THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.

This classic psychological case study focuses on one talkative child’s emerging ability to use language, her capacity for understanding, for imagining, and for making inferences and solving problems. In wide-ranging essays, scholars offer multifaceted linguistic and psychological analyses of two-year-old Emily’s bedtime conversations with her parents and pre-sleep monologues, taped over a fifteen-month period. In a foreword written for this new edition, Emily, now an adult, reflects on the experience of having been a research subject without knowing it.

This landmark work by George L. Mosse, first published in 1985, examines the history of sexuality through the lens of bourgeois respectability and nationalism. Using a daring breadth of German and English sources, Nationalism and Sexuality pioneered the use of gender stereotypes as a methodology for studying the history of sexuality in mainstream European history. Mosse’s innovative inquiries on gender remain central to discussions about modern constructions of national belonging and the workings of the state. This edition of Mosse’s classic volume includes a new critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts, whose books include What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France.

When The Natural History of Alcoholism was first published in 1983, it was acclaimed in the press as the single most important contribution to the literature on alcoholism since the first edition of Alcoholic Anonymous’s Big Book. George Vaillant took on the crucial questions of whether alcoholism is a symptom or a disease, whether it is progressive, whether alcoholics differ from others before the onset of their alcoholism, and whether alcoholics can safely drink. Based on an evaluation of more than 600 individuals followed for over forty years, Vaillant’s monumental study offered new and authoritative answers to all of these questions.

In this updated version of his classic book, Vaillant returns to the same subjects with the perspective gained from fifteen years of further follow-up. Alcoholics who had been studied to age 50 in the earlier book have now reached age 65 and beyond, and Vaillant reassesses what we know about alcoholism in light of both their experiences and the many new studies of the disease by other researchers. The result is a sharper focus on the nature and course of this devastating disorder as well as a sounder foundation for the assessment of various treatments.

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, American Psychological Association
Winner of a PROSE Award, Association of American Publishers
Shortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book Award
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

A Natural History of Human Morality offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and human children, Michael Tomasello reconstructs how early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species.

“Tomasello is convincing, above all, because he has run many of the relevant studies (on chimps, bonobos and children) himself. He concludes by emphasizing the powerful influence of broad cultural groups on modern humans… Tomasello also makes an endearing guide, appearing happily amazed that morality exists at all.”
—Michael Bond, New Scientist

“Most evolutionary theories picture humans as amoral ‘monads’ motivated by self-interest. Tomasello presents an innovative and well-researched, hypothesized natural history of two key evolutionary steps leading to full-blown morality.”
—S. A. Mason, Choice

A Wall Street Journal Favorite Read of the Year
A Guardian Top Science Book of the Year

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.

“Michael Tomasello is one of the few psychologists to have conducted intensive research on both human children and chimpanzees, and A Natural History of Human Thinking reflects not only the insights enabled by such cross-species comparisons but also the wisdom of a researcher who appreciates the need for asking questions whose answers generate biological insight. His book helps us to understand the differences, as well as the similarities, between human brains and other brains.”
—David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal

Traditional quilts serve many purposes over the course of a useful life. Beginning as a beautiful bed covering, a quilt may later function as a ground cover at picnics until years of wear relegate it to someone's ragbag for scrap uses.

Observing this life cycle led authors John Forrest and Deborah Blincoe to the idea that quilts, like living things, have a natural history that can be studied scientifically. They explore that natural history through an examination of the taxonomy, morphology, behavior, and ecology of quilts in their native environment—the homes of humans who make, use, keep, and bestow them.

The taxonomy proposed by Forrest and Blincoe is rooted in the mechanics of replicating quilts so that it can be used to understand evolutionary and genetic relationships between quilt types. The morphology section anatomizes normal and abnormal physical features of quilts, while the section on conception and birth in the life cycle discusses how the underlying processes of replication intersect with environmental factors to produce tangible objects.

This methodology is applicable to many kinds of crafts and will be of wide interest to students of folklore, anthropology, and art history. Case studies of traditional quilts and their makers in the Catskills and Appalachia add a warm, human dimension to the book.

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year

A leading expert in animal behavior takes us into the wild to better understand and manage our fears.

Fear, honed by millions of years of natural selection, kept our ancestors alive. Whether by slithering away, curling up in a ball, or standing still in the presence of a predator, humans and other animals have evolved complex behaviors in order to survive the hazards the world presents. But, despite our evolutionary endurance, we still have much to learn about how to manage our response to danger.

