A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY81 start with T start with T
“Must reading for scholars, sexuality researchers, activists, and public policy and public health planners engaged in efforts to promote education on sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV infection prevention for adolescents in schools.”—JAMA
Talk about Sex is a rich social history about the political transformations, cultural dynamics, and emotional rhetorical strategies that helped the right wing manufacture controversies on the local and national levels in the United States. Although the emergence of a politicized Christian Right is commonly dated at the mid-seventies, with the founding of groups like the Moral Majority, Talk about Sex tells the story of a powerful right-wing Christian presence in politics a full decade earlier. These activists used inflammatory sexual rhetoric—oftentimes deceptive and provocative—to capture the terms of public debate, galvanize voters, and reshape the culture according to their own vision.
This 20th Anniversary Edition includes a new preface and epilogue by the author that examines current controversies over public education on sexuality, gender, and race.
Demonstrating how the right wing draws on the cultural power of sexual shame and fear to build a political movement, Talk about Sex explores the complex entanglements of sexual knowledge, politics, and discourses.
Winner of the 2020 Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing
Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of ‘mental health’, and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today.
Despite the modesty of its title, the publication of this book in 1899 was a significant event. It marked the first application of the relatively new discipline of psychology, and specifically of James's theses in The Principles of Psychology, to educational theory and classroom practice. The book went through twelve printings in as many years and has never been out of print. Among its innovative features were James's maxims "No reception without reaction" and "No impression without expression"; a new emphasis on the biology of behavior and on the role of instincts; and discussions of the relevance to elementary school education of what is known about will, attention, memory, apperception, and the association of ideas.
Appended to the fifteen talks to schoolteachers were three talks to college students, as pertinent today as when they were written: "The Gospel of Relaxation," "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," and "What Makes a Life Significant?"
When our children act up--whether they're just moody and rebellious or taking drugs and committing crimes--our solution, so often now, is to send them to a psychiatrist or developmental psychologist for help. What makes us think this will work? How did we come to rely on psychological explanations--and corrections--for juvenile misconduct?
In Taming the Troublesome Child, these questions lead to the complex history of "child guidance," a specialized psychological service developed early in the twentieth century. Kathleen Jones puts this professional history into the context of the larger culture of age, class, and gender conflict. Using the records of Boston's Judge Baker Guidance Center from 1920 to 1945, she looks at the relationships among the social activists, doctors, psychologists, social workers, parents, and young people who met in the child guidance clinic, then follows the clinicians as they adapt delinquency work to the problems of nondelinquent children--an adaptation that often entailed a harsh critique of American mothers. Her book reveals the uses to which professionals and patients have put this interpretation of juvenile misbehavior, and the conditions that mother-blaming has imposed on social policy and private child rearing to this day.
Achilles—warrior and hero—by the protocols of Western culture, should never cry. And yet Homeric epic is full of his tears and those of his companions at Troy. This path-blazing study by Hélène Monsacré shows how later ideals of stoically inexpressive manhood run contrary to the poetic vision presented in the Iliad and Odyssey. The epic protagonists, as larger-than-life figures who transcend gender categories, are precisely the men most likely to weep.
Monsacré pursues the paradox of the tearful fighter through a series of lucid and detailed close readings, and examines all aspects of the interactions between men and women in the Homeric poems. Her illuminating analysis, first published in French in 1984, remains bold, fresh, and compelling for anyone touched—like Achilles—by a world of grief.
This book distills the essence of child psychoanalysis from the practice and thought of its founder Anna Freud, who for over 50 years has been at the forefront of this controversial field. Children are the most refractory of all subjects to treat analytically. Here, for the first time, is a primer on the difficult technique as practiced at the Hampstead Clinic in London, which was founded by Anna Freud and is today the leading child analytic center in the world. She and her colleagues expose their wealth of experience to systematic review, which yields up rich insights not only into child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy but also into basic child development. In addition, their findings have relevance to the understanding of emotional disturbance at all ages.
The book follows the treatment situation through all its stages, from the first session to termination and follow-up. It focuses on the interaction between therapist and child in the treatment room, illustrating the points with copious clinical vignettes. One point examined is the structure of treatment with respect to such matters as scheduling sessions and handling interruptions. Another element that comes under scrutiny is the development of the child's relationship to the therapist, which subsumes such factors as establishing an alliance, transference, and resistance. The child's repertoire of expressions, both verbal and nonverbal, is explored, as is the therapist's armamentarium of interpretations and interventions. Woven throughout the description of these elements is incisive commentary by Anna Freud. Her commonsense approach gives the book unique value, lifting it to a rare level of human wisdom.
Most teenagers are too young to vote and are off the radar of political scientists. Teenage Citizens looks beyond the electoral game to consider the question of how this overlooked segment of our citizenry understands political topics. Bridging psychology and political science, Constance Flanagan argues that civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in teens’ everyday lives—in their experiences as members of schools and community-based organizations and in their exercise of voice, collective action, and responsibility in those settings. This is the phase of life when political ideas are born.
