1325 books match the query 'Psychology' and 295 start with t

cover of TV Violence and the Child: Evolution and Fate of the Surgeon General's Report

TV Violence and the Child

Evolution and Fate of the Surgeon General's Report

Douglass Cater

Russell Sage Foundation, 1975

In 1969, Senator John Pastore requested that the Surgeon General appoint a committee to conduct an inquiry into television violence and its effect on children. When the Surgeon General's report was finally released in 1972—after a three-year inquiry and a cost of over $1.8 million—it angered and confused a number of critics, including politicians, the broadcast industry, many of the social scientists who had helped carry out the research, and the public. While the final consequences of the Report may not be played out for years to come, TV Violence and the Child presents a fascinating study of the Surgeon General's quest and, in effect, the process by which social science is recruited and its findings made relevant to public policy. In addition to dealing with television as an object of concern, the authors also consider the government's effectiveness when dealing with social objectives and the influence of citizen action on our communication systems. Their overwhelming conclusion is that the nation's institutions are ill-equipped for recruiting expert talent, providing clear findings, and carrying out objectives in this area of delicate human concern.
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cover of Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis

Taboo Subjects

Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis

Gwen Bergner

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

In American literature, a traumatic scene of racial and sexual awakening - frequently involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing - often precipitates a character's "discovery" of racial identity. Similarly, in the annals of psychoanalysis, notions of self and sexual identity often arise from visual trauma such as the mirror stage and primal scene. Noting this parallel between specular births of racial and sexual subjectivity, Gwen Bergner uses a comparative analysis of psychoanalytic theory and American literature to develop a theory of racialization - the process through which individuals assume an identity as black or white. Examining the primal scenes of double consciousness in works by Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, among others, alongside the formative visual traumas of psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Freud, Taboo Subjects reveals how literature disrupts psychoanalysis's conventional models of race and gender identification, forcing a reconfiguration of many foundational psychoanalytic texts. And from psychoanalysis Bergner derives a critical vocabulary for theorizing racialization as it intersects with sex and gender, for both black and white Americans.
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cover of Taking Society's Measure: A Personal History of Survey Research

Taking Society's Measure

A Personal History of Survey Research

Herbert Hyman

Russell Sage Foundation, 1991

How are we, as members of a society, informed of conditions that affect our social welfare? How does the government register the impact of its actions on its citizens? The turbulent 1930s saw the emergence of sample survey research as an increasingly valuable technique of social inquiry. Perhaps no one championed this nascent discipline as vigorously as Herbert Hyman, one of those pioneering investigators whose talents were so closely associated with the rapid growth of survey research that their professional careers and reputations became virtually indistinguishable from the field itself. Hyman's personal account is a remarkable contribution to the history and sociology of social research. His experiences with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of War Information, the U.S. Bombing Surveys of Germany and Japan, the National Opinion Research Center, and the Bureau of Applied Social Research are all documented with fascinating insight into the critical events and prominent individuals that shaped the field of survey research between the late 1930s and the late 1950s.
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cover of Talk about Sex: How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right

Talk about Sex

How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right

Janice M. Irvine

Temple University Press, 2023

Praise for Talk about Sex

“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.
 
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cover of Talk of Love: How Culture Matters

Talk of Love

How Culture Matters

Ann Swidler

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.
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cover of Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing

Talking Therapy

Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing

Kylie Smith

Rutgers University Press, 2020

First place in the 2020 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in History and Public Policy​
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.
 
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cover of Teachers and Testing

Teachers and Testing

David A. Goslin

Russell Sage Foundation, 1967

Discusses the uses and abuses of intelligence testing in our educational systems. Dr. Goslin examines teachers' opinions and practices with regard to tests and finds considerable discrepancies between attitude and behavior. He points to the need for formulation of school policies that clearly specify what role teachers are to play in the measurement process. Dr. Goslin makes several policy recommendations, stressing the idea that the measuring process must take into account many aspects of a child's background and characteristics, and must guard against premature labeling or over-categorization.
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cover of Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars

Teenage Dreams

Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars

Charlie Jeffries

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Utilizing a breadth of archival sources from activists, artists, and policymakers, Teenage Dreams examines the race- and class-inflected battles over adolescent women’s sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Charlie Jeffries finds that most adults in this period hesitated to advocate for adolescent sexual and reproductive rights, revealing a new culture war altogether--one between adults of various political stripes in the cultural mainstream who prioritized the desire to delay girlhood sexual experience at all costs, and adults who remained culturally underground in their support for teenagers’ access to frank sexual information, and who would dare to advocate for this in public. The book tells the story of how the latter group of adults fought alongside teenagers themselves, who constituted a large and increasingly visible part of this activism. The history of the debates over teenage sexual behavior reveals unexpected alliances in American political battles, and sheds new light on the resurgence of the right in the US in recent years.
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cover of Tell Your Life Story: Creating Dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians

Tell Your Life Story

Creating Dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians

Dan Bar-On

Central European University Press, 2006

Describes Dan Bar-On's method of using storytelling as both a qualitative biographical research method and as an intervention, to bring people from opposite sides of an abyss to a dialogue. Such work needs slow pace and long-term commitment, with a special combination of a scientific rigorous analysis with a sensitive approach toward the people one approaches.
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cover of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

Telling Complexions

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

Mary Ann O Farrell

Duke University Press, 1997

In Telling Complexions Mary Ann O’Farrell explores the frequent use of "the blush" in Victorian novels as a sign of characters’ inner emotions and desires. Through lively and textured readings of works by such writers as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, O’Farrell illuminates literature’s relation to the body and the body’s place in culture. In the process, she plots a trajectory for the nineteenth-century novel’s shift from the practices of manners to the mode of self-consciousness.
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.
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cover of Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire

Telling Incest

Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire

Janice Doane and Devon Hodges

University of Michigan Press, 2001

In the last decade, women's accounts of father-daughter incest have prompted much public debate. Are these accounts true? Are they false? Telling Incest, however, asks a different question: what does a believable incest story sound like and why?
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.
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cover of The "Goldhagen Effect": History, Memory, Nazism--Facing the German Past

The "Goldhagen Effect"

History, Memory, Nazism--Facing the German Past

Geoff Eley, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Stepping back from the immediate controversy surrounding the merits and shortcomings of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, this edited volume intervenes in the continuing discussion by exploring aspects of the public's reception to Goldhagen's book--what the authors call the "Goldhagen Effect." The first essay, by Omer Bartov, examines the extent to which the book's reception in the United States, Germany, France, and Israel reflected differing attitudes toward the Holocaust, thereby highlighting the role that the genocide of Jews has come to play in a variety of national contexts. Atina Grossman then analyzes the "Goldhagen Effect" in Germany, looking at Germans' shifting reactions to the American and German editions of the book and the accompanying publicity tour. Grossman considers these responses in the broader context of Germans' ambivalent relationship to their history. Next, Pieter Judson turns his attention to the reception to Hitler's Willing Executioners in Austria, exploring why most Austrians--particularly those on the far right--calmly accepted Goldhagen's conclusions. Finally, Jane Caplan describes some of the ways in which Goldhagen's book resonates with contemporary American sensibilities and suggests why the book experienced such popular success in America.The revised and expanded essays in this volume were originally presented in a symposium organized by Kathleen Canning for the University of Michigan Center for European Studies to discuss the response of academia and the broader intellectual public to Goldhagen's work. The "Goldhagen Effect" will be of interest to historians and others in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to the informed general reader.
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cover of The 360 Librarian: A Framework for Integrating Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence, and Critical Reflection in the Workplace

The 360 Librarian

A Framework for Integrating Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence, and Critical Reflection in the Workplace

Tammi M. Owens

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2019

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cover of The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis

The Ability to Mourn

Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis

Peter Homans

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Peter Homans offers a new understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis and relates the psychoanalytic project as a whole to the sweep of Western culture, past and present. He argues that Freud's fundamental goal was the interpretation of culture and that, therefore, psychoanalysis is fundamentally a humanistic social science. To establish this claim, Homans looks back at Freud's self-analysis in light of the crucial years from 1906 to 1914 when the psychoanalytic movement was formed and shows how these experiences culminated in Freud's cultural texts. By exploring the "culture of psychoanalysis," Homans seeks a better understanding of what a "psychoanalysis of culture" might be.

Psychoanalysis, Homans shows, originated as a creative response to the withering away of traditional communities and their symbols in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The loss of these attachments played a crucial role in the lives of the founders of psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud but also Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Ernest Jones. The personal, political, and religious losses that these figures experienced, the introspection that followed, and the psychological discovery that resulted are what Homans calls "the ability to mourn."

Homans expands this historical analysis to construct a general model of psychological discovery: the loss of shared ideals and symbols can produce a deeper sense of self (psychological structure-building, or individuation) and can then lead to the creation of new forms of meaning and self-understanding. He shows how Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts began to extend their introspection outward, reinterpreting the meanings of Western art, history, and religion. In conclusion, Homans evaluates Freud's theory of culture and discusses the role that psychoanalysis might play in social and cultural criticism.

Throughout the book, Homans makes use of the many histories, biographies, and psychobiographies that have been written about the origins of psychoanalysis, drawing them into a comprehensive sociocultural model. Rich in insights and highly original in approach, this work will interest psychoanalysts and students of Freud, sociologists concerned with modernity and psychoanalysis, and cultural critics in the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and social history.
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cover of The Accidental Teacher: Life Lessons from My Silent Son

The Accidental Teacher

Life Lessons from My Silent Son

Annie Lubliner Lehmann

University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Jonah Lehmann is an accidental teacher of others, including his family and friends. This personal and touching account of Jonah's life is enlightening, especially to those coming to terms with similar challenges with autism and other cognitive disabilities. It was written with love to support research on autism, and I recommend it to anyone and everyone touched by those of us who are different."
---Patricia E. Kefalas Dudek, Legal Advocate for People with Disabilities

"I have never read a book about a disabled person that caught me from page one. I could not put this one down. Lehmann offers a profound perspective on living with the reality of a severely disabled child. This book will be required reading for students who take my class in Special Education Administration."
---Frances LaPlante-Sosnowsky, Associate Professor of Education at Wayne State University

"A story of the astonishing power of human love and family triumph over hardship. Lehmann's story, engaging and at times both heartbreaking and joyful, offers an intimate view of one mother's journey as she works with professionals and a blur of caregivers to assist the ever-changing needs of her son. I highly recommend it to seasoned professionals in the field of autism and students preparing for careers in special education."
---Janet E. Graetz, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Child Studies at Oakland University

A child teaches without intending to . . .
Having severe autism does not stop Annie Lehmann's son Jonah from teaching her some of life's most valuable lessons. The Accidental Teacher, a heartfelt memoir about self-discovery rather than illness, uses insight and humor to weave a tale rich with kitchen-table wisdom. It explains the realities of life with a largely nonverbal son and explores the frustrations and triumphs of the Lehmann family as Jonah grew into a young adult. This book is a must-read for anyone who has been personally touched by a major life challenge.

