Faculty Member David Anderegg Presenting New Book at Northshire Bookstore Tonight at 7:00pm (May 15, 2008) [Read more.]

The Washington Post Reviews Faculty Member David Anderegg's New Book, "Nerds" (January 2, 2008) [Read more.]

Psychology faculty member David Anderegg’s new book Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them takes a closer look at the nerd stereotype and gets a nod from The Washington Post. NBC's Today show, May 5, 2003-- Anderegg was interviewed on NBC’s Today show, where he discussed his new book Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It, just published by Simon and Schuster. The book explores how American parents worry too much, despite the fact that their families are safer and healthier today than at any other time in our history. Drawing on extensive social science research, and more than twenty years of clinical experience, Anderegg offers anxious parents comfort and advice. The book has been reviewed in the May issue of Health Magazine, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. An excerpt of his book will appear in the June issue of Working Mother magazine. An interview with Anderegg will also appear in the May issue of Child magazine.

Bennington magazine, May 2005: An article by Anderegg entitled “Paging Dr. Froid: Teaching Psychoanalytic Theory to Undergraduates” appeared in the spring 2004 issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology. Anderegg’s novel Aux Pioneers was published in serial form in Berkshire HomeStyle magazine. His a cappella group, “Quintessential,” sang the national anthem for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in August.

Bennington magazine, May 2004: David Anderegg’s op-ed piece “The ‘Last Chance’ Teen Dance” was published in the Los Angeles Times last June. He was also invited by the American Psychological Association to join the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Psychology, the journal of the Division of Psychoanalysis. Last fall he presented talks at the Lenox/Pittsfield (MA) Pre-School Mental Health Consortium.

Bennington magazine, September 2003: Excerpt from Worried All The Time Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It

Bennington faculty member Anderegg is a therapist with more than 20 years of experience treating children and adults.  Since its publication early this spring, Worried All the Time has garnered a great deal of attention. In May he discussed the book in an appearance on NBC’s Today show. He was interviewed in Child magazine and excerpts of the book ran in a recent issue of Working Mother. Worried All the Time has been reviewed in the Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Dallas Morning News, and BookReporter.com, and appeared in recent articles in The Boston Globe and The Baltimore Sun. “There is much to think about in Worried All the Time, whether you have children or not,” wrote Susan Salter Reynolds in The Los Angeles Times.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Culture?  A mother approaches me after a lecture. Her son has sworn at another child at school, and he was overheard by a teacher. The school has been very clear in letting her know that this is against the school policy, and her son has had to go to detention, which has never happened to him before in his life. “We don’t use that kind of language,” she says. “I know people get frustrated, but we have been so careful.” She looks to be in her early forties, clearly very worried about the fate of her eleven-year-old son. I keep listening. Although I think I know the answer to this one, I want to hear more about the identity of the culprit, the instigator, the person or agent who has turned her sweet son into a monster. “We’re very careful about what he’s allowed to watch on television, and he never goes to PG-13 movies. All I can think of is, it must be the music.” The music? “I think he has a friend who listens to Eminem, and I think he made a copy of an Eminem CD of his own. I think that must be where he got the idea—he got it from the culture.”

I knew this was coming, but I felt I had to check. I am always interested in the metaphors parents use to describe their parenting worries, and the infection metaphor is one of my favorites. Since contamination anxiety is as old as time, it is a metaphor that carries a lot of weight. But what is important about the infection metaphor here is not that the child is being attacked by invisible forces, but by foreign forces. The home is the clean, protected body, and the culture (made more scary by associations from the laboratory—the location of “cultures” of bacteria and viruses) is described as the foreign enemy that infects the child.  What is striking about this to me, and what seems to be new, is this aspect of parents’ relation with (for want of a better phrase) the media culture. “Media culture” refers to a lot of stuff: television, movies, radio, the Internet, video games, print media. It’s a pretty big media world, and, of course, each of these forms of media has specific manifestations and specific appeals. They also have specific effects on children and adults, which probably have more to do with their form than their content (more on this below). But these specific entities are lumped together in a term that suggests that parents experience them as all the same, a manifestation of foreignness or otherness.  If the media culture is an enemy presence from which we must protect ourselves, where does it come from? Who is sending it to infect our children? Parents all over the world protest the deleterious effect of American media; even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the concept of “jihad versus McWorld” had entered the world of ideas as a way to describe the conflict that results when people seek to safeguard their traditions and their authority over their children against the onslaught of American values as carried in American media. It would make sense if one were, say, a Tibetan or Yemeni parent, to feel that American media culture is a foreign agent infecting the pure domestic culture of the home country, because America is, to them, a foreign country.  But why do Americans feel so invaded by their own cultural products? This is our stuff, as is so amply demonstrated every time we turn on the television. It is also continuous with stuff we, as parents, remember, and if we remember our history, we might also remember the history of the foreign infection metaphor. Rock and roll was, in its early days, seen as a subversive force; and as a subversive force, it was sometimes seen as a plot foisted upon America by our foreign enemies. In a sense, the paranoids of the day were right (at least more right than we are) because their sense of the foreignness or strangeness of rock and roll could be seen as the inevitable reaction of insulated white Americans coming up against the cultural products of African Americans.  But why, now, do so many parents feel that the culture is not us? If they are not our values, whose are they? Cultural conservatives have described this villain in personified form as “Hollywood”: Hollywood is a community whose values are different from ours, and therefore the cultural products our children are exposed to are, in some important sense, foreign. The fact that these products sell so well belies the foreignness of them, and the question about the otherness of a community that is made up of expatriates from every corner of the American heartland is questionable, but the theme resonates well with many American parents. We all know that Elvis and Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain were relatively harmless homemade products (and most parents who hate popular music for their children will happily allow them to listen to oldies or classic rock stations playing the music of outdated subversives), but Eminem or Lil’ Kim seem to have been designed by Someone Else to seduce our children. This someone is pretty powerful—we just don’t know who it is. 