Through voices from a wide range of social classes and ethnic backgrounds in the United States and five other countries, we learn how teenagers form ideas about democracy, inequality, laws, ethnic identity, the social contract, and the ties that bind members of a polity together. Flanagan’s twenty-five years of research show how teens’ personal and family values accord with their political views. When their families emphasize social responsibility—for people in need and for the common good—and perform service to the community, teens’ ideas about democracy and the social contract highlight principles of tolerance, social inclusion, and equality. When families discount social responsibility relative to other values, teens’ ideas about democracy focus on their rights as individuals.
At a time when opportunities for youth are shrinking, Constance Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage the world of politics and civic engagement, and how their own political identities take form.
Although the blush was used to tell the truth of character and body, O’Farrell shows how it is actually undermined as a stable indicator of character in novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, North and South, and David Copperfield. She reveals how these writers then moved on in search of other bodily indicators of mortification and desire, among them the swoon, the scar, and the blunder. Providing unique and creative insights into the constructedness of the body and its semiotic play in literature and in culture, Telling Complexions includes parallel examples of the blush in contemporary culture and describes ways that textualized bodies are sometimes imagined to resist the constraints imposed by such construction.
Examining the work of writers from Gertrude Stein to Toni Morrison and Dorothy Allison, Telling Incest argues that an incest story's plausibility depends upon a shifting set of narrative conventions and cultural expectations. As contexts for telling incest stories have changed, so too have the tasks of those who tell and those who listen. The authors analyze both fictional and nonfiction narratives about father-daughter incest, beginning by scrutinizing the shadowy accounts found in nineteenth-century case records, letters, and narratives.
Telling Incest next explores African American stories that shift the blame for incest from the black family to the predations of a paternalistic white culture. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges demonstrate that writers drew upon this reworked incest narrative in the 1970s and early 1980s in order to relate a feminist story about incest, a story that criticizes patriarchal power. This feminist form of the story, increasingly emphasizing trauma and recovery, can be found in such popular books as Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. Doane and Hodges then examine recent memoirs and novels such as Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Sapphire's Push, narratives that again rework the incest story in an effort to "tell" about women's complex experiences of subjugation and hope.
Telling Incest will be of particular interest to readers who have enjoyed the popular and culturally significant work of writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, and Dorothy Allison and to students of women's studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies.
Janice Doane is Professor of English, St. Mary's College of California. Devon Hodges is Professor of English, George Mason University. They have also coauthored From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother and Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism.
Iris Murdoch once suggested that to understand any philosopher's work we must ask what he or she is frightened of. To understand any psychoanalyst's work--both as a clinician and as a writer--we should ask what he or she loves, because psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things that we may prefer to keep apart, but that Freud found to be inextricable. If it is possible to talk about psychoanalysis as a scandal, without spuriously glamorizing it, then one way of doing it is simply to say that Freud discovered that love was compatible, though often furtively, with all that it was meant to exclude. There are, in other words--and most of literature is made up of these words--no experts on love. And love, whatever else it is, is terror.
In a manner characteristically engaging and challenging, charming and maddening, Adam Phillips teases out the complicity between desire and the forbidden, longing and dread. His book is a chronicle of that all-too-human terror, and of how expertise, in the form of psychoanalysis, addresses our fears--in essence, turns our terror into meaning.
It is terror, of course, that traditionally drives us into the arms of the experts. Phillips takes up those topics about which psychoanalysis claims expertise--childhood, sexuality, love, development, dreams, art, the unconscious, unhappiness--and explores what Freud's description of the unconscious does to the idea of expertise, in life and in psychoanalysis itself. If we are not, as Freud's ideas tell us, masters of our own houses, then what kind of claims can we make for ourselves? In what senses can we know what we are doing? These questions, so central to the human condition and to the state of psychoanalysis, resonate through this book as Phillips considers our notions of competence, of a professional self, of expertise in every realm of life from parenting to psychoanalysis. Terrors and Experts testifies to what makes psychoanalysis interesting, to that interest in psychoanalysis--which teaches us the meaning of our ignorance--that makes the terrors of life more bearable, even valuable.
Bringing such provocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce’s Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard’s view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.
Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard’s prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.
To love and to work, Freud's famous definition of psychological maturity, here becomes the focussing principle for a renewed examination of the dominant themes that play themselves out in adult life. Erik Erikson, Neil Smelser, and nine leading experts in adult development consider the stages that adults pass through and the crises that adults confront as they attempt to create a meaningful life.
Themes of Work and Love in Adulthood is a book that raises many fascinating questions about adult experience. How, for example, does work affect personality? Are love and work in competition; must one be pursued at the expense of the other? Is there a point in life past which men lay less stress on mastery and turn more toward emotional fulfillment? And do women experience a shift in the opposite direction? More generally, why do adult crises fall into predictable patterns and how do adults grow as they respond to these crises? Is the recent broadening of standards for adult conduct an opportunity for personal liberation or a source of personal debilitation?
