Leather Couch

Yasmin Williams sits on her leather couch, her guitar stretched across her lap horizontally with its strings turned to the sky. She taps on the fretboard with her left hand as her right hand plucks a kalimba placed on the guitar’s body. Her feet, clad in tap shoes, keep rhythm on a mic’d wooden board placed under her. Even with all limbs in play, it’s mind boggling that the melodic and percussive sounds that emerge are made by just one musician, playing in real time. With her ambidextrous and pedidextrous, multi-instrumental techniques of her own making and influences ranging from video games to West African griots subverting the predominantly white male canon of fingerstyle guitar, Yasmin Williams is truly a guitarist for the new century…

What comes to mind when you picture a psychologist? If you're like most people coming to this fascinating field for the first time, the answer may include a leather couch and a scholarly looking gentleman quietly taking notes and occasionally nodding. In some ways, such a picture would be accurate, a confirmation not only of the importance of Sigmund Freud in the history of psychology but also of the degree Freud dominates the popular perception of this discipline.