A Conversation with Maggie Scarf

Disclaimer: Unedited AI Transcript

Larry Barsh (00:07):

You are listening to specifically for Seniors, a podcast designed for a vibrant and diverse senior community. I'm your host, Dr. Larry Barsh. Join me in a lineup of experts as we discuss a wide variety of topics that will empower, inform, entertain, and inspire as we celebrate the richness and wisdom of this incredible stage of life.

Larry Barsh (00:40):

My guest today on specifically for Seniors, will be familiar to many of the listeners to this podcast. Maggie Scarf is a former visiting fellow at Whitney Humidity Humanity Center, Yale University, and a fellow of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale University. She was, for many years, a contributing editor to the New Republic and a member of the advisory Board of the American Psychiatric Press. Maggie is the author of seven books for adults, two books for children. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Neiman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard. She has received several national media awards from the American Psychological Foundation. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic Psychology. Today, Maggie has appeared on many television programs, including Oprah, the Today Show, good Morning America, CBS News and CNN, and has been interviewed extensively on radio and for magazines and newspapers across the nation. On a personal note, I am honored to be able to call Maggie a friend. Welcome to specifically for Seniors, Maggie.

Maggie Scarf (02:14):

Thank you, Larry, for your very kind and gracious introduction.

Larry Barsh (02:21):

Well, it's you

Maggie Scarf (02:22):

<Laugh> <laugh>.

Larry Barsh (02:24):

Maggie, let's talk about your educational back round. Were you a psychologist by training?

Maggie Scarf (02:32):

No, I wasn't. In fact, I had one course in psychology when I was in college. I loved it, but I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to write children's fiction, and I majored in French literature. I'm a big reader,

Larry Barsh (02:54):

<Laugh>. But how did you become a writer?

Maggie Scarf (02:58):

Well, the way I, the way my career as a writer and a particularly a writer of in Psychological topics is kind of a shaggy dog story. It happened in the most absurd way when I look back on it because I moved from having that one course in psychology to years later, the Washington Post calling me the foremost voice in America on psychological topics, which was quite a, a a, an arc of distance.

Larry Barsh (03:50):

Your, your books focus on writings on relationships, family dynamics, and personal development. Why those subjects? What what brought you to that field?

Maggie Scarf (04:01):

I'd have to start way back to tell you how I even got to a point where an editor would entertain the idea that I would write a book. And that was the following. I was a faculty wife at Yale. My husband taught economics. I was the mom of three daughters, and they were school aged. And with the youngest one going to school, I had time on my head. So I thought, well, I'll, I'll get a part-time job. And I went for two possible part-time jobs. One was doing articles for the Yale Alumni Magazine, and the other was doing radio interviews for the Yale radio station, WELI. So I, as a matter of fact, I got both jobs. So I did several articles, one on an American art opening at the museum, and then I did an article on a new award. And this, this was the beginning.

Maggie Scarf (05:28):

This was a award where they were doing very new things. It was being done at Yale and at Langley Porter in California, in San Francisco. And what they were doing was beginning the use of drugs, which was quite new at the time. And a form of social engineering called milieu therapy. The word milieu is a French word, just meaning the social environment. And this was engineering the social environment as a form of treatment. Now, the Yale Psychiatric Department was just filled with Freudians. I mean, they wouldn't look at a drug. This was anathema. And also they tended to have hospitals, which were way away from the community. This was a ward inside the Yale New Haven Hospital. So it was just quite new. So I went over and asked about writing an article about them doing an article. I knew nothing about it.

Maggie Scarf (06:45):

And they said, yeah, we'll, we'll sort of play act what goes on here. We'll do a little program and you can take it to W-E-L-I-I took it to WELI. They wanted no part of it. They were horrified. They did, what, what is this stuff? So I, I had the transcript written out for me. Somebody typed it out. And then I looked at it and I thought, my God, this is fascinating. So I went back to the, this ward at Yale New Haven Hospital, and I asked them if I could hang around, learn what they're doing. They said, sure, you can do it. We'll, both the head of the psychiatric services at the hospital and the, the head of that ward gave me permission, but they said, we don't wanna upset the patients. So say you're doing a psychological experiment. So that began what was a six month period of following the, the patients around sitting behind the one way mirror, just taking part in all the discussions that discuss each patient.