Annie Lubliner Lehmann, a freelance writer for more than twenty-five years, has published articles in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times and Detroit Free Press. She resides in Michigan with her husband and two of her three children. Her eldest son, who inspired this memoir, is now a young adult with autism who lives in a supervised home.

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cover of The Adolescent Years: Social Influences and Educational Challenges

The Adolescent Years

Social Influences and Educational Challenges

Edited by Kathryn Borman and Barbara Schneider

University of Chicago Press, 1998

This volume considers adolescence in broad terms, as a "dynamic of social construction." The contributors examine the changes in various social contexts in which teenagers live—family, school, community institutions, peer groups, workplace—and show how these factors can significantly affect the progress of social and cognitive developmental tasks.
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cover of The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression

The Aesthetics of Disengagement

Contemporary Art and Depression

Christine Ross

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than half of the world's population will have a depressive disorder at some point in their lifetimes. In The Aesthetics of Disengagement Christine Ross shows how contemporary art is a powerful yet largely unacknowledged player in the articulation of depression in Western culture, both adopting and challenging scientific definitions of the condition. Ross explores the ways in which contemporary art performs the detached aesthetics of depression, exposing the viewer's loss of connection and ultimately redefining the function of the image. Ross examines the works of Ugo Rondinone, Rosemarie Trockel, Ken Lum, John Pilson, Liza May Post, Vanessa Beecroft, and Douglas Gordon, articulating how their art conveys depression's subjectivity and addresses a depressed spectator whose memory and perceptual faculties are impaired. Drawing from the fields of psychoanalysis as well as psychiatry, Ross demonstrates the ways in which a body of art appropriates a symptomatic language of depression to enact disengagement - marked by withdrawl, radical protection of the self from the other, distancing signals, isolation, communication ruptures, and perceptual insufficiency. Most important, Ross reveals the ways in which art transforms disengagement into a visual strategy of disclosure, a means of reaching the viewer, and how in this way contemporary art puts forth a new understanding of depression.
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cover of The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art

Mark Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2018

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn’t be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment.

This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.
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cover of The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior

The Affect Effect

Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior

Edited by W. Russell Neuman, George E. Marcus, Michael MacKuen, and Ann N. Crigler

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in our understanding of political behavior, The Affect Effect fills the void by providing a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead.

In sixteen seamlessly integrated essays, thirty top scholars approach this topic from a broad array of angles that address four major themes. The first section outlines the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of emotion in politics, while the second focuses on how emotions function within and among individuals. The final two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself. Opening up new paths of inquiry in an exciting new field, this volume will appeal not only to scholars of American politics and political behavior, but also to anyone interested in political psychology and sociology.
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cover of The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion

The Affect Lab

The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion

Grant Bollmer

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Examines how our understanding of emotion is shaped by the devices we use to measure it

 

Since the late nineteenth century, psychologists have used technological forms of media to measure and analyze emotion. In The Affect Lab, Grant Bollmer examines the use of measurement tools such as electrical shocks, photography, video, and the electroencephalograph to argue that research on emotions has confused the physiology of emotion with the tools that define its inscription. 

 

Bollmer shows that the psychological definitions of emotion have long been directly shaped by the physical qualities of the devices used in laboratory research. To investigate these devices, The Affect Lab examines four technologies related to the history of psychology in North America: spiritualist toys at Harvard University, serial photography in early American psychological laboratories, experiments on “psychopaths” performed with an instrument called an Offner Dynograph, and the development of the “electropsychometer,” or “E-Meter,” by Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard. 

 

Challenging the large body of humanities research surrounding affect theory, The Affect Lab identifies an understudied problem in formulations of affect: how affect is a construction inseparable from the techniques and devices used to identify and measure it. Ultimately, Bollmer offers a new critique of affect and affect theory, demonstrating how deferrals to psychology and neuroscience in contemporary theory and philosophy neglect the material of experimental, scientific research.

 

 

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cover of The Afterlife Is Where We Come From

The Afterlife Is Where We Come From

Alma Gottlieb

University of Chicago Press, 2003

When a new baby arrives among the Beng people of West Africa, they see it not as being born, but as being reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world. Far from being a tabula rasa, a Beng infant is thought to begin its life filled with spiritual knowledge. How do these beliefs affect the way the Beng rear their children?

In this unique and engaging ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb explores how religious ideology affects every aspect of Beng childrearing practices—from bathing infants to protecting them from disease to teaching them how to crawl and walk—and how widespread poverty limits these practices. A mother of two, Gottlieb includes moving discussions of how her experiences among the Beng changed the way she saw her own parenting. Throughout the book she also draws telling comparisons between Beng and Euro-American parenting, bringing home just how deeply culture matters to the way we all rear our children.

All parents and anyone interested in the place of culture in the lives of infants, and vice versa, will enjoy The Afterlife Is Where We Come From.

"This wonderfully reflective text should provide the impetus for formulating research possibilities about infancy and toddlerhood for this century." — Caren J. Frost, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
 
“Alma Gottlieb’s careful and thought-provoking account of infancy sheds spectacular light upon a much neglected topic. . . . [It] makes a strong case for the central place of babies in anthropological accounts of religion.  Gottlieb’s remarkably rich account, delivered after a long and reflective period of gestation, deserves a wide audience across a range of disciplines.”—Anthony Simpson, Critique of Anthropology
 
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cover of The Altruistic Species: Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious Perspectives of Human Benevolence

The Altruistic Species

Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious Perspectives of Human Benevolence

Andrew Michael Flescher

Templeton Press, 2008

What motivates altruism? How essential is the phenomenon of altruism to the human experience? Is altruism readily accessible to the ordinary person? In The Altruistic Species, Andrew Michael Flescher and Daniel L. Worthen explore these questions through the lenses of four disciplinary perspectives—biology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. In their investigation, they make an extended argument for the existence of altruism against competing theories that construe all ostensible cases of benevolence as self-interest in disguise. The authors consider theories of egoism; the role of genetics and evolutionary biology; the psychological that induce altruistic behavior; philosophical theories of altruism in normative ethics such as Kantian, utilitarian, and Aristotelian models of moral action; and accounts of love of the neighbor in Christianity and Buddhism. Additionally, they offer a new, comprehensive definition of altruism that includes the insights of each of these perspectives.