For more than thirty years, Daniel Blumstein has been studying animals’ fear responses. His observations lead to a firm conclusion: fear preserves security, but at great cost. A foraging flock of birds expends valuable energy by quickly taking flight when a raptor appears. And though the birds might successfully escape, they leave their food source behind. Giant clams protect their valuable tissue by retracting their mantles and closing their shells when a shadow passes overhead, but then they are unable to photosynthesize, losing the capacity to grow. Among humans, fear is often an understandable and justifiable response to sources of threat, but it can exact a high toll on health and productivity.

Delving into the evolutionary origins and ecological contexts of fear across species, The Nature of Fear considers what we can learn from our fellow animals—from successes and failures. By observing how animals leverage alarm to their advantage, we can develop new strategies for facing risks without panic.

Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism Volume III: Psy Fi Laurence A. Rickels Foreword by Benjamin Bennett A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable revisionary work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century itself. Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Case of California (2001), and the edited volume Acting Out in Groups (1999).

Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism Volume III: Psy Fi Laurence A. Rickels Foreword by Benjamin Bennett A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable revisionary work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century itself. Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Case of California (2001), and the edited volume Acting Out in Groups (1999).

Volume I: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War Volume II: Crypto-Fetishism Volume III: Psy Fi Laurence A. Rickels Foreword by Benjamin Bennett A revolutionary new approach to the place of Nazi ideology in twentieth-century thought. Psychoanalysis was a symptom of everything the Nazis reviled: an intellectual assault on Kultur largely perpetrated by Jews. It was also, as this remarkable revisionary work shows, an inescapable symptom of modernity, practiced, transformed, and perpetuated by and within the Nazi regime. A sweeping, magisterial work by one of the most incisive and interesting scholars of modern philosophy, theory, and culture, Nazi Psychoanalysis studies the breadth of this phenomenon in order to clarify and deepen our understanding not only of psychoanalysis but of the twentieth century itself. Tracing the intersections of psychoanalysis and Nazism, Laurence A. Rickels discovers startling conjunctions and continuities in writers as diverse as Adler and Adorno, Kafka and Goethe, Lacan, H. Rider Haggard, and Heidegger, and in works as different as Der Golem, Civilization and Its Discontents, Frankenstein, Faust, and Brave New World. In a richly allusive style, he writes of psychoanalysis in multifarious incarnations, of the concept and actual history of "insurance," of propaganda in theory and practice, of psychological warfare, Walt Disney, and the Frankfurt School debates-a dizzying tour of the twentieth century that helps us see how the "corridor wars" that arise in the course of theoretical, clinical, social, political, and cultural attempts to describe the human psyche are related to the world wars of the century in an intimate and infinitely complicated manner. Though some have used its appropriation by the Nazis to brand psychoanalysis with the political odium of fascism, Rickels instead finds an uncanny convergence-one that suggests far-reaching possibilities for both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. His work, with its enormous intellectual and historical span, makes a persuasive argument that no element of modernity-not psychoanalysis any more than Marxism or deconstruction, cultural revolutions or technological advances-can be adequately understood without a thorough consideration of its Nazi component. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Case of California (2001), and the edited volume Acting Out in Groups (1999). In volume I, Rickels uses hundreds of political and scientific articles and books to show the emergence of the concept of psychological warfare beginning in World War I.

This masterly book substantially extends Howard Raiffa's earlier classic, The Art and Science of Negotiation. It does so by incorporating three additional supporting strands of inquiry: individual decision analysis, judgmental decision making, and game theory. Each strand is introduced and used in analyzing negotiations.

The book starts by considering how analytically minded parties can generate joint gains and distribute them equitably by negotiating with full, open, truthful exchanges. The book then examines models that disengage step by step from that ideal. It also shows how a neutral outsider (intervenor) can help all negotiators by providing joint, neutral analysis of their problem.

Although analytical in its approach--building from simple hypothetical examples--the book can be understood by those with only a high school background in mathematics. It therefore will have a broad relevance for both the theory and practice of negotiation analysis as it is applied to disputes that range from those between family members, business partners, and business competitors to those involving labor and management, environmentalists and developers, and nations.

Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.

Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.

Neural plasticity--the brain's ability to change in response to normal developmental processes, experience, and injury--is a critically important phenomenon for both neuroscience and psychology. Increasing evidence about the extent of plasticity--long past the supposedly critical first three years--has recently emerged. Neural Plasticity offers the first succinct and lucid integration of this research and its implications.