Maggie Scarf (08:19):

And I had been there, I I, I was there around six months, but I had been there about a month when one of the patients that was a kid who was I think a senior at Yale and had a psychotic break and decided he was a frog. Occasionally he would have bouts of being a frog and started hopping around. But one time when he wasn't hopping around, he came up to me and he said, who are you and why are you hanging around here? And I said, oh, I'm doing psychological research. And, and he said, oh, that's interesting. What is it on? And boy, that stopped me cold.

Maggie Scarf (09:14):

It was on. So I said to him, to tell you the truth, I'm a journalist. He said, you are a journalist. Wow. He said, that is so exciting. Are you gonna write about us? And then he ran, pulled the other patients, and they all got excited. They were so happy because here they were, they were gonna be written about. So I went along. I thought I'd be kicked off the board after that incident, but nothing happened. So I continued along and I followed them daily, every day for six months. And the experiences were fascinating. I mean, sitting behi behind the one way mirror is in itself a surreal experience. Because for instance, there was this beautiful, beautiful young woman who had come in after a suicide attempt when a a, an affair with her therapist broke up. And there she was sitting looking, the group therapies going on, I'm watching it.

Maggie Scarf (10:35):

Usually other people were with me. But at that point, I was alone. And she's crimping and she's looking at herself and paying no attention to anybody else in the group. And I'm sitting there, God, you know, I feel such a jerk. So, you know, I wanted to say the other people. Anyhow, I did that and I wrote an article. And when I wrote that article, I thought, Hey, this is pretty good. I'm not gonna send this to the alumni magazine. I'm gonna send it to the New York Times. And I talked to my husband about it, and he said, are you kidding? That's impossible. They'll never take anything off the street from an unknown. They will take things from the top of the piles of the best agents. It's ridiculous. You know, don't bother. I said, well, what the heck? I could try. So I called them up and I said, how long are your articles? And the person who answered the phone told me, she said, but don't think in any way that this is a assignment or anything to, oh, no, no, no. I said, so I then wrote it up, and I sent it in. Two weeks later, I got a call. They said, we're taking this. Who are you?

Speaker 4 (12:17):

<Laugh>?

Maggie Scarf (12:19):

So I thought for a minute, I couldn't say I'm somebody who had one course in psychology. <Laugh>. So, so what I said was, oh, I'm the person who wrote that article. They said, great. So that was that. They gave me assignment after assignment. I did cover stories on electrical stimulation of the brain, sex hormones and behavior. Oh sleep disorders. IJI just was a fetus a person. I did one article, one cover article after another. And this was at a time when the, the Times Magazine was really taken very seriously in academic. It was not snazzy the way it is now. In fact, it was losing money, but it was just, it had a lot of, of kind of it, it was taken seriously. It had gravitas. And so anyhow, that was my career, which was this odd thing that I was able to take these, these different subjects, absorb them quickly, do interviews, do the research, and of course, for that, that first article about that mental work, I did enormous amounts of research. So, and then I would sort of stir them up in my brain like a washing machine and come out with articles that were in informative, entertaining, told you what, what was going on. And I just loved doing it. I found my Meier in this very strange way.

Larry Barsh (14:36):

So how did that lead to the seven books?

Maggie Scarf (14:40):

Well, as you can imagine, once my name was out there, editors started to write to me and say, wouldn't you care to write a book with us? You know, double Day, random House, Simon and Tuesday. And I couldn't quite think of a topic, though. I did really want to start writing a book, because rushing from topic to topic was really hard work. And so I one day I was walking through the Yale co-op, which is the same as the Harvard Co. And I looked at a book and, and I saw that it was called women in Depression. And no, it was just called Depression. And I thought, Hmm, that might have been a good topic. And I start, I said, but of course somebody's done it. I think it was Women in Depression. Anyhow, I started leafing through it, and I realized that it was all statistics.

Maggie Scarf (16:01):

But what crazy statistics, there was study after study after study showing that in every, every single study done ev anywhere, anytime on any group in any country. If you looked at the statistics, the outcome was that there were at least three to six or more women to every man who was feeling depressed, who was in a depression, in a clinical depression. And I thought, wow, that's crazy. And I thought, I think I'll do a book on that, interview a bunch of women and see what it's about. And so I got permission from the same ward to start there. And I started doing a series of interviews. And I did those interviews both at Yale. I did them up at Dartmouth when one of the clinical professors moved up there. I did them at, at Mass General when I was on a Neiman Fellowship. And I wrote chapter after chapter, all in, all mixed up, one chapter after another.

Maggie Scarf (17:39):

And then I, by then I had an agent and she said, why don't you put it in a lifecycle format, bang, that did it. And I did it over the co adolescence, twenties, thirties. In other words, I did issues. In fact, the title is Pressure Point in the Lives of Women, and it was called Unfinished Business. Nobody thought it was going to be a great seller depression, huh. But as a matter of fact, it just opened a huge subject and found it was a best seller and had found a very large audience. And it was translated everywhere. Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany, France, even China. And so that started my book writing business.

Larry Barsh (18:54):

And the other books followed along in, in that line of topic,

Maggie Scarf (19:01):

Well, I was always interested in relationship issues, but of course, with this kind of subject, the obvious death subject, since so many of the issues were around relationships was marriage. And so I did a, a book on marriage called Intimate Partners, patterns in Love and Marriage, which was filled with a lot of new information, new again, my thing was just gathering new things. And, and so I not only describe the ways in which people put their intimate relationships together, all the, all the factors that go into it, which you don't think about when you're falling in love. And with that, I also added tasks, things people could do to help straighten out tense relationships. And there was a series of four I could describe one of the easiest ones to you. Would you like that? Mm-Hmm,

Larry Barsh (20:34):

<Affirmative>. Please do.

Maggie Scarf (20:37):

That is called talking and listening. And that involves, say, the couple taking an hour out of the week. Just say, we'll take Wednesday nights when the kids are asleep, seven to eight. So say it to you and me. I get at, we flip a coin, guess what? I win heads with <laugh>. And so I go first and I get to talk, and you get to listen. But you cannot interfere. You cannot say a word, and I cannot talk about you. Or I can, I can talk about nothing but myself, my hopes, my joys, my hurts, my fantasy, all me separate from you. This stops the kind of back and forth that happens in tense where I say something and you say, oh, no, you are wrong. No, you cannot interfere. And I sit there for a half hour and I don't talk about re our relationship, and I don't say a word about you.

Maggie Scarf (21:59):

I only talk about me. Then it's your turn to get the microphone. You have the same set of instructions. I keep my mouth shut. You talk, you tell me what's going on with your job, with your work, with your research, with your life, with your feelings about yourself, whether you are feeling up or down, how you, how you see your life, how you prefer things, what whatever has to do with you as a separate person. And then when the task is done, we don't say a word about it to each other, we just drop it. Now, if we're in therapy, that would be the assignment. We would bring it to the therapist. But say, you're doing these tasks yourself.

Maggie Scarf (23:03):

You let maybe three, four days go by and then you can pick it up and talk about it. And the next week we have the task again, since I went first. You go first and we do the same thing. It's a good way of, of promoting separateness. Instead of, let's say I'm feeling really bad about myself. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So I ni ni ni ni at you until you are really at me, and you are saying how bad I am. And then I can say he thinks I'm bad, but I don't think I'm bad. In other words, it's a way of me sparing myself from saying, you feel bad at your, about yourself. I can instead get angry at you. So this is a good way of pulling apart those things where you may be holding the anger for me, and I'm saying I'm not angry. It's a wonderful task.

Larry Barsh (24:29):

Wow, <laugh>. Yeah. I've got to, I've got to sit and think about that for a while. <Laugh> going from there you said you wanted to write children's novels, but you did end up writing a couple of children's books.