The Altruistic Species reinvigorates the debate over the prevalence of selfless motivation in human behavior—whether it is a rare or ubiquitous phenomenon—something considered exceptional or a capacity that members of any community could potentially develop. This noteworthy interdisciplinary examination of altruism balances science, virtue theory, and theology. It is ideal for ethics, human behavior, and evolutionary biology courses as an educational resource for other multidisciplinary studies and interested lay readers.

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cover of The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders

The Analysis of the Self

A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders

Heinz Kohut

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Psychoanalyst, teacher, and scholar, Heinz Kohut was one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals. A rebel according to many mainstream psychoanalysts, Kohut challenged Freudian orthodoxy and the medical control of psychoanalysis in America. In his highly influential book The Analysis of the Self, Kohut established the industry standard of the treatment of personality disorders for a generation of analysts. This volume, best known for its groundbreaking analysis of narcissism, is essential reading for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand human personality in its many incarnations.
 

“Kohut has done for narcissism what the novelist Charles Dickens did for poverty in the nineteenth century. Everyone always knew that both existed and were a problem. . . . The undoubted originality is to have put it together in a form which carries appeal to action.”—International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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cover of The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism

The Analyst and the Mystic

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism

Sudhir Kakar

University of Chicago Press, 1992

"This work is of importance for psychoanalysts and scholars of the psychology of religion. Kakar makes a scholarly and significant contribution to the objectification of what psychoanalysis and Hindu mystical tradition have in common."—Ana Maria Rizzuto, Tufts University
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cover of The Archetypal Process: Self and Divine and Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman

The Archetypal Process

Self and Divine and Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman

David Ray Griffin

Northwestern University Press, 1989

Archetypal Process is a pioneering study linking the ideas of process philosophy, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, with the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung and James Hillman. This is the first work to examine the interconnections of these two modes of thought.

Archetypal Process examines the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground archetypal psychology in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought, and finally, it adds a much-needed feminist perspective to the debate.
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cover of The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States

The Architecture of Madness

Insane Asylums in the United States

Carla Yanni

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely held belief among doctors and social reformers that insanity was a curable disease and that environment—architecture in particular—was the most effective means of treatment.

In The Architecture of Madness, Carla Yanni tells a compelling story of therapeutic design, from America’s earliest purpose—built institutions for the insane to the asylum construction frenzy in the second half of the century. At the center of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who in the 1840s devised a novel way to house the mentally diseased that emphasized segregation by severity of illness, ease of treatment and surveillance, and ventilation. After the Civil War, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals across the country.

Before the end of the century, interest in the Kirkbride plan had begun to decline. Many of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments against the monolithic structures advocated by Kirkbride. At the same time, the medical profession began embracing a more neurological approach to mental disease that considered architecture as largely irrelevant to its treatment.

Generously illustrated, The Architecture of Madness is a fresh and original look at the American medical establishment’s century-long preoccupation with therapeutic architecture as a way to cure social ills.

Carla Yanni is associate professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display.

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cover of The Art of Memory

The Art of Memory

Frances A. Yates

University of Chicago Press, 1974

One of Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century!
 
How did people remember essential information before the invention of the printed page? In 1966 Frances Yates revealed the answer, which, ironically had been forgotten for centuries: A system of mnemonics that has become known as the memory palace. In this system, people deliberately associated details they wanted to remember with specific locations in a landscape or building in their mind, thus making them easier to recall. As people even today have discovered, this technique, which at first may seem complicated, turns out to be astonishingly effective, enabling practitioners to recall vast amounts of information without external aids.

In The Art of Memory Yates traces this technique of memorization from its treatment by Greek orators through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.
 
A work of profound, groundbreaking scholarship, The Art of Memory is also remarkably engaging and readable, full of fascinating details and useful information for anyone, scholar or not, who is interested in how our memory works, how we made it work in the past, and how we might still use those insights today.
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cover of The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years

The Artist in American Society

The Formative Years

Neil Harris

University of Chicago Press, 1982

What was the place of the artist in a new society? How would he thrive where monarchy, aristocracy, and an established church—those traditional patrons of painting, sculpture, and architecture—were repudiated so vigorously? Neil Harris examines the relationships between American cultural values and American society during the formative years of American art and explores how conceptions of the artist's social role changed during those years.
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cover of The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso's Pursuit of the Model

The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze

Picasso's Pursuit of the Model

Karen L. Kleinfelder

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Although Pablo Picasso's name is virtually synonymous with modernity, his late graphics repeatedly turn back to the traditional theme of the artist and model. Had the aging artist turned reactionary, or is Picasso's treatment of the theme more subversive than anyone has suspected?

In this innovative study, Karen L. Kleinfelder rejects the claim that Picasso's later work was a failure. The failing, she claims, lies more in the way we typically have read the images, treating them merely as reflections of an "old-age" style or of the artist's private life.

Focusing on graphics dating from 1954 to 1970, Kleinfelder shows how Picasso plays with the artist-model theme to extend, subvert, and parody both the possibilities and limits of representation. For Kleinfelder, Picasso's graphic work both mystifies and demystifies the creative process, venerates and mocks the effects of aging and the artist's self-image as a living "old master," and acknowledges and denies his own fear of death.

Using recent interpretive and literary theory, Kleinfelder probes the three-way relationship between artist, model, and canvas. The dynamics of this relationship provided Picasso with an open-ended textual framework for exploring the dichotomies of man/woman, self/other, and vitality/mortality. What unfolds is the artist's struggle not only with the impossibility of representing the model on canvas, but also with the inevitability of his own death.

Kleinfelder explores how Picasso's means of pursuing these issues allows him to defer closure on a long, productive career. By focusing on the graphics rather than the paintings, Kleinfelder contradicts the primacy of the painted "masterpiece"; she steers the reader away from the assumption that the artist must work toward creating a final body of work that signifies the culmination of his search for a coherent identify.

Picasso's search, she argues, realizes itself in the creative process. She interprets the late graphics not as a biographical statement but as a tool for investigating the possibilities of representation within the limits of Picasso's medium and his lifetime. Richly illustrated, Kleinfelder's book will open up new approaches to the late work of this complex artist.

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cover of The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique

The Ascent of Affect

Genealogy and Critique

Ruth Leys

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings.
 
Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.
 
[more]
cover of The Banyamulenge Soldier: Genocide between Congo and Rwanda

The Banyamulenge Soldier

Genocide between Congo and Rwanda

Christopher P. Davey

University of Michigan Press, 2025

The Banyamulenge Soldier offers a critical analysis of combatant experiences from within the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and subsequent armed groups through the interpretation of Banyamulenge soldier narratives. Banyamulenge young men joined the RPF and acted as foot soldiers in the RPF’s fight against the genocidaire in 1994 and later conflicts, becoming active agents of conflict in the region up to the present. In examining the highly political discourse and stories around the Rwandan conflict and Congo wars, this book examines RPF memory, the evolution of its uses of violence, and how these memories have shaped Banyamulenge combatants. 

Challenging the preconceived perpetrator and victim categories with a forward-thinking approach using the concept of genocide narrative identity—meaning a narrative identity shaped by experiences of social destruction or uses of genocide as a concept—Christopher P. Davey reveals how the stories we tell about ourselves shapes who we are. He shows that Banyamulenge experiences of genocide between Congo and Rwanda are layered around agencies of victimhood and perpetration of genocide. Using soldier and other community narratives, Davey examines the subjective nature of genocide in perception of an event, strategic deployment of the label, and in the (re)shaping of social worlds inhabited by this community and therefore impacting others in Congo and Rwanda. The Banyamulenge Soldier offers an insider view of the historical dynamics of current conflicts in South Kivu while adding to our understanding of relational genocide theory.
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cover of The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression

The Basic Fault

Therapeutic Aspects of Regression

Michael Balint

Northwestern University Press, 1968

When it was first published in 1968, Michael Balint's The Basic Fault laid the groundwork for a far-ranging reformation in psychoanalytic theory. This reformation is still incomplete, for it remains true today that despite the proliferation of techniques and schools, we do not know which are more correct or more successful--and all psychoanalysts continue to encounter intractable cases of mental disorder. Balint argues that ordinary "rigid" techniques and theories are doomed to failure in such cases because of their emphasis on interpretation.

The Basic Fault continues to illuminate the crucial current issues in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general: the nature of self, the role of developmental defects, the value of empathy, and the central importance of the relationship between therapist and patient. This paperback edition includes a foreword by Paul H. Ornstein discussing the impact of Balint's work at the time of its publication and its continued importance now.
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cover of The Battered Child

The Battered Child

Edited by Mary Edna Helfer, Ruth S. Kempe, and Richard D. Krugman

University of Chicago Press, 1999

First published in 1968, The Battered Child quickly became a landmark work. Our awareness of child abuse today is due in no small part to the remarkable impact of its first and subsequent editions.

The new edition of this classic text continues the legacy. While updating and significantly adding to previous editions, the fifth edition retains the multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach that initially set the work apart. This new edition contains chapters from professionals in such diverse fields as pediatrics, psychiatry, legal studies, and social work that reflect the past decade's extraordinary advances in research and techniques. Twenty of the book's 30 chapters are entirely new, while the remaining material has been extensively revised.

Part I provides a historical overview of child abuse and neglect as well as background material on the cultural, psychiatric, social, economic, and legal contexts of child maltreatment. Part II discusses the processes of assessing cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and neglect from the unique perspectives of all the professionals involved, including teachers, pediatricians, and social workers. Part III describes intervention and treatment, focusing on legal issues, investigative procedures, and therapeutic processes, while Part IV addresses prevention and policy issues.

Previous editions of The Battered Child have earned the labels of "a classic" and a "Bible." With its up-to-date information, unequaled scope, and contributions from experts on every aspect of child abuse, the fifth edition of this cornerstone text is even more essential to the field than its predecessors.

"Comprehensive and up-to-date."—David Cottrell, British Journal of Psychiatry

"A valuable contribution to the field of abuse and neglect"—Prasanna Nair, Journal of the American Medical Association
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cover of The Battle for the Mind: War and Peace in the Era of Mass Communication

The Battle for the Mind

War and Peace in the Era of Mass Communication

Gary S. Messinger

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

Most people typically think of armed conflict in physical terms, involving guns and bombs, ships and planes, tanks and missiles. But today, because of mass communication, war and the effort to prevent it are increasingly dependent on non-physical factors—the capacity to persuade combatants and citizens to engage in violence or avoid it, and the packaging of the information on which decision making is based. This book explores the many ways that mass communication has revolutionized international relations, whether the aim is to make war effectively or to prevent it.

