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Part cultural history, part sociological critique, and part literary performance, Panic Diaries explores the technological and social construction of individual and collective panic. Jackie Orr looks at instances of panic and its “cures” in the twentieth-century United States: from the mass hysteria following the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to an individual woman swallowing a pill to control the “panic disorder” officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Against a backdrop of Cold War anxieties over atomic attack, Orr highlights the entanglements of knowledge and power in efforts to reconceive panic and its prevention as problems in communication and information feedback. Throughout, she reveals the shifting techniques of power and social engineering underlying the ways that scientific and social scientific discourses—including crowd psychology, Cold War cybernetics, and contemporary psychiatry—have rendered panic an object of technoscientific management.

Orr, who has experienced panic attacks herself, kept a diary of her participation as a research subject in clinical trials for the Upjohn Company’s anti-anxiety drug Xanax. This “panic diary” grounds her study and suggests the complexity of her desire to track the diffusion and regulation of panic in U.S. society. Orr’s historical research, theoretical reflections, and biographical narrative combine in this remarkable and compelling genealogy, which documents the manipulation of panic by the media, the social sciences and psychiatry, the U.S. military and government, and transnational drug companies.

This fresh exploration of the utility of “person schemas” for understanding interpersonal
behavior and intrapsychic conflict brings together psychoanalytic researchers, social learning
theorists, and cognitive scientists. The contributors show that a fuller conceptualization of
person schemas can begin to close the gap between psychodynamic and cognitive science
research, providing new methods for understanding disorders of personality.

“There are many strengths in this volume beyond the clear presentation of the person schema
as a concept linking cognitive and psychodynamic perspectives. . . . Students will have an
opportunity for comparison of perspectives while those working in the field will have an
opportunity to follow the shift from concept to method to case application to theoretical
context for understanding personality change.”—Bertram J. Cohler, University of Chicago

Contributors are Lorna Smith Benjamin, Paul Crits-Christoph, Randolph L. Cunningham, Roy
D'Andrade, Amy Demorest, Mary Ewert, Scott H. Friedman, Frances J. Friedrich, Jess H.
Ghannam, Dianna Hartley, Mardi J. Horowitz, John F. Kihlstrom, Peter H. Knapp, Lester
Luborsky, David Mark, Thomas V. Merluzzi, Stephen E. Palmer, Carol Popp, Peter Salovey,
Pamela Schaffler, Jerome L. Singer, Charles H. Stinson, and Sandra L. Tunis.

The concept of stress pervades modern society, with relief from it promised on everything from vitamin to vacation packages. Yet there exists no generally accepted classification of stressful experience, nor is the concept itself universally considered a valid subject for research.

This authoritative work is the first to analyze critically the entire range of research and theory on stress in animals and humans, from the earliest studies in the 1930s up to the present day. Herbert Weiner not only documents the many empirical and conceptual advances of recent years, but also supplies a new working definition and classification of stressful experience. He describes the integrated, organismic responses to stressful environmental changes, tasks, and challenges in terms of functional adaptation: the failure of these responses results in injury, ill-health, disease, and death. To examine the coordination between behavior and bodily functions, Weiner reviews current knowledge on how stressful experiences also alter biobehavioral rhythms.

Providing a useful, integrative concept of stress rooted in an understanding of the organism as an interactive communication system composed of many subsystems, Perturbing the Organism will interest a wide range of clinicians and researchers throughout the medical and behavioral sciences.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Mental Health and Development

First published in 1930, this classic study of personality types remains vital for the understanding of contemporary public figures. Lasswell's pioneering application of the concepts of clinical psychology to the understanding of powerbrokers in politics, business, and even the church offers insights into the careers of leaders as diverse as Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon.