bangladeshi refuges, Vietnamese boat people & 3 TV events, that as Bill intimated would not be one TV news now as they were then:

BBC news started one evening, on a weekday, as I had come home from St Joseph's Convent, that Idi Amin of Uganda had been deposed.  Footage showed crushed wire fences where UNITA rebels had stormed in the final defeat of Amin, who fled to Saudi Arabia

The most startling news footage   I ever saw came from Iran in 1978. Ethiopia 84 was harrowing as opposed to shocking.

The ITN  5.45 news titles started.  This was in an age where news programmes emphasised news & not colourful graphics as their reason to broadcast.Superimposed on the  5:45 ITN News logo was new film of an Iranian soldier lying flat on top of a tall building, the cameraman standing behind him, as he fired a heavy machine gun, a weapon that can bring down a plane, into the crowds of Tehran below.

Of the crowds only the massed throngs which blocked out the pavements & road could be seen. But closer to the building, hidden by its balcony were the crowds that the Shah's soldier was firing live ammunition into.  He kept adjusting his position, so clearly aiming at the people.

I haven't seen any news footage similar to this broadcast on British news channels in 35 years.  It can be recorded but clearly  it is deemed too 'disturbing' for the public; whereas I do want to see what is committed by governments. In the case of the Shah of Iran, it was also his Prime Minister  Jafar Sharif-Emami who's actions by ordering the Black Friday massacre in October led to the riots now on the news.

The third one was the Khmer Rouge - that's for another post.

Le Recherche & Hypnosis

Stanislavski is all too familiar to every professional actor, especially if they attended one of my universities,  Rose Bruford in Sidcup. He is de rigueur there. So this one with it's usual discursiveness is the interconnections of Proust, emotional memory, acting theorists, it's role in hypnosis.

This article also explains the main reason why many posts here are about the 1970s. It's not simply nostalgia, the purpose is to cultivate the collective memory of ephemeral & established culture and oral history which  plays an important but neglected part of psychological & recording changes in culture and history of society. Also chronicling the most fragile part cultural history that is oral history and ephemera.

Stanislavski is most famous for his emotional memory, which Lee Strasberg based his whole Method Acting upon. Most of Strasberg's contemporaries walked out of the Actors Studio stating that he was over emphasising the technique, and Stanislavski himself treated it as merely a minor technique; more on all that another time.

But before Stanislavski there was Marcel Proust whose sniffing of that madeleine biscuit triggered a tsunami of earlier memories transcribed into the tsunami of 7 voluminous volumes.

His  À la recherche du temps perdu is the non plus ultra of involuntary memory or involuntary autobiographical memory. The affective memory of Stanislavski & emotional memory of Strasberg.

The significance of this in psychology is it's multisensory engagement including emotional and synesthesia occurring: images & symbols which did not appear in  the original memory but have an important unspecified aspect in the current memory.

Hypnosis connection-
The above affective memory is usually the recalling of a childhood experience, and at its most intense and vivid.

From my own research, which corroborates experimental psychology, the use of regression & regression memory produces hyper suggestibility: the brain responds more effectively to hypnotic suggestions than by standard techniques.

The more sensory information is remembered or vividly imagined the more powerful the hypnotic operation. Therefore the  more of the senses that are engaged in conjunction with using feelings is the ideal.

The long term memory especially childhood recall unleashes a far more intense and deeper hypnotic response. The response can be measured through the intensity of the imagination, the immersion into the cognition, ie the thoughts being experienced, and physical responses perceived by the subject or physiological responses measured by medical instruments.


The Books-
I had the good fortune to find in Bexley libraries a copy of Anthony Blythe's 1974 book Autohypnosis. As a medical doctor his writing on the subject is from the objective of a medical and psychological purpose; instead of the sensationalist tomes which became popular since the 80s.

His father Peter Blythe, also a doctor quel surprise. wrote an earlier book on hypnosis but it lacks the hypnotic scripts that his son had transcribed, taken from medical practice of various professionals.

R.N. Shrout wrote another superior text  which included the Time Dilation practices which were established as efficacious in experiments at Harvard Music School in the 70s.

Anthony Blythe referenced a book called PSI: Secrets behind the Iron Curtain written by two American psychology post grads in '69. It contains discussions with Soviet psychologists. Much of  this is sensationalist & over enthusiastic and typifies the fin-de-siecle  that ended the 1960s on a wave of optimism believing Transcendental Meditation & positive  waves would put an end to the bad vibes. Within months America was secretly carpet bombing Cambodia which turned a tiny Communist group into the ever growing Khmer Rouge filled with grief stricken survivors who's families and villages had been destroyed. So much for meditating under your pyramid!

Anyway, the PSI book contains Blythe's reference: Artificial Reincarnation, a hypnotic technique which is very powerful. The Russian psychologist interpreted it in terms of psychic communication.  The more prosaic and accurate mechanism is that it bypasses the subjects self concept & self esteem, or lack of it. The mind responds to the positive suggestions unconditionally.