Vividness and Theatricality in Children’s Lives  Part of the reason that parents are worried about children’s exposure to contemporary media is that it seems more powerful than the media we grew up with. It is more encompassing, more real, more engrossing, because it is more like life: in every sense, it leaves less to the imagination. The difference between a Spider-Man comic in the newspaper or on the newsstand and Spider-Man: The Movie is extreme. Spider-Man: The Movie is nothing if not vivid; it seems like everything is really happening on the screen, thanks to breathtaking special effects that are now a staple of contemporary television and movies. What has changed since we were children is precisely the vividness of contemporary media. And vividness is what begets imitation.  Imitation has been a subject of interest to psychologists for as long as psychology has been in business. For behaviorist psychologists, imitation was always a hot topic because of its contribution to children performing socially appropriate behavior. Developmental psychologists, led by the efforts of Jean Piaget in the 1930s, have always been interested in imitation as a way of knowing. Children imitate as one way, among many, of attempting to understand what is going on in the world around them. In this view, imitation is a way of understanding things that are not already understood, the things that stand out from the background of everyday life. Children imitate things that are vivid, so that they can understand what those things are like by feeling what it is like to do them.  To young children, everything is new, and young children imitate lots of things in their play that are relatively mundane. Little boys and little girls imitate their father shaving, or their mother putting on makeup. Imitation is a way of understanding by experiencing what it feels like to do it; and there are some things, the things that seem odd or out of the ordinary, that children can best understand through imitation.  But once something loses its strangeness, it loses its power as an object of imitation. By the time children are five or six, they have stopped imitating their parents doing everyday things; everyday adult things are, by then, also everyday things for kids. It is the new, odd, and especially vivid things that retain their power as objects of imitation. Children of the fifties played at flying, in the way that children have always played at flying so that they can know what it feels like to be a bird. But children of the fifties imitated flying after seeing two very strange things: Superman flying on television and Mary Martin flying on stage or on television as Peter Pan. Then kids really started flying: the vividness of the image, its strangeness, made it harder to understand in conventional ways—and therefore it had to be imitated to be understood. Of course, imitation is an incomplete way of understanding, and nobody really knows what it feels like to be Superman, even when they imitate him taking off, but it helps. It’s one piece of the knowledge equation.  Seen in this light, it makes sense that parents are worried about contemporary media culture. It is precisely the vividness, or the strangeness, of it that is new, or at least different than when current parents were children. I believe that it is this strangeness that gives it both its sense of foreignness and its power. Children want to imitate the unusually vivid images, motions, actions that they see in the movies or on television, and the vividness of contemporary media comes from just that combination of lifelike and unlifelike that contemporary special effects provide. When Keanu Reeves bends in half to dodge bullets in slow motion in The Matrix it looks real, but it looks like an unreal thing really happening. When the martial artists in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fly around the trees, it looks both so real and so strange that it is captivating in its vividness: this is precisely the kind of visual image that children will imitate as a way of trying to understand. Anyone who has watched children or adolescents getting together after having seen The Matrix will understand this point: there are certain images, actions, or poses that are imitated again and again, as if the entire huge child population were on instant replay.  To return to our original example, it may be true that our likable, innocent eleven-year-old who gets into trouble for swearing at school is, in fact, doing so because of his exposure to Eminem. Very likely. Is it something to worry about? Probably not. First of all, if his parents make the mistake that this momentary imitation is the beginning of a road to perdition, they are not understanding the process of imitation. It is completely understandable why, after hearing Eminem or especially seeing an Eminem video, a kid would want to try that out and see how it feels. They might want to feel the power and strangeness that comes with unrestrained use of language: to say, “Fuck you,” in public, or to scream it, or to scream it over and over, to see what it feels like. But after having done that, and felt it, most kids do not need to do it over and over; it is by definition a self-limiting phenomenon.  It is also the case that kids who have been very protected from the extremes of contemporary media culture might be more vulnerable to temporary imitation, because it is for those kids that the images are the most vivid and strange, for they have seen so few of them. Many parents who have been extremely cautious about allowing their children to be exposed to trashy movies or videos are utterly dismayed about their children’s adolescence; at the point when children’s access to media can no longer be effectively controlled by parents, the protected child who has never seen an image of a gun or heard an expletive will sometimes very quickly degenerate into, well, a degenerate, in the eyes of his or her parents. But these children have a lot of catching up to do. They want to know what it feels like to do all those things that are powerful, not because they have been forbidden but simply because they are new and strange. From the outside, this can sometimes look like a wholesale personality change, to be laid at the door of the media culture.

Copyright © 2003 by David Anderegg. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York