Much more than a summary of current work on adulthood, Themes of Work and Love in Adulthood is a book full of unusual rewards: Erik Erikson's sensitive reconstruction of the entanglements of love and work revealed in the correspondence between Freud and Jung; Ann Swidler's fascinating discussion of the historical transformation of the love ideal from medieval times to its contemporary form; Robert LeVine's analysis of the adult life course in an African culture. When these unique essays are added to the important position papers by major theorists of adult development—Daniel Levinson, Roger Gould, and Marjorie Fiske—the result is a book that is both useful and exciting.
This collection, edited by Patricia Siple and Susan D. Fischer, brings together theoretically important contributions from both basic research and applied settings. The studies include native sign language acquisition; acquisition and processing of sign language through a single mode under widely varying conditions; acquisition and processing of bimodal (speech and sign) input; and the use of sign language with atypical, autistic, and mentally retarded groups.
All the chapters in this collection of state-of-the-art research address one or more issues related to universality of language processes, language plasticity, and the relative contributions of biology and input to language acquisition and use.
Theorizing Emotions reflects the recent turn to emotions in academia—not just in sociology but also in psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Drawing on the classic studies of Max Weber, Erving Goffman, and Norbert Elias, several leading European scholars present their findings on the role of emotions in various facets of society, from the laboratory to the office to the media. Among the topics discussed are the tensions between feelings and feeling rules, the conscious and unconscious emotions of scientists, emotions and social disorder, the effect of the emotional turn as an element of advancing modernity, romantic love in U.S. and Israeli codes of conduct, and the role of mass media in generating massive public emotions.
A leading psychologist explains why nearly all of us—including many of those who are persecuted and powerless—so often defend the social systems that cause misery and injustice.
Why do we so often defend the very social systems that are responsible for injustice and exploitation? In A Theory of System Justification, John Jost argues that we are motivated to defend the status quo because doing so serves fundamental psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance. We want to feel good not only about ourselves and the groups to which we belong, but also about the overarching social structure in which we live, even when it hurts others and ourselves.
Jost lays out the wide range of evidence for his groundbreaking theory and examines its implications for our communities and our democracy. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, he provides an accessible account of system justification theory and its insights. System justification helps to explain deep contradictions, including the feeling among some women that they don’t deserve the same salaries as men and the tendency of some poor people to vote for policies that increase economic inequality.
The theory illuminates the most pressing social and political issues of our time—why has it been so hard to combat anthropogenic climate change?—as well as some of the most intimate—why do some black children prefer white dolls to black ones and why do some people stay in bad relationships? Jost’s theory has far-reaching implications, and he offers numerous insights that political activists and social justice advocates can use to promote change.
Beginning with a discussion of the profound impact of World War II and the Cold War on mental health, Halliwell moves from the influence of work, family, and growing up in the Eisenhower years to the critique of institutional practice and the search for alternative therapeutic communities during the 1960s. Blending a discussion of such influential postwar thinkers as Erich Fromm, William Menninger, Erving Goffman, Erik Erikson, and Herbert Marcuse with perceptive readings of a range of cultural text that illuminate mental health issues--among them Spellbound, Shock Corridor, Revolutionary Road, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden--this compelling study argues that the postwar therapeutic revolutions closely interlink contrasting discourses of authority and liberation.
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
The book is broken into three sections: one emphasizing the WPA’s own work identity, one on fostering community in writing programs, and one on balancing the professional and personal. Chapters written by a diverse range of authors in different institutional and WPA contexts examine the roles of WPAs in traumatic events, such as mass shootings and natural disasters, as well as the emotional labor WPAs perform on a daily basis, such as working with students who have been sexually assaulted or endured racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise disenfranchising interactions on campus. The central thread in this collection focuses on “preserving” by acknowledging that emotions are neither good nor bad and that they must be continually reflected upon as WPAs consider what to do with emotional labor and how to respond. Ultimately, this book argues for more visibility of the emotional labor WPAs perform and for WPAs to care for themselves even as they care for others.
The Things We Carry extends conversations about WPA emotional labor and offers concrete and useful strategies for administrators working in both a large range of traumatic events as well as daily situations that require tactical work to preserve their sense of self and balance. It will be invaluable to writing program administrators specifically and of interest to other types of administrators as well as scholars in rhetoric and composition who are interested in emotion more broadly.
Many philosophers believe they can gain knowledge about the world from the comfort of their armchairs, simply by reflecting on the nature of things. But how can the mind arrive at substantive knowledge of the world without seeking its input? Michael Strevens proposes an original defense of the armchair pursuit of philosophical knowledge, focusing on “the method of cases,” in which judgments about category membership—Does this count as causation? Does that count as the right action to take?—are used to test philosophical hypotheses about such matters as causality, moral responsibility, and beauty.
