Richard Kogan, M.D.

Richard Kogan is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City; Co-Director of the Medical Center's Human Sexuality Program; and Artistic Director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program.

Kogan is a concert pianist. He developed a series of lecture-recitals that explore the role of music in healing and the influence of psychological factors and medical conditions on the creative work of composers.

Life

Kogan is the son of a gastroenterologist from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the second of five children. He began piano performances in 1961 at age 6. But the medical world was never far from family life; his father took the boy on medical rounds. His mother enrolled him at the Juilliard School of Music pre-college, where he studied piano with Nadia Reisenberg.

Music For his lecture-concerts, Kogan selects composers who had intrapsychic conflicts that affected their creative processes, and who wrote for the piano, so that he can illustrate his points with musical examples.

He often uses an anniversary as an occasion to examine a certain composer. In 2006 he explored Mozart's mind and music at the 250th anniversary of his birth. In 2007 he discussed Leonard Bernstein on the 50th anniversary of the world premiere of West Side Story. In 2010 he discussed Chopin on the bicentennial of his birth.

Frédéric Chopin (1810–49): In self-imposed exile from his beloved occupied Poland; evidently experiencing tuberculosis that caused enervation, exhaustion, and a constant awareness of the shadow of death; and bedeviled by visual hallucinations (possibly produced by temporal lobe epilepsy), Chopin, according to Kogan, "not coinciden[tally] composed the most famous funeral march in history."

Robert Schumann (1810–56): Manic episodes in the course of his bipolar disorder brought periods of explosive creativity, but he died in a mental institution of self-starvation.

George Gershwin (1898–1937) as a child would probably today have been diagnosed with conduct disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Late in his life, psychoanalysis could not relieve depression triggered by an undiagnosed brain tumor, which killed him at 38.

Some other composers' lives, though also marked by periods of mental illness, did not end quite so tragically. Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), following the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 1, experienced severe depression for three years that prevented him from composing. After his psychiatrist, Nikolai Dahl (an amateur musician), cured Rachmaninoff's creative block through hypnosis and psychotherapy, the composer produced his celebrated Piano Concerto No. 2, dedicated to Dahl.

Kogan has said that, while writers and artists have mood disorders in greater proportion than the general population, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity. "There have been examples of great composers, such as Bach, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, who seem to have been relatively free of significant psychopathology."

While trained as a classical musician, Kogan has said he has "a deep appreciation for a wide variety of musical genres.... I am generally opposed to arbitrary stylistic distinctions. I agree with the viewpoint of Duke Ellington, who once said, 'There are only two kinds of music—good music and bad music. I like both kinds.'" "Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto... is the most popular piano concerto ever written... that was dedicated to a psychiatrist."

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Rachmaninoff and his family left Russia, eventually settling in New York City, where he became extremely successful as a concert pianist. Nevertheless, he remained tormented by depression, and his preoccupation with death only grew with age. He made creative use of this preoccupation by including the Dies irae motif in at least 20 of his works.

Mind and body In psychiatry, the overarching paradigm is the biopsychosocial model. This model holds that mind, centered in the brain, is an integral part of the body, and that both mind and body also interact with the social milieu. Each of the three factors—biology, psyche, and society—interacts with and affects the others.

Kogan says that listening to, or playing, music reduces stress levels by releasing the hormone cortisol, and can reduce pain.

Music boosts immunity and releases dopamine, a brain neurotransmitter also released during other pleasurable activities such as sex or eating good food.

Honors Concert Artists Guild Award Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition Liebert Award for Applied Psychoanalysis McGovern Award for the Art and Science of Medicine American College of Psychiatry Public Service Award Eighth annual Joan and Stanford Alexander Award in Psychiatry, presented to Kogan at Baylor College of Medicine, April 6, 2016.