Pointing out the negative and the positive consequences of plasticity, Peter Huttenlocher describes plasticity in children and adults (in normal aging and in response to trauma), in sensory systems, the motor cortex, higher cortical functions, and language development, proceeding system by system, and paying particular attention to the cerebral cortex. One of the book's strengths is its range of references, not only to studies on human subjects but to the experimental study of animal models as well. This book will be a unique contribution to research and to the literature on clinical neuroscience.

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The ‘tensive motifs’ of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of ‘Neurofilmology’—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

In the summer of 1963, anthropologist Jean Briggs journeyed to the Canadian Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) to begin a seventeen-month field study of the Utku, a small group of Inuit First Nations people who live at the mouth of the Back River, northwest of Hudson Bay. Living with a family as their “adopted” daughter—sharing their iglu during the winter and pitching her tent next to theirs in the summer—Briggs observed the emotional patterns of the Utku in the context of their daily life.

In this perceptive and highly enjoyable volume the author presents a behavioral description of the Utku through a series of vignettes of individuals interacting with members of their family and with their neighbors. Finding herself at times the object of instruction, she describes the training of the child toward achievement of the proper adult personality and the handling of deviations from this desired behavior.

"[Simon] deals seriously and perceptively with lives almost never granted such respect--those of the 'spinster,' the 'old maid.' ...There is also a particular ironic energy." --The Nation "Nothing is more ridiculous than someone who says, upon learning that I never got married, ‘Oh, you would like my Aunt _____ ! She never got married either. You two would have a lot in common.' "--from an interview, August 1984. In this timely and provocative study, Barbara Levy Simon interviews fifty American women, born between 1884 and 1918 who were never married, and examines their emphatic refusal to be "yoked by wifing," as one woman expressed it. A spirit of independence pervades these compelling self-portraits as the women describe the day-to-day activities, options and adaptations, as well as the stigma that shaped lives that defied the spinster stereotype. Simon explains: "I have written this book about them because I want others to learn, as I have, about the diversity of their experiences and perspectives. It is only by immersion in this variety that one can begin to comprehend the discrepancy between popular notions of ‘old maids' and the actualities of single women's daily lives.... Though women who have never married have often been judged, they have seldom been studied." With care and empathy, the author presents women who lived at a time when not being married and being financially independent were considered deviant. From a variety of ethnic, religious, educational, and social groups, and ranging in age from sixty-six to one hundred and one years old, these women discuss the work they have loved or hated and their relations with family and friends. The autobiographical reflections provide insights about the symbolic and material worlds of never-married women and comparisons to the lives of single career women today. In the 1980s, a significantly higher proportion of American women are foregoing marriage than at any point in the past one hundred years. Simon confronts head-on the image of the passive and unhappy old maid, presenting instead a group of independent and self-actualizing women who, in many cases, chose to remain single. "With women choosing to be single in greater numbers than at any other time in this century, a study of single women is most timely.... Although considered deviant by the greater society, these women all manifest a feisty, independent spirit that defies conventional stereotypes of ‘old maids' or ‘spinsters.‘ ... Maybe you should give your mother a copy of this book the next time she asks." --New Directions for Women "An important work on a segment of the female population that has remained single for at least six decades in a society that expected its women to marry and bear children [Simon] evaluates the actualities of these women's lives versus popular images and stereotypes..." --Choice "By offering concrete examples of how the nuclear family is oppressive to those who stand outside of it, Never Married Women breathes life into critiques of the family articulated by...other feminist theorists. And by focusing on the lives of elderly single women, Simon aptly illustrates the injustice of our over reliance on the family--instead of the state--to care for the dependent elderly." --Contemporary Sociology "This book is a paean to women's resilience, adaptability, and courage to live with the consequences of their own decisions." --Readings: A Journal of Reviews and Commentary in Mental Health

Gay, straight, bisexual: how much does sexual orientation matter to a teenager’s mental health or sense of identity? In this down-to-earth book, filled with the voices of young people speaking for themselves, Ritch Savin-Williams argues that the standard image of gay youth presented by mental health researchers—as depressed, isolated, drug-dependent, even suicidal—may have been exaggerated even twenty years ago, and is far from accurate today.

The New Gay Teenager gives us a refreshing and frequently controversial introduction to confident, competent, upbeat teenagers with same-sex desires, who worry more about the chemistry test or their curfew than they do about their sexuality. What does “gay” mean, when some adolescents who have had sexual encounters with those of their own sex don’t consider themselves gay, when some who consider themselves gay have had sex with the opposite sex, and when many have never had sex at all? What counts as “having sex,” anyway? Teenagers (unlike social science researchers) are not especially interested in neatly categorizing their sexual orientation.

