Overview

In Essence creates a veritable 'narrative scaffolding' of the arts among the sciences. A compilation of scholarly blogs and essays by a clinical professor of psychiatry, this volume weaves together references from some of our most prestigious scholars and illustrates each piece with sumptuous color images from the world's greatest artists. Drawing insights from philosophy, culture, history, literature, film, and the arts, the author, with a medical and psychological perspective, presents an exquisite tapestry of subjects, including loneliness, resilience, pain, cancer, pregnancy, synesthesia, hypochondriasis, counterfactual thinking, compassion failure, facial deformities, the madness of hunger, face blindness, and a mathematical approach to the study of infinity.

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Reviews

""Many have noted the synergy between the sciences and the humanities or liberal arts. Both rely, in some cases, on the transcendental experience of seeing things differently. Science helps us discern what is, to a reasonable degree of certainty, objectively true about the world. The arts and humanities often provide us with new questions and perspectives that science can then address. Dr. Sylvia Karasu is a master at combining the arts and sciences in her steady, beautiful work...reminding us of the human elements and how different people and topics have been perceived over the generations. Her writing harkens to both literary and historical references. And yet, all is interwoven with the science. It is a beautiful experience to read her work, and I have closely followed her blogs for well over a decade now. The reader will find no better volume to help perceive the breadth of the obesity questions and the exploration of knowledge."" - David B. Allison, PhD, scientist, renowned obesity researcher, Distinguished Professor and Dean, School of Public Health, Indiana University-Bloomington. ""In her In Essence: A Tapestry of Selected Writings on the Arts and Sciences, Dr. Karasu has again demonstrated her great skill in weaving a story about medicine, psychology, and philosophy together with illustrative artwork to make a really wonderful story that is a pleasure to read."" - George A. Bray, MD, Boyd Professor Emeritus, Pennington Biomedical Research Center of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and Co-editor, all the editions of Handbook of Obesity ""Dr. Sylvia Karasu brings her medical expertise and psychological insights as a master psychiatrist to a broad range of fascinating human phenomena and then employs rigorous historical and current scholarship to quickly provide key insights into human behavior, aspirations, and concerns. The breadth of her expertise extends to matching her elegant prose with works of art that epitomize the key points she makes in her focused and authoritative reviews. Each one is a small jewel!"" - Barry S. Coller, MD, Physician-in-Chief, Vice President for Medical Affairs, David Rockefeller Professor, Allen and Frances Adler Laboratory of Blood and Vascular Biology ""Short-form essays in the medical humanities of real quality are very, very rare. Sylvia R. Karasu's In Essence reveals with original insights moment after moment how our hopes, fantasies, and desires shape the way we deal with health and illness as doctors or patients or doctors who are patients. From the aesthetics of the body to changes in the body to conspiracies about the body, her micro-essays always teach us in the most painless way to be aware of what we believe as true or false, as that awareness may help to save each of us in the end."" - Sander L. Gilman, PhD, JD, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emeritus, as well as Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, at Emory University, where he was the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. Author of Doc or Quack: Science and Anti-science in Modern Medicine (2025) ""In Essence: A Tapestry of Selected Writings triumphantly lives up to its name: it is indeed a tapestry of knowledge. Not only is the range of topics astonishing-Karasu covers everything from grief to stress to hope to cognition to the immune system-but so too is the author's depth of insight-her expertise in human psychology is buttressed by a deep awareness of the global history of literature, visual art, philosophy, and more. This is a remarkable book."" - Bradley J. Irish, PhD, Associate Professor of English, Arizona State Universit

Author Information

Sylvia R. Karasu, MD is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine, an Attending Psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and a long-standing member of the Institutional Review Board of The Rockefeller University. Dr. Karasu is the author Of Epidemic Proportions: The Art and Science of Obesity (2019), a compilation of 101 scholarly blogs she wrote for psychologytoday.com. She is also the senior author of The Gravity of Weight: A Clinical Guide to Weight Loss and Maintenance (2010) and The Art of Marriage Maintenance (2005.) Dr. Karasu is a cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and has her MD degree from Einstein College of Medicine. She is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and an elected Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. She has been a contributor to the online medical humanities journal Hektoen International, and she has been writing monthly blogs for psychologytoday.com for over 14 years. She has a private psychiatric practice in New York City.

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