Gary Messinger shows that over the last 150 years a succession of breakthroughs in the realm of media has reshaped the making of war and peace. Along with mass newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, radio, television, computer software, and telecommunication satellites comes an array of strategies for exploiting these media to control popular beliefs and emotions. Images of war now arrive in many forms and reach billions of people simultaneously. Political and military leaders must react to crowd impulses that sweep around the globe. Nation-states and nongovernmental groups, including terrorists, use mass communication to spread their portrayals of reality.

Drawing on a wide range of media products, from books and articles to films and television programs, as well as his own research in the field of propaganda studies, Messinger offers a fresh and comprehensive overview. He skillfully charts the path that has led us to our current situation and suggests where we might go next.

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cover of The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior

The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior

Edited by Stephen M. Colarelli and Richard D. Arvey

University of Chicago Press, 2014

In recent years, evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have emerged as prominent theoretical perspectives within the social sciences. Yet despite broad levels of commonality between the disciplines—including an emphasis on adaptation, evolved mechanisms that guide behavior, and consequences of mismatch between these mechanisms and novel environments—studies that apply these perspectives on social behavior to organizations remain relatively rare.

The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior brings together contributors who shed light on the potential that behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology offer for studies of organizational behavior. In addition to examining the extant literature integrating these disciplines and organizational behavior, the book reconsiders a wide range of topics through the lens of biology within organizational behavior, including decision making, leadership and hierarchy, goals and collective action, and individual difference. Contributions also explore new areas of potential application and provide a critical assessment of the challenges that lie ahead. With accessible insights for scholars and practitioners, The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior marks a promising step forward in what is increasingly perceived to be an underdeveloped area of organizational behavior.
[more]
cover of The Black Cow's Footprint: Time, Space and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India

The Black Cow's Footprint

Time, Space and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India

Richard K. Wolf

University of Illinois Press, 2006

A black cow leads the members of a South Indian hill tribe, the Kotas, to the Nilgiri Hills and, with its hoof, indicates where to found each village. This footprint acts as a moral center of gravity, an important place for music-making, dancing, and other rituals. Places such as this, and moments in time, serve as physical and moral “anchors” for the Kota community. In this book, Richard K. Wolf explores how the Kotas “anchor” their musical and other activities around places and significant moments in time and, in the process, constitute themselves as individuals and as a group. This volume also includes a CD of Richard Wolf’s Kota field recordings.
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cover of The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death

The Black Heavens

Abraham Lincoln and Death

Brian R. Dirck

Southern Illinois University Press, 2019

Winner, Lincoln Group of New York Award of Achievement 2019

From multiple personal tragedies to the terrible carnage of the Civil War, death might be alongside emancipation of the slaves and restoration of the Union as one of the great central truths of Abraham Lincoln’s life. Yet what little has been written specifically about Lincoln and death is insufficient, sentimentalized, or devoid of the rich historical literature about death and mourning during the nineteenth century. The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death is the first in-depth account of how the sixteenth president responded to the riddles of mortality, undertook personal mourning, and coped with the extraordinary burden of sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to be killed on battlefields.

Going beyond the characterization of Lincoln as a melancholy, tragic figure, Brian R. Dirck investigates Lincoln’s frequent encounters with bereavement and sets his response to death and mourning within the social, cultural, and political context of his times. At a young age Lincoln saw the grim reality of lives cut short when he lost his mother and sister. Later, he was deeply affected by the deaths of two of his sons, three-year-old Eddy in 1850 and eleven-year-old Willie in 1862, as well as the combat deaths of close friends early in the war. Despite his own losses, Lincoln learned how to approach death in an emotionally detached manner, a survival skill he needed to cope with the reality of his presidency.

Dirck shows how Lincoln gradually turned to his particular understanding of God’s will in his attempts to articulate the meaning of the atrocities of war to the American public, as showcased in his allusions to religious ideas in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. Lincoln formed a unique approach to death: both intellectual and emotional, typical and yet atypical of his times. In showing how Lincoln understood and responded to death, both privately and publicly, Dirck paints a compelling portrait of a commander in chief who buried two sons and gave the orders that sent an unprecedented number of Americans to their deaths.
 
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cover of The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

The Book of Minds

How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

Philip Ball

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human?
 
Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?

Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.
[more]
cover of The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality

The Book of Minor Perverts

Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality

Benjamin Kahan

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Assocation Book Prize

­Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the shift from Foucault’s “thousand aberrant sexualities” to one: homosexuality. The focus here is less on the effects of queer identity and more on the lines of causation behind a surprising array of minor perverts who refuse to fit neatly into our familiar sexual frameworks. The result stands at the intersection of history, queer studies, and the medical humanities to offer us a new way of feeling our way into the past.
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cover of The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity

The Burdens of Intimacy

Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity

Christopher Lane

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Why does passion bewilder and torment so many Victorian protagonists? And why do so many literary characters experience moments of ecstasy before their deaths? In this original study, Christopher Lane shows why Victorian fiction conveys both the pleasure and anguish of intimacy. Examining works by Bulwer-Lytton, Swinburne, Schreiner, Hardy, James, Santayana, and Forster, he argues that these writers struggled with aspects of psychology that were undermining the utilitarian ethos of the Victorian age.

Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand for repression and moral restraint. But he also refutes historicist and Foucauldian approaches, arguing that they dismiss the very idea of repression and end up denouncing psychoanalysis as complicit in various kinds of oppression. These approaches, Lane argues, reduce Victorian literature to a drama about politics, power, and the ego. Striving instead to reinvigorate discussions of fantasy and the unconscious, Lane offers a clear, often startling account of writers who grapple with the genuine complexities of love, desire, and friendship.

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cover of The Burnout-Belonging Connection: Why Burnout is Not Our Fault and How Community Can Fortify Us Against It

The Burnout-Belonging Connection

Why Burnout is Not Our Fault and How Community Can Fortify Us Against It

Lisa M. Nunn

Rutgers University Press, 2027

For over a decade now, we’ve been hearing the wrong messages about burnout: we are told that we have to fix ourselves in order to fix burnout. This misguided wisdom says that better time management, stronger boundaries, and more yoga-mindfulness-gratitude-exercise-vacation are the solution. Nope. Stronger, healthier communities are the solution. Lisa M. Nunn shows us that the same dynamics that create the social bonds of belonging, when absent, become the drivers of burnout. Greedy communities drive burnout; respectful communities foster belonging. Unfair communities drive burnout; trustworthy communities foster belonging. Negligent communities drive burnout; attentive communities foster belonging. The book offers 35 strategies to cultivate strong belonging—and in doing so minimize burnout—in our workplaces, families, friendship circles, volunteer organizations, athletic clubs, and every other community in our lives.

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cover of The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940–1977

The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940–1977

David Bloor

University of Chicago Press, 2025

The story of a unique and controversial wartime study of pilot fatigue.
 
During World War II, members of the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory were commissioned to study pilot fatigue. They set up a Spitfire cockpit in the laboratory, turned it into a piece of laboratory apparatus, and carried out a series of important experiments that appeared to dramatically confirm the dangers of fatigue. Historians of psychology are aware of this episode, but the experiments, the events surrounding them, and the scientific reasoning involved have never been studied in detail. By going into the episode in depth, and by looking behind the scenes at archival material, David Bloor offers an analysis that is both original and more penetrating than anything that has been said before on the topic.
 
Bloor describes the Cockpit experiments themselves before turning to the theoretical interpretation of the results and the intellectual resources that informed how they were viewed. Bloor then explains a major empirical and theoretical challenge to the Cambridge Cockpit work drawn from a field study of landing accidents apparently showing that fatigue-effects were operationally negligible. Bloor delves into the consequences of this challenge, and the Cambridge reaction to it, in the post-war years. The analysis is deepened by comparison with the corresponding wartime work on fatigue carried out both in Germany and the United States. As the author demonstrates, even today the Cambridge Cockpit experiments pose a challenge to the current understanding of pilot fatigue.
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cover of The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society

The Cassowary's Revenge

The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society

Donald Tuzin

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Donald Tuzin first studied the New Guinea village of Ilahita in 1972. When he returned many years later, he arrived in the aftermath of a startling event: the village’s men voluntarily destroyed their secret cult that had allowed them to dominate women for generations. The cult’s collapse indicated nothing less than the death of masculinity, and Tuzin examines the labyrinth of motives behind this improbable, self-devastating act. The villagers' mythic tradition provided a basis for this revenge of Woman upon the dominion of Man, and, remarkably, Tuzin himself became a principal figure in its narratives. The return of the magic-bearing "youngest brother" from America had been prophesied, and the villagers believed that Tuzin’s return "from the dead" signified a further need to destroy masculine traditions.

The Cassowary's Revenge is an intimate account of how Ilahita’s men and women think, emote, dream, and explain themselves. Tuzin also explores how the death of masculinity in a remote society raises disturbing implications for gender relations in our own society. In this light Tuzin's book is about men and women in search of how to value one another, and in today's world there is no theme more universal or timely.
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cover of The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology

The Cattell Controversy

Race, Science, and Ideology

William H. Tucker

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Raymond Cattell, the father of personality trait measurement, was one of the most influential psychologists in the twentieth century, the author of fifty-six books, more than five hundred journal articles and book chapters, and some thirty standardized instruments for assessing personality and intelligence in a professional career that spanned almost seventy years. In August 1997, the American Psychological Association announced that Cattell had been selected the recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science. Then, only two days before the scheduled ceremony, the APF abruptly postponed the presentation of the award due to concerns involving Cattell's views on racial segregation and eugenics.

In addition to his mainstream research, Cattell had also authored a series of publications that posited evolutionary progress as the ultimate goal of human existence and argued that scientifically measurable criteria should be used to distinguish "successful" from "failing" racial groups so that the latter might be gradually "phased out" by non-violent methods such as regulation of birth control. Derived from science, Cattell's evolutionary philosophy was intended to be the basis of a full-blown religion. Although the earliest of these works had been published in the 1930s, near the end of an era in which eugenically based policies for human improvement were much more acceptable, Cattell promoted similar ideas well into the 1980s and '90s.

The Cattell Controversy describes Cattell's socio-religious beliefs in detail and analyzes their relationship to his scientific contributions. William H. Tucker discusses the controversy that arose within the field in response to the award's postponement, after which Cattell withdrew his name from consideration for the award but insisted that his position had been distorted by taking statements out of context. Reflecting on these events, Tucker concludes with a discussion of the complex question of whether and how a scientist's ideological views should ever be a relevant factor in determining the value of his or her contributions to the field.