Strevens argues that the method of cases is capable of producing reliable, substantial knowledge. His strategy is to compare concepts of philosophical things to concepts of natural kinds, such as water. Philosophical concepts, like natural kind concepts, do not contain the answers to philosophers’ questions; armchair philosophy therefore cannot be conceptual analysis. But just as natural kind concepts provide a viable starting point for exploring the nature of the material world, so philosophical concepts are capable of launching and sustaining fruitful inquiry into philosophical matters, using the method of cases. Agonizing about unusual “edge cases,” Strevens shows, can play a leading role in such discoveries.
Thinking Off Your Feet seeks to reshape current debates about the nature of philosophical thinking and the methodological implications of experimental philosophy, to make significant contributions to the cognitive science of concepts, and to restore philosophy to its traditional position as an essential part of the human quest for knowledge.
A discipline is emerging called cultural psychology; it will serve as a force of renewal for both anthropology and psychology. In this book Richard Shweder presents its manifesto. Its central theme is that we have to understand the way persons, cultures, and natures make each other up. Its goal is to seek the mind indissociably embedded in the meanings and resonances that are both its product and its components.
Over the past thirty years the person as a category has disappeared from ethnography. Shweder aims to reverse this trend, focusing on the search for meaning and the creation of intentional worlds. He examines the prospect for a reconciliation of rationality and relativism and defines an intellectual agenda for cultural psychology.
What Shweder calls for is an exploration of the human mind, and of one’s own mind, by thinking through the ideas and practices of other peoples and their cultures. He examines evidence of cross-cultural similarities and differences in mind, self, emotion, and morality with special reference to the cultural psychology of a traditional Hindu temple town in India, where he has done considerable work in comparative anthropology. And he critiques the concept of the “person” implicit in Western social science, as well as psychiatric theories of the “subject.” He maintains that it will come as no surprise to cultural psychology if it should turn out that there are different psychological generalizations or “nomological networks”—a Hindu psychology, a Protestant psychology—appropriate for the different semiotic regions of the world. Shweder brings the news that God is alive not dead, but that there are many gods.
This study reveals how Hardy made sense of diverse sources of an affective human psychology, a discipline that expanded significantly during Hardy’s working life. From the 1870s to the turn of the twentieth century, the tools and techniques for studying the structures and function of the nervous system developed rapidly. Simultaneously, Hardy moved steadily toward realizing a more physiologically accurate rendering of brains and nerves.
Do the first two years of life really determine a child’s future development? Are human beings, like other primates, only motivated by pleasure? And do people actually have stable traits, like intelligence, fear, anxiety, and temperament? This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions—and proves them mistaken. Ranging with impressive ease from cultural history to philosophy to psychological research literature, Jerome Kagan weaves an argument that will rock the social sciences and the foundations of public policy.
Scientists, as well as lay people, tend to think of abstract processes—like intelligence or fear—as measurable entities, of which someone might have more or less. This approach, in Kagan’s analysis, shows a blindness to the power of context and to the great variability within any individual subject to different emotions and circumstances. “Infant determinism” is another widespread and dearly held conviction that Kagan contests. This theory—with its claim that early relationships determine lifelong patterns—underestimates human resiliency and adaptiveness, both emotional and cognitive (and, of course, fails to account for the happy products of miserable childhoods and vice versa). The last of Kagan’s targets is the vastly overrated pleasure principle, which, he argues, can hardly make sense of unselfish behavior impelled by the desire for virtue and self-respect—the wish to do the right thing.
Written in a lively style that uses fables and fairy tales, history and science to make philosophical points, this book challenges some of our most cherished notions about human nature.
Johnston draws on Jacques Lacan's oeuvre in conjunction with certain philosophical resources-elements from transcendental philosophy, structuralism, and phenomenology-to rectify the inconsistencies within the Freudian metapsychological model of drive. In doing so, he helps to answer a question haunting Freud at the end of his career: Why is humanity plagued by a perpetual margin of discontent, despite technological and cultural progress?
In Time Driven, Johnston is able to make sense of Freud's metapsychology both as a whole and in its historical development of Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud, and of the place of both Freud and Lacan in modern philosophy.
These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait “hot takes” stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection. We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind to the future. We thought that technology would save us by connecting us to each other and the world’s information. Instead, it enticed our vices, encouraged our biases, and eroded the one virtue we need now more than ever: wisdom.
A Time for Wisdom is for readers who feel beleaguered by the incivility of the modern world, dispirited by its coarse rhetoric and toxic partisanship. It is an invitation to escape the shallow cacophony and restore peace and perspective to our daily lives. Written by two psychologists, the book takes the best scientific research on wisdom and integrates it with timeless concepts that have, for ages, guided troubled souls through life’s hardships. From this foundation, the authors present four steps we can follow to practice wisdom in the 21st Century:
- Receiving knowledge.
- Practicing detachment.
- Experiencing tranquility.
- Cultivating transcendence.
These are profound and spiritual principles that can bring us immense satisfaction when we aspire to live by them.