In fact, Savin-Williams learns, teenagers may think a lot about sex, but they don’t think that sexuality is the most important thing about them. And adults, he advises, shouldn’t think so either.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most elusive thinkers in the philosophical tradition. His highly unusual style and insistence on what remains hidden or unsaid in his writing make pinning him to a particular position tricky. Nonetheless, certain readings of his work have become standard and influential. In this major new interpretation of Nietzsche’s work, Robert B. Pippin challenges various traditional views of Nietzsche, taking him at his word when he says that his writing can best be understood as a kind of psychology.

Pippin traces this idea of Nietzsche as a psychologist to his admiration for the French moralists: La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Stendhal, and especially Montaigne. In distinction from philosophers, Pippin shows, these writers avoided grand metaphysical theories in favor of reflections on life as lived and experienced. Aligning himself with this project, Nietzsche sought to make psychology “the queen of the sciences” and the “path to the fundamental problems.” Pippin contends that Nietzsche’s singular prose was an essential part of this goal, and so he organizes the book around four of Nietzsche’s most important images and metaphors: that truth could be a woman, that a science could be gay, that God could have died, and that an agent is as much one with his act as lightning is with its flash.

Expanded from a series of lectures Pippin delivered at the Collège de France, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy offers a brilliant, novel, and accessible reading of this seminal thinker.

Snake charmers, bards, acrobats, magicians, trainers of performing animals, and other nomadic artisans and entertainers have been a colorful and enduring element in societies throughout the world. Their flexible social system, based on highly specialized individual skills and spatial mobility, contrasts sharply with the more rigid social system of sedentary peasants and traditional urban dwellers. Joseph Berland brings into focus the ethnographic and psychological differences between nomadic and sedentary groups by examining how the experiences of South Asian gypsies and their urban counterparts contribute to basic perceptual habits and skills.

No Five Fingers Are Alike, based on three years of participant research among rural Pakistani groups, provides the first detailed description in print of Asian gypsies. By applying methods of anthropological observation as well as psychological experimentation, Berland develops a theory about the relationship between social experience and mental growth. He suggests that there are certain social conditions under which mental growth can be accelerated. His work promises to stand as an important contribution to the cross-cultural literature on cognitive development.

How researchers understood the atomic bomb’s effects on the human psyche before the recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
 
In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts—by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists—to tackle the complex ways in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. A trans-Pacific research network emerged that produced massive amounts of data about the dropping of the bomb and subsequent nuclear tests in and around the Pacific rim.
 
Ran Zwigenberg traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims. He explores how the bomb’s psychological impact on survivors was understood before we had the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, psychological and psychiatric research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rarely referred to trauma or similar categories. Instead, institutional and political constraints—most notably the psychological sciences’ entanglement with Cold War science—led researchers to concentrate on short-term damage and somatic reactions or even, in some cases, on denial of victims’ suffering. As a result, very few doctors tried to ameliorate suffering.
 
But, Zwigenberg argues, it was not only that doctors “failed” to issue the right diagnosis; the victims’ experiences also did not necessarily conform to our contemporary expectations. As he shows, the category of trauma should not be used uncritically in a non-Western context. Consequently, this book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore how suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD was a category of analysis.

“A fascinating book.”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

A Smithsonian Best Science Book of the Year
Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Language & Linguistics

Carved into our past and woven into our present, numbers shape our perceptions of the world far more than we think. In this sweeping account of how the invention of numbers sparked a revolution in human thought and culture, Caleb Everett draws on new discoveries in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics to reveal the many things made possible by numbers, from the concept of time to writing, agriculture, and commerce.

Numbers are a tool, like the wheel, developed and refined over millennia. They allow us to grasp quantities precisely, but recent research confirms that they are not innate—and without numbers, we could not fully grasp quantities greater than three. Everett considers the number systems that have developed in different societies as he shares insights from his fascinating work with indigenous Amazonians.

“This is bold, heady stuff… The breadth of research Everett covers is impressive, and allows him to develop a narrative that is both global and compelling… Numbers is eye-opening, even eye-popping.”
—New Scientist

“A powerful and convincing case for Everett’s main thesis: that numbers are neither natural nor innate to humans.”
—Wall Street Journal