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cover of The Causes of Human Behavior: Implications for Theory and Method in the Social Sciences

The Causes of Human Behavior

Implications for Theory and Method in the Social Sciences

Lawrence B. Mohr

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Acknowledging that though the disciplines are supposed to be cumulative, there is little in the way of accumulated, general theory, this work opens a dialogue about the appropriate means and ends of social research based in analysis of fundamental issues.
This book examines two root issues in the methodology of explanatory social research--the meaning of the idea of causation in social science and the question of the physiological mechanism that generates intentional behavior. Conclusions on these as well as on several derived problems emerge through the analysis. Among the latter, the analysis shows that neither universal nor probabilistic laws governing human behavior are possible, even within the positivist or empiricist traditions in which laws are a central feature. Instead, the analysis reveals a more modest view of what an explanatory social theory can be and do. In this view, the kind of theory that can be produced is basically the same in form and content across quantitative and qualitative research approaches, and similarly across different disciplines. The two streams of analysis are combined with resulting implications for large-sample, small-sample, and case study research design as well as for laws and theory.
Written for the practicing empirical researcher in political science and organization theory, whether quantitative or qualitative, the major issuesand findings are meant to hold identically, however, for history, sociology, and other social science disciplines.
Lawrence B. Mohr is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan.
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cover of The Changing Fictions of Masculinity

The Changing Fictions of Masculinity

David Rosen

University of Illinois Press, 1993

 In a sensitive and provocative
  study of six great works of British literature, David Rosen traces the evolution
  of masculinity, inviting readers to contemplate the shifting joys and sorrows
  men have experienced throughout the last millennium, and the changing but constant
  tensions between their lives and ideals. Focusing on Beowulf, Sir Gawain
  and the Green Knight, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Hard Times, and Sons and
  Lovers, Rosen shows how the actions of heroes fail to resolve tensions between
  masculine ideals and male experiences.
 
[more]
cover of The Chigi Codex: Sacred Music from Burgundy and France; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigi C VIII 234

The Chigi Codex

Sacred Music from Burgundy and France; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chigi C VIII 234

Edited by Edward F. Houghton

University of Chicago Press, 2027

The Chigi Codex makes available for the first time a critical edition and comprehensive study of a late fifteenth-century anthology of sacred musical works.

Compiled between 1500 and 1504, The Chigi Codex contains the complete contents of an extraordinary illuminated manuscript, an anthology of forty polyphonic masses and motets associated with the royal courts of France and Burgundy. This edition includes nearly the complete oeuvre of Johannes Ockeghem, five motets by Johannes Regis, and compositions by Josquin des Prez, Henricus Isaac, Antoine Busnoys, Pierre de la Rue, Jean Mouton, Alexander Agricola, and others. Twelve works are unique to The Chigi Codex; seven motets were added by a Spanish scribe after 1515. The complete contents are presented here with transcriptions of the music accessible to musicians today, with a critical commentary on the music and concordant sources. The Codex transmits works that were copied in manuscripts and prints throughout Europe later in the sixteenth century.

In addition to its monumental repertory, The Chigi Codex includes notable works of visual art in the double-folio openings of thirty-six works with miniature paintings, coats of arms, inhabited capitals, family mottos, bizarre creatures, and colorful borders, all in the famed Ghent-Bruges style. Herbert Kellman discusses these as well as the history of the Codex and its long journey from its original patron, the Burgundian seigneur Philippe Bouton, to the Spanish families Folch de Cardona and Fernández de Córdoba, and finally to Rome and to the library of Fabio Chigi, Pope Alexander VII. The Chigi library is now an important part of the Vatican Library.  

Making the manuscript accessible to the public and musicians, this edition of The Chigi Codex supports the study, performance, and understanding of its music and art in the musical, cultural, and historical contexts of its creation.
[more]
cover of The Children's God

The Children's God

David Heller

University of Chicago Press, 1986

How do children imagine God? Surprisingly, few researchers have asked this question. In crayon drawings, doll-play, letters, and carefully designed interviews, the forty children in David Heller's study reveal a rich array of spiritual imagery. Though Heller does find some differing views attributable to age, gender, and religious background (the children were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu), he discovers to a surprising degree a common vision of God that cuts across ethnic and religious differences. He also considers related issues of school prayer and the psychology of religion.
[more]
cover of The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

The Colorful Apocalypse

Journeys in Outsider Art

Greg Bottoms

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster’s famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster’s contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy.

With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories.

In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

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cover of The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict

The Colors of Violence

Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict

Sudhir Kakar

University of Chicago Press, 1996

For decades India has been intermittently tormented by brutal outbursts of religious violence, thrusting thousands of ordinary Hindus and Muslims into bloody conflict. In this provocative work, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar exposes the psychological roots of Hindu-Muslim violence and examines with grace and intensity the subjective experience of religious hatred in his native land.

With honesty, insight, and unsparing self-reflection, Kakar confronts the profoundly enigmatic relations that link individual egos to cultural moralities and religious violence. His innovative psychological approach offers a framework for understanding the kind of ethnic-religious conflict that has so vexed social scientists in India and throughout the world.

Through riveting case studies, Kakar explores cultural stereotypes, religious antagonisms, ethnocentric histories, and episodic violence to trace the development of both Hindu and Muslim psyches. He argues that in early childhood the social identity of every Indian is grounded in traditional religious identifications and communalism. Together these bring about deep-set psychological anxieties and animosities toward the other. For Hindus and Muslims alike, violence becomes morally acceptable when communally and religiously sanctioned. As the changing pressures of modernization and secularism in a multicultural society grate at this entrenched communalism, and as each group vies for power, ethnic-religious conflicts ignite. The Colors of Violence speaks with eloquence and urgency to anyone concerned with the postmodern clash of religious and cultural identities.
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