In A Time for Wisdom, the authors show us how. They commend a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. They lead us out of the circus of contemporary life and show us a path beyond our petty self-centeredness. By journeying along that path, we can, like the great sages and scientists before us, rise above the immediacy of the moment and partake of the numinous and the infinite.
Waiting lists in psychiatric clinics and increasing numbers of patients in long-term psychotherapy have highlighted the need for shorter methods of treatment. Existing forms of short-term psychotherapy tend to be vague and uncertain, lacking as they do a clearly formulated rationale and methodology.
The bold and challenging technique for brief psychotherapy designed around the factor of time itself, which James Mann introduces here, is a method he hopes will revolutionize current practice. The significance of time in human life is examined in terms of the development of time sense as well as its unconscious meaning and the ways these are experienced in both the categorical and existential senses. The author shows how the interplay between the regressive pressures of the child’s sense of infinite time and the adult reality of categorical time determine the patient’s unconscious expectations of psychotherapy.
In To Sit on the Earth, pioneering ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan charts his intellectual and emotional journey, from his youthful infatuation with Freud and Wilhelm Reich to his mature adoption of anthropologist Georges Devereux’s ethnographic approach to psychoanalysis.
Expelled from Egypt as a Jew in 1956 when he was just a boy, Nathan spent his formative years on the outskirts of Paris. Caught up in situationist and Marxist politics, he enthusiastically participated in the revolutionary Events of May 1968. He then settled into a distinguished career as a writer, professor, and founding director of a free ethno-psychiatry clinic serving migrant populations in the French capital. Along the way, Nathan’s field research and practice took him to Benin, Burundi, and Brazil, where he sought out sorcerers, shamans, and other indigenous healers. As he did so, he encountered telling echoes of his ancestors’ age-old practices in Judeo-Arab Cairo.
Combining case histories and theoretical reflections with personal and familial anecdotes, while engaging with contemporary thinkers—including Sartre, Lacan, Bourdieu, and Foucault—this multi-layered, genre-defying memoir invites us to reconsider the beliefs that connect us to others and ourselves. To Sit on the Earth lays out a subtle, compelling case for the theological and cultural diversity essential to a thriving modernity.
Every president faces criticism and caricature. Donald Trump, however, is unique in that he is routinely characterized in ways more suitable for a toddler. What’s more, it is not just Democrats, pundits, or protestors who compare the president to a child; Trump’s staffers, subordinates, and allies on Capitol Hill also describe Trump like a small, badly behaved preschooler.
In April 2017, Daniel W. Drezner began curating every example he could find of a Trump ally describing the president like a toddler. So far, he’s collected more than one thousand tweets—a rate of more than one a day. In The Toddler-in-Chief, Drezner draws on these examples to take readers through the different dimensions of Trump’s infantile behavior, from temper tantrums to poor impulse control to the possibility that the President has had too much screen time. How much damage can really be done by a giant man-baby? Quite a lot, Drezner argues, due to the winnowing away of presidential checks and balances over the past fifty years. In these pages, Drezner follows his theme—the specific ways in which sharing some of the traits of a toddler makes a person ill-suited to the presidency—to show the lasting, deleterious impact the Trump administration will have on American foreign policy and democracy.
The “adults in the room” may not be able to rein in Trump’s toddler-like behavior, but, with the 2020 election fast approaching, the American people can think about whether they want the most powerful office turned into a poorly run political day care facility. Drezner exhorts us to elect a commander-in-chief, not a toddler-in-chief. And along the way, he shows how we must rethink the terrifying powers we have given the presidency.
Since World War II, the story of the trauma hero—the noble white man psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence—has become omnipresent in America’s narratives of war, an imaginary solution to the contradictions of American political hegemony. In Total Mobilization, Roy Scranton cuts through the fog of trauma that obscures World War II, uncovering a lost history and reframing the way we talk about war today.
Considering often overlooked works by James Jones, Wallace Stevens, Martha Gellhorn, and others, alongside cartoons and films, Scranton investigates the role of the hero in industrial wartime, showing how such writers struggled to make sense of problems that continue to plague us today: the limits of American power, the dangers of political polarization, and the conflicts between nationalism and liberalism. By turning our attention to the ways we make war meaningful—and by excavating the politics implicit within the myth of the traumatized hero—Total Mobilization revises the way we understand not only World War II, but all of postwar American culture.
In this forcefully argued book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language draws on evidence from evolutionary biology, genetics, physical anthropology, anatomy, and neuroscience, to provide a framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition.
Philip Lieberman argues forcibly that the widely influential theories of language's development, advanced by Chomskian linguists and cognitive scientists, especially those that postulate a single dedicated language "module," "organ," or "instinct," are inconsistent with principles and findings of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. He argues that the human neural system in its totality is the basis for the human language ability, for it requires the coordination of neural circuits that regulate motor control with memory and higher cognitive functions. Pointing out that articulate speech is a remarkably efficient means of conveying information, Lieberman also highlights the adaptive significance of the human tongue.
