Eli Sagan Chesen, M.D. (born 1944) is a U.S. psychiatrist, author and artist.
Chesen grew up in Sioux City, IA, and has lived his life crisscrossing vocational and avocational boundaries. His diverse life experience has included his having practiced medicine and having plotted out, for David Frost, the interview strategy for the original Nixon/Frost Interviews.
Chesen has practiced medicine for 40 years, specializing in pharmacological psychiatry. He currently practices psychiatry in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Chesen started painting 50 years ago, when he was 15.
His knowledge of chemistry, physiology and physics infiltrate his creative activities.
Chesen's art work is schematic, figurative, deconstructive, technological, modernist and abstract.
He sometimes attaches electronic or hardware objects, such as water faucets, to his oils as with "Duchamp Meets Home Depot", an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s sea changing work with plumbing art.
He won the first of two juried art competitions, in 1971, for his abstract oil, "Hi Fi 1964".
In some of his most recent work, Chesen has taken 1953 Buick automobile hoods and 'deconstructed' them into stunning pieces of original sculpture.
Chesen has authored several books including: Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health (1972), [1] President Nixon’s Psychiatric Profile (1973), [2] and The Fitness Compulsion (1988). [3] His book Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health was serialized by the New York Times Sunday Magazine. [4]
Currently he is a contributing author to Prairie Fire magazine, a monthly regional journal of public policy and the arts, based in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Eli Chesen has been serialized in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and has been written up in Esquire , Newsweek and Le Monde . Chesen's Nixon book was a cover story in Parade Magazine in 1975. He has been featured on Donahue, The CBS Evening News, Regis, and ABC's Good Morning America.
Quoting John Dean, III, former counsel to President Nixon and primary mover in the "Watergate" scandal: “Importantly, Eli Chesen, with whom I have discussed Nixon over many years because of his 1974 book, President Nixon's Psychiatric Profile, had a number of off-the-record conversations with Reston Jr., which appear to me to have provided David Frost with a key to pressing Nixon to actually provide something of value during the interviews. I was curious about Eli's take on the Frost/Nixon film. Moreover, knowing of Eli's extensive off-the-record dealings with Reston, I was interested in his feelings about Reston's emerging as a central character in the film and play. I was surprised by several of Eli’s responses – Chesen, practices psychiatry in Lincoln, Nebraska. Given his profession, I am never surprised by his keen perception of others. He is politically and culturally-sophisticated, and smart as a whip.” [5]
Chesen has produced several energy innovations such as transformerless low voltage, halogen light fixtures and an air conditioner (refrigerant mediated) swimming pool heater, which takes waste air conditioner heat and transfers it into the family swimming pool providing, in some latitudes, 100% of desirable pool heating at an energy cost of zero. The crude prototype of this device appeared in Popular Science Magazine in 1978 [6] and has since been improved and operates automatically in its current incarnation.
Subsequent to the Popular Science article Chesen was granted $10,000 from the United States Department of Energy to perfect the device. One version of Chesen's pool heating devices incorporates principles of mammalian physiology (known as a counter-current multiplier system).
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment where a generalized seizure is electrically induced to manage refractory mental disorders. Typically, 70 to 120 volts are applied externally to the patient's head, resulting in approximately 800 milliamperes of direct current passing between the electrodes, for a duration of 100 milliseconds to 6 seconds, either from temple to temple or from front to back of one side of the head. However, only about 1% of the electrical current crosses the bony skull into the brain because skull impedance is about 100 times higher than skin impedance.
Dew is water in the form of droplets that appears on thin, exposed objects in the morning or evening due to condensation.
Sir David Paradine Frost was a British television host, journalist, comedian and writer. He rose to prominence during the satire boom in the United Kingdom when he was chosen to host the satirical programme That Was the Week That Was in 1962. His success on this show led to work as a host on American television. He became known for his television interviews with senior political figures, among them the Nixon interviews with US president Richard Nixon in 1977 which were adapted into a stage play and film. Frost interviewed all eight British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2016 and all seven American presidents in office between 1969 and 2008.
Kleptomania is the inability to resist the urge to steal items, usually for reasons other than personal use or financial gain. First described in 1816, kleptomania is classified in psychiatry as an impulse control disorder. Some of the main characteristics of the disorder suggest that kleptomania could be an obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder, but also share similarities with addictive and mood disorders.
