Use your Mac as a psychotherapist
Jan 23, 2010 - 3 Comments
Yes, you read that right. You can use your Mac as a psychotherapist from the Terminal, thanks to emacs. It’s pretty amusing, and here’s how to do it:
* Launch the Terminal
* Type ‘emacs’ and hit return
* Press Shift+Escape keys, then hit X
* Type “doctor” and hit return
* Mac psychotherapist to the rescue! See the screenshot below:
In case you’re wondering, this is not just a Mac specific feature, it’s part of emacs, a UNIX text editor, and it works on virtually any version of emacs out there.
this is pretty cool. i HAD to tweet it. thanks for sharing.
There used to be a text editor available for the Classic environment which would perform the same function. Sorry, can’t remember the name.
Not so amazing. I wrote a program in Basic, no less, over 20 years ago I called Dr. Ram. It was based upon Rogerian non-directive analysis.
Every entry by the “patient” was checked for certain stress words such as mother, father, sister, brother, hate. love, etc. A stress word would bring up a random number generator that would activate a response often using the keyword such as “tell me about your mother.” or a general comment such as, “How long have you felt this way?” or “Do you often feel this way?”
It ran great on an Atari 128XE. Lots of fun with friends using it. Too bad I didn’t save all the entries. LOL