Fully human language involves the species-specific anatomy of speech, together with the neural capacity for thought and movement. In Lieberman's iconoclastic Darwinian view, the human language ability is the confluence of a succession of separate evolutionary developments, jury-rigged by natural selection to work together for an evolutionarily unique ability.
“Marvelous. . . . Edmundson’s book offers an extraordinary challenge both to practicing analysts and to a scholarly community which all too uncomplainingly inhabits and reinforces the Freudian paradigm of interpretation. Edmundson reinvents an adventurous and dissident Freud as an antidote to . . . weary psychoanalytic commonplaces.”—Malcolm Bowie, Raritan
“This book takes a distinguished place in the ongoing effort to recontextualize Freud by stressing the literary, rather than the scientific roots and character of his theory.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
Breaking new ground, Trafficked Children in the United States offers a fresh take on what matters most to these young people as they rebuild their lives in America.
From Aeschylus' classic drama The Persians to the hidden tragic themes in The Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. The study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.
Following the most solemn moments in recent American history, comedians have tested the limits of how soon is “too soon” to joke about tragedy. Comics confront the horrifying events and shocking moments that capture national attention and probe the acceptable, or “sayable,” boundaries of expression that shape our cultural memory. In Tragedy Plus Time, Philip Scepanski examines the role of humor, particularly televised comedy, in constructing and policing group identity and memory in the wake of large-scale events.
Tragedy Plus Time is the first comprehensive work to investigate tragedy-driven comedy in the aftermaths of such traumas as the JFK assassination and 9/11, as well as during the administration of Donald Trump. Focusing on the mass publicization of television comedy, Scepanski considers issues of censorship and memory construction in the ways comedians negotiate emotions, politics, war, race, and Islamophobia. Amid the media frenzy and conflicting expressions of grief following a public tragedy, comedians provoke or risk controversy to grapple publicly with national traumas that all Americans are trying to understand for themselves.
Even if you can’t read this with a partner—and I stress that you certainly ought to—you will still be in rich company. There is Shambaraswami, an itinerant magician, hypnotist, and storyteller to whom villagers turn for spells that will bring them wealth or love; José-Custodio de Faria, a Goan priest hypnotizing young and beautiful women in nineteenth-century Parisian salons; James Esdaile, a Scottish physician for the East India Company in Calcutta, experimenting on abject Bengalis with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic; and Lee Siegel, a writer traveling in India to learn all that he can about hypnosis, yoga, past life regressions, colonialism, orientalism, magic spells, and, above all, the power of story. And then there is you: descending through these histories—these tales within tales, trances within trances, dreams within dreams—toward a place where the distinctions between reverie and reality dissolve.
Here the world within the book and that in which the book is read come startlingly together. It’s one of the most creative works we have ever published, a dazzling combination of literary prowess, scholarly erudition, and psychological exploration—all tempered by warm humor and a sharp wit. It is informing, entertaining, and, above all, mesmerizing.
From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.
From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.
Does a knowledge of Latin facilitate the learning of computer programming? Does skill in geometry make it easier to learn music? The issue of the transfer of learning from one domain to another is a classic problem in psychology as well as an educational question of great importance, which this ingenious new book sets out to solve through a theory of transfer based on a comprehensive theory of skill acquisition.
The question was first studied systematically at the turn of the century by the noted psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, who proposed a theory of transfer based on common elements in two different tasks. Since then, psychologists of different theoretical orientations—verbal learning, gestalt, and information processing—have addressed the transfer question with differing and inconclusive results. Mark Singley and John Anderson resurrect Thorndike’s theory of identical elements, but in a broader context and from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Making use of a powerful knowledge-representation language, they recast his elements into units of procedural and declarative knowledge in the ACT* theory of skill acquisition. One skill will transfer to another, they argue, to the extent that it involves the same productions or the same declarative precursors. They show that with production rules, transfer can be localized to specific components—in keeping with Thorndike’s theory—and yet still be abstract and mentalistic.
The findings of this book have important implications for psychology and the improvement of teaching. They will interest cognitive scientists and educational psychologists, as well as computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence and cognitive modeling.
Moving from viruses, vaccines, and copycat murder to gay panics, xenophobia, and psychopaths, Transforming Contagion energetically fuses critical humanities and social science perspectives into a boundary-smashing interdisciplinary collection on contagion. The contributors provocatively suggest contagion to be as full of possibilities for revolution and resistance as it is for the descent into madness, malice, and extensive state control. The infectious practices rooted in politics, film, psychological exchanges, social movements, the classroom, and the circulation of a literary text or meme on social media compellingly reveal patterns that emerge in those attempts to re-route, quarantine, define, or even exacerbate various contagions.
In a book that is bound to ignite controversy, Ruth Leys investigates the history of the concept of trauma. She explores the emergence of multiple personality disorder, Freud's approaches to trauma, medical responses to shellshock and combat fatigue, Sándor Ferenczi's revisions of psychoanalysis, and the mutually reinforcing, often problematic work of certain contemporary neurobiological and postmodernist theorists. Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other.