A refrigerator, colloquially fridge, is a commercial and home appliance consisting of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump that transfers heat from its inside to its external environment so that its inside is cooled to a temperature below the room temperature. Refrigeration is an essential food storage technique around the world. The lower temperature lowers the reproduction rate of bacteria, so the refrigerator reduces the rate of spoilage. A refrigerator maintains a temperature a few degrees above the freezing point of water. The optimal temperature range for perishable food storage is 3 to 5 °C. A similar device that maintains a temperature below the freezing point of water is called a freezer. The refrigerator replaced the icebox, which had been a common household appliance for almost a century and a half. The United States Food and Drug Administration recommends that the refrigerator be kept at or below 4 °C (40 °F) and that the freezer be regulated at −18 °C (0 °F).
Carl Thomas Curtis was an American attorney and politician from the U.S. state of Nebraska. He served as a Republican in the United States House of Representatives (1939–1954) and later the United States Senate (1955–1979). He remains the second longest-serving Senator from Nebraska.
James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty", was an American journalist whose career spanned the mid-1930s to the early 1990s. He was associated for many years with The New York Times.
Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication and Covid-19 response. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.
James "Jim" Reston Jr. is an American journalist, documentarian and author of political and historical fiction and non-fiction. He has written about the Vietnam war, the Jonestown Massacre, civil rights, the impeachment of Richard Nixon and 9/11.
Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.
Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion is a non-fiction book on cults and coercive persuasion, written by Marc Galanter. The book was published in hardcover format in 1989 by Oxford University Press, and again in hardcover in 1999 in a second-edition work. The second edition was reprinted by Oxford University Press in March 2007.
Scott Andrew Frost is an American football coach. He was the head football coach at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln from 2018 to 2022. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Frost played college football as a quarterback for the Stanford Cardinal and the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the latter of which he led to a shared national championship in 1997. He played six years in the NFL, mostly on special teams.
Frost/Nixon is a 2008 historical drama film based on the 2006 play of the same name by Peter Morgan, who also adapted the screenplay. The film tells the story behind the Frost/Nixon interviews of 1977. The film was directed by Ron Howard. A co-production of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, the film was produced for Universal Pictures by Howard, Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment, and Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title Films, and received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director.
Helen Flanders Dunbar — later known as H. Flanders Dunbar — is an important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine and psychobiology, as well as being an important advocate of physicians and clergy co-operating in their efforts to care for the sick. She viewed the patient as a combination of the psych and some, body and soul. Both needed to be treated in order to treat a patient efficiently. Dunbar received degrees in mathematics, psychology, theology, philosophy, and medicine. Dunbar founded the American Psychosomatic Society in 1942 and was the first editor of its journal. In addition to running several other committees committed to treating the whole patient, Dunbar wrote and distributed information for public health, involving child development and advocating for mental health care after World War II.
Elliot Aidan Cowan is an English actor, known for portraying Corporal Jem Poynton in Ultimate Force, Mr Darcy in Lost in Austen, and Ptolemy in the 2004 film Alexander. He also starred as Lorenzo de' Medici in Da Vinci's Demons and Daron-Vex in Krypton. Cowan most recently is known for playing King Henry Tudor in the STARZ series The Spanish Princess.
Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental and behavioral disorder in which an individual has intrusive thoughts and feels the need to perform certain routines (compulsions) repeatedly to relieve the distress caused by the obsession, to the extent where it impairs general function. Obsessions are persistent unwanted thoughts, mental images, or urges that generate feelings of anxiety, disgust, or discomfort. Common obsessions include fear of contamination, obsession with symmetry, the fear of acting blasphemously, their own sexual orientation, and the fear of possibly harming others or themselves. Compulsions are repeated actions or routines that occur in response to obsessions to achieve a relief from anxiety. Common compulsions include excessive hand washing, cleaning, counting, ordering, avoiding triggers, hoarding, neutralizing, seeking assurance, praying, and checking things. People with OCD may only perform mental compulsions, this is called primarily obsessional obsessive–compulsive disorder. Many adults with OCD are aware that their compulsions do not make sense, but they perform them anyway to relieve the distress caused by obsessions. Compulsions occur often, typically taking up at least one hour per day and impairing one's quality of life.
The Nixon interviews were a series of conversations between former American president Richard Nixon and British journalist David Frost, produced by John Birt. They were recorded and broadcast on television and radio in four programs in 1977. The interviews later became the central subject of Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon in 2006.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) is a nonprofit organization established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Its stated mission is to "eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health and enact patient and consumer protections." Many critics regard it as a Scientology front group whose purpose is to push the organization's anti-psychiatric agenda.
David H. Rosen is an American psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, and author, who was the first holder of the McMillan Professorship in Analytical Psychology, Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science, and Professor of Humanities in Medicine at Texas A&M University. Although retired, he edited The Soul of Art (2017) by Christian Gaillard, which is the twentieth volume in the Fay Book Series in Analytical Psychology. The new editor of the Fay Book Series is Michael Escamilla who was named the McMillan scholar at The C.G. Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas.
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