Maggie Scarf (24:50):

Wrote a children's book on Franklin, on Benjamin Franklin, and one on Antarctica. But what I had really hoped to do was write children's books. I never could make it just didn't almost, but never did it. Instead, I wrote all these other things

Larry Barsh (25:15):

That Yeah, that sort of took some time. I would imagine we talked a little bit about writing for the New York Times and how that started you your career as a book writer. Was that the way that your journalism writing came to be just by sending in an, an article is an unknown.

Maggie Scarf (25:43):

It it was just unthinkable. Unthinkable. But it happened

Larry Barsh (25:52):

Amazing. And that, that led to six, seven books. Yeah. And

Maggie Scarf (25:58):

When I was in England for a year I got an assignment from the Times to write about a a psychologist, sir John Ey, his name was, and he had a theory on mother child attachment, and he defined different kinds of attachment and so on. So I wrote an article, the Times refused it. They said, so babies need mothers. Tell me something new. As a matter of fact, he became a big force in psychology, and he was a huge background theorist for my book on Women and depression, all about attachments and the, the, the tremendous importance of attachment to women

Larry Barsh (27:05):

From all of this. You ended up on television with Oprah, today's show, good Morning America. What was that like?

Maggie Scarf (27:16):

It was, I cannot describe it. It was so crazy. It was beyond imagining. Once I went on the Oprah show as the quote expert, and there was a woman, well, the, the, the people coming in to be the, the interviewees were women who were having affairs that their husbands didn't know about this on national television.

Larry Barsh (27:56):

It is a good place to keep a secret <laugh>

Maggie Scarf (27:59):

<Laugh>. I, so I thought, are they going to get anybody? Well, they did. And I was in the green room getting makeup put on me, and a woman is in there and she said, I thought you were gonna put on all these little check marks, you know, to cover my face. Oh, no. They said, we're gonna use sunglasses. I'm sitting there and think sunglasses. This is really off the wall. So they didn't pressure her. They said, if you don't wanna go on, go okay with us. You know, she decided to go on. Well, the way the Oprah Show is run is the quote expert, which is me, is sitting in another room for the first 20 minutes while Oprah interviews her. And then I'm brought on for the later part of the, of the show. So while I'm in the green room, I'm watching her and she says, boy, I don't hope my husband isn't making, watching this.

Maggie Scarf (29:25):

'Cause He makes rifles. Of course, I nearly fell off my chair. I thought, lady, you're suicidal. So they brought me out there. I had the interview later on. I was in the limo with her. We were both going to O'Hare Airport. And I said to her, your husband doesn't really make rifles, does he? Oh yeah. She says he does. But I said, he made remedied something rifles, not sniper rifles or some different, and I thought, help <laugh>. I never heard what happened. Of course, once you were once the door shut, when the egg show you were, it was over another time I was on. And they, they had a an anthropologist who said that love relationships only lasted for three years, because that's when babies became independent. I looked at her and I said, so what does a kid do? Go out and rent an apartment or what? <Laugh>, you're not supposed to be nasty. I couldn't take it. <Laugh>.

Larry Barsh (31:00):

And your books brought you into a lot of book tours as well.

Maggie Scarf (31:05):

Oh, and was I there for somebody who cares to go to sleep at night? I would in the morning have a TV show, couple of newspapers after that, maybe another TV show in the afternoon. Then the next day, this the ne the whole routine all over again. I, my head was so mixed up, but of course, so were all the, all the TV producers are young. They're all starting out as interns. I came into Boston to be on a TV show in the morning, and the girl runs up to me and shakes my hand and says, hi, I'm Maggie Scarf. And I looked at her and I said, then who am I? <Laugh> just, I mean, not only is the poor guests crazy, you are running into everyone else who's going crazy. <Laugh>,

Larry Barsh (32:21):

One more question. If you were asked to write an article for the New York Times now, and you were given free reign as to what you'd like to talk about your choice, what would it be?