A powerfully argued work of intellectual history, Trauma will rewrite the terms of future discussion of its subject.
According to the poet Elias Canetti, “All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams.” To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of “wish fulfillment,” and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.
In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers—among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks—to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential “traumas of normal life,” such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.
Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.
Kulick analyzes the various ways travestis modify their bodies, explores the motivations that lead them to choose this particular gendered identity, and examines the complex relationships that they maintain with one another, their boyfriends, and their families. Kulick also looks at how travestis earn their living through prostitution and discusses the reasons prostitution, for most travestis, is a positive and affirmative experience.
Arguing that transgenderism never occurs in a "natural" or arbitrary form, Kulick shows how it is created in specific social contexts and assumes specific social forms. Furthermore, Kulick suggests that travestis—far from deviating from normative gendered expectations—may in fact distill and perfect the messages that give meaning to gender throughout Brazilian society and possibly throughout much of Latin America.
Through Kulick's engaging voice and sharp analysis, this elegantly rendered account is not only a landmark study in its discipline but also a fascinating read for anyone interested in sexuality and gender.
Laurent Joubert (b. 1529) was an important figure in the medical world of the French Renaissance. His monumental Treatise on Laughter provides categories and examples of the laughable. The work describes laughter, its causes and effects, its types and differences. His subdivisions and categories, along with their examples, furnish today's critic and reader with a Renaissance vision of comic commonplaces. It is this vision that may prove to be of great value in analyzing comic literature of the Renaissance.
Creative expression inspired by disease has been criticized as a celebration of victimhood, unmediated personal experience, or just simply bad art. Despite debate, however, memoirs written about illness—particularly AIDS or cancer—have proliferated since the late twentieth century and occupy a highly influential place on the cultural landscape today.
In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts not only recount and interpret symptoms but also describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins this theoretically rigorous analysis by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “White Glasses,” showing how these breast cancer survivors draw on feminist health practices of the 1970s and also anticipate the figure that would appear in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s—the “politicized patient.” She further reveals how narratives written by doctors Abraham Verghese and Rafael Campo about treating people with AIDS can disrupt the doctor–patient hierarchy, and she explores practices of witnessing that emerge in writing by Paul Monette and John Bayley.
Through these records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich demonstrates how language both captures and fails to capture these “scenes of loss” and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure—the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die.
Lisa Diedrich is assistant professor of women’s studies at Stony Brook University.
Although the role of genetics in behavior was widely accepted, these psychiatrists fiercely debated whether heredity had predisposed Guiteau to assassinate Garfield. Rosenberg's account allows us to consider one of the opening rounds in the controversy over the criminal responsibility of the insane, a debate that still rages today.
At a time when many people around the world are living into their tenth decade, the longest longitudinal study of human development ever undertaken offers some welcome news for the new old age: our lives continue to evolve in our later years, and often become more fulfilling than before.
Begun in 1938, the Grant Study of Adult Development charted the physical and emotional health of over 200 men, starting with their undergraduate days. The now-classic Adaptation to Life reported on the men’s lives up to age 55 and helped us understand adult maturation. Now George Vaillant follows the men into their nineties, documenting for the first time what it is like to flourish far beyond conventional retirement.
Reporting on all aspects of male life, including relationships, politics and religion, coping strategies, and alcohol use (its abuse being by far the greatest disruptor of health and happiness for the study’s subjects), Triumphs of Experience shares a number of surprising findings. For example, the people who do well in old age did not necessarily do so well in midlife, and vice versa. While the study confirms that recovery from a lousy childhood is possible, memories of a happy childhood are a lifelong source of strength. Marriages bring much more contentment after age 70, and physical aging after 80 is determined less by heredity than by habits formed prior to age 50. The credit for growing old with grace and vitality, it seems, goes more to ourselves than to our stellar genetic makeup.
Blame society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim--she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility?
This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?
With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency--and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.
The Trouble with Blame clarifies the social cost (quickly becoming so apparent) of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of over-emphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our dire need for accountability and recovery.
If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round—never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, Trusting What You’re Told begins by reminding us of a basic truth: Most of what we know we learned from others.
Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You’re Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler’s ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old’s nuanced stance toward magic: skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God.
We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for information: he only asks for treats.
But as Michael C. Corballis shows in The Truth about Language, it’s time to reconsider those assumptions. Language, he argues, is not the product of some “big bang” 60,000 years ago, but rather the result of a typically slow process of evolution with roots in elements of grammatical language found much farther back in our evolutionary history. Language, Corballis explains, evolved as a way to share thoughts—and, crucially for human development, to connect our own “mental time travel,” our imagining of events and people that are not right in front of us, to that of other people. We share that ability with other animals, but it was the development of language that made it powerful: it led to our ability to imagine other perspectives, to imagine ourselves in the minds of others, a development that, by easing social interaction, proved to be an extraordinary evolutionary advantage.
