Leo Rangell, M.D. is the recipient of the Haskell Norman Prize for Excellence in Psychoanalysis for 2008. Established in honor of the late psychoanalyst, Haskell Norman, M.D., this international award is given to a psychoanalyst for outstanding achievement as a clinician, teacher and theoretician.
Dr. Rangell will receive the award and deliver a lecture at the Scientific Meeting of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis at 7:30 pm on Monday, October 13, 2008.? The Center is located at 2340 Jackson St., 4th Floor (entrance on Webster St.) in San Francisco.
The lecture, entitled “Music in the Head. Living at the Brain-Mind Border. A View into the Creative Process,” is a personal and theoretical view of an unusual creative phenomenon at the interface of brain and mind.
Dr. Rangell reports on an unusual personal experience. Since awakening in the ICU following open-heart surgery over a decade ago, he has been visited by the constant presence of involuntary music. Whether this is 24/7 on intermittent is already a theoretical question. After some wide initial excursions into areas of possible treatment, the author settled into an ongoing study observing the subjective phenomena, neurologic, otologic and psychological, through a psychoanalytic prism. The continuous self study-treatment casts light on a number of theoretical issues, including the creative process. These experiences are the subject of a book in press, by Dr. Rangell with a forward by Oliver Sacks.