Maggie Scarf (32:37):

I'm a total politic politics junkie. I follow politics very, very carefully all the time, anywhere and everywhere. I don't think I'd have something new to write, but I guess what's on my mind at the moment is the absolute horror of the Supreme Court, which is tearing the Constitution to bits. Even as we sit here there's nothing we can do about the fact that Thomas should recruit, accuse himself. There's nothing that the American public can do about it. We're sitting here watching our democracy to just torn up. And I'm so hoping, doing everything I can, which is mostly sending money to to people whom I'm backing. But I'm fearful as I have never in my lifetime I what's happened since Trump appeared on the scene. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is hard to think of.

Larry Barsh (34:04):

What would you advise we do about the Supreme Court?

Maggie Scarf (34:09):

I don't know. I think there, I can't think of anything besides an uprising of the, of the public, but I the way I see it happening is that the, the Republicans are voted out and that Democratic Congress holds them up and, and stops it. It's really, it's really a sort of a Republican, the worst word of the, in the worst way, taking over with extremist views. If we can't stop it, we're, we're crook.

Larry Barsh (35:01):

Would you advocate for enlarging the size of the Supreme Court?

Maggie Scarf (35:06):

Yes. Yes, I certainly would. That would be a good way to handle it. I know that Biden hasn't wanted to, but it should be done. I mean it to become clear that it should be done. What do you think?

Larry Barsh (35:27):

Well, yeah, I agree too. I, I sort of would go for term limits in the Supreme Court.

Maggie Scarf (35:35):

I would also,

Larry Barsh (35:36):

Because I think some of the trouble came up with a, well-meaning justice who didn't retire when she probably should have.

Maggie Scarf (35:48):

Yes,

Larry Barsh (35:50):

It

Maggie Scarf (35:50):

Did start there, and she's been held up. That's a great saint. But she surely has not behaved in a saintly way toward the country. She was ill

Larry Barsh (36:07):

And I, I, I don't know how it would be accomplished, but I would advocate for our equality in political thought in the Supreme Court for conservatives, for liberals. Not an odd number.

Maggie Scarf (36:28):

You never, and when they turn around and be something else,

Larry Barsh (36:34):

No odd number. Because if the Supreme Court can't compromise and come to one solution that unites two disparate points of view. I don't know how Congress could do it.

Maggie Scarf (36:54):

Well, here we are,

Larry Barsh (36:57):

But nobody asked me to be president. And <laugh>,

Maggie Scarf (37:00):

You know, the problem with that is that somebody who comes onto the Supreme Court, where the certain kind of thought process could turn around and be different once they get on the court. Sure. So you could never promise that, that you could get that four to four set up.

Larry Barsh (37:29):

No, but you can try.

Maggie Scarf (37:33):

Yeah. We we're all thinking about it, but I think it, it's in the voting that, that any, any resolution is going to happen. And one thing is certainly clear, and that is that Trump has his base, but he has never tried to enlarge his base. And his base is not large enough to prevail in a general election. And so he's not up for winning a general election. So unless he thinks he's going to start another insurrection, but I don't think he is. Nobody showed up in New York when he called his people to come. He was saying thousands had come, but no one had come.

Larry Barsh (38:36):

What, what disturbs me and provides an example as to what must have happened in a lot of countries, when you got an au author, authoritarian dictator, and you say to yourself, how can that happen? And we had the example of one man disrupting a 200 and 50-year-old institution.

Maggie Scarf (39:02):

It's true, but he hasn't succeeded completely yet. So we, we, we can hold our breaths, cross our fingers, and do whatever we can in whatever ways we can.

Larry Barsh (39:20):

Yep. Maggie, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on.

Maggie Scarf (39:28):

Oh, thank you for inviting me back. <Laugh>,

Larry Barsh (39:32):

<Laugh>, we, we won't talk about that

Maggie Scarf (39:34):

<Laugh>. Okay.

Larry Barsh (39:36):

Thanks Maggie.

Maggie Scarf (39:38):

Thanks, Larry.

Announcer (39:45):

If you found this podcast interesting, fun, or helpful, tell your friends and family and click on the follow or subscribe button. We'll let you know when new episodes are available. You've been listening to specifically for seniors. We'll talk more next time. Stay connected.