Even as his thesis challenges such giants as Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould, Corballis writes accessibly and wittily, filling his account with unforgettable anecdotes and fascinating historical examples. The result is a book that’s perfect both for deep engagement and as brilliant fodder for that lightest of all forms of language, cocktail party chatter.
Lying on the couch, the patient must tell all. And yet, as the psychoanalyst well knows, the patient is endlessly unable--unwilling--to speak the truth. This perversity at the heart of psychoanalysis, a fine focus on intimate truths even as the lines between truth and lies are being redrawn, is also at the center of this book of essays by the renowned historian of psychoanalysis John Forrester. Continuing the work begun in Dispatches from the Freud Wars, Truth Games offers a rich philosophical and historical perspective on the mechanics, moral dilemmas, and rippling implications of psychoanalysis.
Lacan observed that the psychoanalyst's patient is, even when lying, operating in the dimension of truth. Beginning with Lacan's reading of Freud's case history of the Rat Man, Forrester pursues the logic and consequences of this assertion through Freud's relationship with Lacan into the general realm of psychoanalysis and out into the larger questions of anthropology, economics, and metaphysics that underpin the practice. His search takes him into the parallels between money and speech through an exploration of the metaphors of circulation, exchange, indebtedness, and trust that so easily glide from one domain to the other.
Original, witty, incisive, these essays provide a new understanding of the uses and abuses and the ultimate significance of truth telling and lying, trust and confidence as they operate in psychoanalysis--and in the intimate world of the self and society that it seeks to know.
Twins Talk is an ethnographic study of identical twins in the United States, a study unique in that it considers what twins have to say about themselves, instead of what researchers have written about them. It presents, in the first person, the grounded and practical experiences of twins as they engage, both individually and together, the “who am I” and “who are we” questions of life. Here, the twins themselves are the stars.
Dona Lee Davis conducted conversational interviews with twenty-two sets of identical twins attending the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, the largest such gathering in the world. Lively and often opinionated, each twin comes through as a whole person who at the same time maintains a special bond that the vast majority of people will never experience.
The study provides a distinctive and enlightening insider’s challenge to the nature/nurture debates that dominate contemporary research on twins. The author, herself an identical twin, draws on aspects of her own life to inform her analysis of the data throughout the text. Each chapter addresses a different theme from multiple viewpoints, including those of popular science writers, scientific researchers, and singletons, as well as those of the twins themselves.
Paul McCarthy
"Though madness has been a consistent topic in considerations of Melville's work, this is the first full-scale treatment of the subject. It is in a sense, then, a pioneering work that will no doubt receive widespread attention."
—William B. Dillingham
How does being male or female shape us? And what, aside from obvious anatomical differences, does being male or female mean? In this book, the distinguished psychologist Eleanor Maccoby explores how individuals express their sexual identity at successive periods of their lives. A book about sex in the broadest sense, The Two Sexes seeks to tell us how our development from infancy through adolescence and into adulthood is affected by gender.
Chief among Maccoby’s contentions is that gender differences appear primarily in group, or social, contexts. In childhood, boys and girls tend to gravitate toward others of their own sex. The Two Sexes examines why this segregation occurs and how boys’ groups and girls’ groups develop distinct cultures with different agendas. Deploying evidence from her own research and studies by many other scholars, Maccoby identifies a complex combination of biological, cognitive, and social factors that contribute to gender segregation and group differentiation.
A major finding of The Two Sexes is that these childhood experiences in same-sex groups profoundly influence how members of the two sexes relate to one another in adulthood—as lovers, coworkers, and parents. Maccoby shows how, in constructing these adult relationships, men and women utilize old elements from their childhood experiences as well as new ones arising from different adult agendas. Finally, she considers social changes in gender roles in light of her discoveries about the constraints and opportunities implicit in the same-sex and cross-sex relationships of childhood.
Tychomancy—meaning “the divination of chances”—presents a set of rules for inferring the physical probabilities of outcomes from the causal or dynamic properties of the systems that produce them. Probabilities revealed by the rules are wide-ranging: they include the probability of getting a 5 on a die roll, the probability distributions found in statistical physics, and the probabilities that underlie many prima facie judgments about fitness in evolutionary biology.
Michael Strevens makes three claims about the rules. First, they are reliable. Second, they are known, though not fully consciously, to all human beings: they constitute a key part of the physical intuition that allows us to navigate around the world safely in the absence of formal scientific knowledge. Third, they have played a crucial but unrecognized role in several major scientific innovations.
A large part of Tychomancy is devoted to this historical role for probability inference rules. Strevens first analyzes James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary, apparently a priori, deduction of the molecular velocity distribution in gases, which launched statistical physics. Maxwell did not derive his distribution from logic alone, Strevens proposes, but rather from probabilistic knowledge common to all human beings, even infants as young as six months old. Strevens then turns to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the statistics of measurement, and the creation of models of complex systems, contending in each case that these elements of science could not have emerged when or how they did without the ability to “eyeball” the values of physical probabilities.
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