Alumni Watch: Richard Kogan '77

Richard Kogan ’77

Mining the depths of both his intellectual and musical talents, Dr. Richard Kogan ’77 travels the country giving unique concert/lectures about master composers, while not attending to his private practice or his role as co-director of the Human Sexuality Program at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York.

From his job description alone, it is clear that Kogan is a rare combination; he is a Harvard- (he graduated medical school in 1981) and Cornell-educated psychiatrist as well as an accomplished pianist who studied at Juilliard. He has starred in a DVD about the life and work of tormented musical genius Robert Schumann. But he is also a practicing and high-profile psychiatrist. To possess such a chimerical skill set is remarkable, but Kogan’s ability to meld such disparate disciplines in one lecture is what keeps his audiences riveted.

Kogan argues in an interview that the combination of music and medicine should not be as uncommon as it is, stressing that the two have long been linked—Apollo was the Greek god of both disciplines and, in many pre-industrial societies, shamanic figures use music and dance to heal.

Kogan offers George Gershwin as a modern case study, describing the composer’s young life as “a childhood that could have gone off the rails without the influence of music.” The legendary composer’s parents were gamblers who moved the family in and out of 28 different apartments before he was 18. By any standards, Gershwin had a “gigantic” behavioral problem, says Kogan—he was in a gang, stole, fought, cut school, and lost his virginity at the age of nine. But in a way, Kogan says, Gershwin stumbled upon a way to self-medicate: musical composition.

In that story, Kogan sees a perfect example of the “transformative healing effects of music”—Gershwin was able to transmute his energy and mischief into prolific art, and in collaboration with his brother Ira, wrote some of the most enduring music of his era.

Kogan posits that the sorrow and despair found in some of Gershwin’s later works may be due to a depression the composer suffered before his premature death at the age of 38. When asked if he thought depression could be a source of creativity, Kogan answers, “Mental illness is overemphasized as a source of creativity—depression is a catastrophic illness which is underdiagnosed and treated. That being said, people draw on their experience, and suffering can spark creativity. This creativity can act as resilience to the illness—its how some people make sense of their condition.”

The question is, how can doctors harness the healing potentials of music? According to Kogan, there is a lot of work to be done—“If I were to say ‘music makes people feel better’ everybody would agree, but the good, hard, scientific research has not been done. Once it’s done, though, there will be an explosion of this kind of treatment.”

“I see it as my mission as a psychiatrist to help each and every patient to reach their creative potential,” Kogan says. “Gershwin is a cautionary tale—people thought he wouldn’t amount to anything. We say that far too much.”