Person: Harrington, Anne
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Harrington
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Harrington, Anne
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Publication The Placebo Effect: What's Interesting for Scholars of Religion?(Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) Harrington, AnneThe placebo effect these days is no longer merely the insubstantial, subjective response that some patients have to a sham treatment, like a sugar pill. It has been reconceived as a powerful mind-body phenomenon. Because of this, it has also emerged as a complex reference point in a number of high-stakes conversations about the metaphysical significance of experiences of religious healing, the possible health benefits of being religious, and the feasibility of using double-blind placebo-controlled trials to investigate the efficacy of prayer. In each of these conversations, the placebo effect is always pointing toward some larger issue, serving some larger agenda. The agendas, though, tend to pull in different directions, leading to a situation that feels at once fractured and stalemated. This essay reviews the main areas of interest, and proposes some specific issues where humanistic scholars of religion in particular might be able to introduce constructive and creative new perspectives.Publication Thinking about Trance Over a Century: The Making of a Set of Impasses(Oxford University Press, 2017-07-13) Harrington, AnneDespite differences in methods and (usually) goals, both hypnosis and meditation involve an unusual state of awareness, generally known as “trance.” Yet, the idea of trance, as an object of scholarly and scientific study, turns out to have been marked, historically, by confusion and controversy. Is trance one thing or many things? A regression to a pathological, primitive state or ascent to an elevated state? Noisy or quiet? Biological or social? Meditation researchers, hypnosis researchers, and anthropologists (interested in phenomena like shamanism and spirit possession) have all, historically, struggled with questions like these in surprisingly similar ways. This chapter uses historical evidence to demonstrate this point, all with the end of suggesting that it could be enormously useful for these different communities to overcome their disciplinary isolation from one another, and see if there is a way in which they could make progress together.Publication When mindfulness is therapy: Ethical qualms, historical perspectives.(American Psychological Association (APA), 2015) Harrington, Anne; Dunne, John D.In the past 20 years, mindfulness therapeutic programs have moved firmly into the mainstream of clinical practice and beyond. As they have, we have also seen the development of an increasingly vocal critique. At issue is often less whether or not these mindfulness practices “work,” and more whether there is a danger in dissociating them from the ethical frameworks for which they were originally developed. Mindfulness, the argument goes, was never supposed to be about weight loss, better sex, helping children perform better in school, helping employees be more productive in the workplace, or even improving the functioning of anxious, depressed people. It was never supposed to be a merchandized commodity to be bought and sold. The larger clinical and religious community, however, has not always been troubled by the idea that meditation might sometimes be used as a highly pragmatic remedy for various ailments. Why, then, are people troubled now? This essay is an effort to recapture a bigger historical perspective on current ethical qualms: to move beyond criticism and instead to try to understand the anatomy of our discontent.Publication Zen, Suzuki, and the Art of Psychotherapy(Routledge, 2016) Harrington, AnnePublication Preface(Oxford University Press, 2015) Harrington, AnnePublication Mother Love and Mental Illness: An Emotional History(University of Chicago Press, 2016) Harrington, AnneThis essay aims to illuminate the historical origins of psychiatric concern with mother love – and especially mother love gone wrong. It looks particularly at ways in which a combination of wartime research, postwar social concerns and new tensions between psychoanalysis and hospital psychiatry worked together to create a range of theories and practices predicated on the idea that specific forms of pathological mother love could lead to specific forms of mental disorder, including (and perhaps especially) schizophrenia. It also tells the story of how mothers of the schizophrenic patients in particular rose up – in the name of love – to challenge the view that they had caused their children’s illness, and why this happened.Publication Mindfulness Meditation: Frames and Choices(American Psychological Association, 2013-06-05) Harrington, Anne; Dunne, JohnPublication God and Health: What More Is There To Say?(Templeton Foundation Press, 2010-04-27) Harrington, AnnePublication How to House a Mind Inside a Brain. Lessons from History.(Nature Publishing Group, 2007) Harrington, AnnePublication The Brain and the Behavioral Sciences(Cambridge University Press, 2009) Harrington, AnneThe increasing visibility and sense of intellectual opportunity associated with neuroscience in recent years have in turn stimulated a growing interest in its past. For the first time, a general reference book on the history of science has seen fit to include a review of the history of the brain and behavioral sciences as a thread to be reckoned with within the broader narrative tapestry. On the one hand, this looks like a welcome sign that a new historical subfield has “come of age.” On the other hand, when one settles down to the task of composing a “state of the art” narrative, one realizes just how much these are still early days. The bulk of available secondary literature still swims in a space between nostalgic narratives of great men and moments, big “march of ideas” overviews, and an unsystematic patchwork of more theorized forays by professional historians into specific themes (e.g., phrenology, brain localization, reflex theory). The challenge of imagining a comprehensive narrative is made all the more formidable by the fact that we are dealing here with a history that resists any easy or clean containment within disciplinary confines. The paper trail of ideas, experiments, clinical innovations, institutional networks, and high-stakes social debates not only moves across obvious sites of activity such as neurology, neurosurgery, and neurophysiology but also traverses fields as (only apparently) distinct as medicine, evolution, social theory, psychology, asylum management, genetics, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and theology.