In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented his revolutionary “seduction theory,” arguing that childhood sexual abuse directly caused adult mental illness. Just nine years later, he completely reversed this stance, insisting these traumatic memories were mere fantasies. Why did Freud retract his original theory? And why has the psychoanalytic community gone to such lengths to conceal this critical reversal?In the landmark book, The Assault on Truth, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson draws on unique access to formerly sealed and hidden papers to uncover the truth behind this pivotal moment in psychoanalytic history. Masson dares to explore the reality that neither Freud nor his followers could bear to face.This investigation reveals the enduring impact of Freud's decision on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Bracing in its honesty and gripping in its revelations, The Assault on Truth is the book that prompted Masson’s dramatic break with the psychoanalytic establishment and launched his brilliant career as an independent thinker and writer. Read more

In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a compelling 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, told by an award-winning journalist on her decade-long search for sanity in America’s mental healthcare system.On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports listeners behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable. Read more

New York Times Bestseller Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best BooksIn the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, that the New York Times described as “fascinating…meticulous research” and bestselling author Clint Smith endorsed it as “a book that left me breathless.” On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.   In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.   As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.   In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.   Read more

As the 20th century drew to a close, the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was perhaps the least known of the prominent figures of his time - in particular Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung - and yet he continues to be a figure of influence in the 21st century. His school of ‘individual psychology’ involved a holistic approach to the study of the individual, with a key focus on the way each person viewed the world, especially regarding their concerns of inferiority. This applied to both men and women in their different ways. The Neurotic Character is, as the editor of this modern translation states, 'Adler’s magnum opus - complex, profound and brilliant in its crystallised capture of the human soul gone astray.'Written in 1911, Adler continued to expand and develop his ideas over the following decades as he assimilated experience gained from his practice. It opens with the Theoretical Part, in which he introduces ‘The Origin and Development of the Inferiority Feeling and Its Effects', as well as ‘Psychic Compensation and Its Preparation’ and ‘The Accentuated Fiction as Guiding Idea in the Neurosis’.The second, major part of his work follows - the Practical Part. In this, Adler examines a wide range of issues, from ‘Greed and Distrust’, to the sexual causes and effects of inferiority. In the succeeding sections, he considers how suppressing everyday feelings and habits experienced by men and women in the course of their lives - issues such as impatience and dissatisfaction, cruelty, self-reproach - can all have profound effects on the individual.The writing is clear and supported by case studies providing a strong perspective of reality. It is not surprising that, as a result, it can be seen how strongly Adlerian ideas and views have influenced the practice of psychotherapy today. And that for all the apparent dominance of Freudian and Jungian doctrine in psychological and academic circles, the work of Alfred Adler should not be underestimated. This recording presents the new translation of The Neurotic Character, commissioned and edited by the Adlerian psychotherapist, Henry Stein, who provides a useful appendix - an introduction to classical Adlerian theory and practice.PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. Read more

At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion -- and indeed our future. Read more

In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented his revolutionary “seduction theory,” arguing that acts of sexual abuse and violence inflicted on children are the direct cause of adult mental illness. Nine years later, Freud completely reversed his position, insisting that these sexual memories were actually fantasies that never happened. Why did Freud retract the seduction theory? And why has the psychoanalytic community gone to such lengths to conceal that retraction? In this landmark book, drawing on his unique access to formerly sealed and hidden papers, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson dares to uncover the truth about this critical turning point in Freud’s career and its enduring impact on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The Assault on Truth reveals a reality that neither Freud nor his followers could bear to face. Bracing in its honesty, gripping in its revelations, this is the book that prompted Masson’s break with the psychoanalytic community—and launched his subsequent brilliant career as an independent thinker and writer. Read more

La interpretación de los sueños de Sigmund Freud es uno de los libros más importantes del siglo XX. Aunque los sueños y su papel en la consciencia humana han estado siempre presentes en la religión, el arte y la vida a lo largo de los siglos, la mirada de Freud al respecto, a través del prisma de su incipiente práctica y estudio del psicoanálisis, ofreció una perspectiva asombrosamente nueva y desafiante. Publicado por primera vez en Alemania en 1899, se vendió lentamente, pero durante la siguiente década lo revisó y amplió, basándose en el trabajo con sus pacientes, en el análisis de lo que él mismo soñaba y en las conversaciones y debates con sus colegas. Ha sido traducido a multitud de idiomas. En esta extensa obra aborda el significado de los sueños experimentados por el individuo generación tras generación: soñar con la acción de volar, con la muerte, con la ira, con el sexo, con el miedo, con el poder. ¿Qué significado tienen estos sueños en líneas generales y en relación con cada persona y su situación personal? En este libro trascendental, Freud relata y examina historias clínicas y los efectos del análisis. Los sueños que recordamos atraviesan los diversos pasajes de los filtros del consciente y del preconsciente para aflorar a la luz del día, sometidos a la censura interna, a los deseos por cumplir, a los cambios y a muchos otros factores. Entonces, ¿qué es lo que realmente dicen o manifiestan estos sueños? ¿Qué ansiedad o esperanza revelan? La sexualidad desempeña un papel fundamental -este libro incluye la primera aparición del complejo de Edipo de Freud, entre otras cuestiones sexuales-. La interpretación de los sueños no es un libro fácil, pero su influencia en el siglo XX, especialmente en la conciencia y en la sociedad de Occidente, no puede subestimarse. Traducción de Luis López-Ballesteros y de Torres.Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish. Read more

A perfect introduction for students and laypeople alike, A Degree in a Book: Psychology provides you with all the concepts you need to understand the fundamental issues.Including the theories of Francis Galton, Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov, and many more, it covers the whole range of psychological research.By the time you finish listening to this book, you will be able to answer questions such as:How do we learn?Do groups make better decisions than individuals?How do we study the living brain?What are the components of personality?PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. Read more

In 1932, world-renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also suffering after a series of troubling personal events. He was drinking heavily, quarrelling frequently, and experiencing powerful, disturbing dreams. Pauli turned to C. G. Jung for help, forging an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics and profoundly influencing each other's work.This portrait of an incredible friendship will fascinate readers interested in psychology, science, creativity, and genius. Read more

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This comprehensive collection of writings by the epoch-shaping Swiss psychoanalyst was edited by Joseph Campbell, himself the most famous of Jung's American followers. It comprises Jung's pioneering studies of the structure of the psyche—including the works that introduced such notions as the collective unconscious, the Shadow, Anima and Animus—as well as inquries into the psychology of spirituality and creativity, and Jung's influential "On Synchronicity," a paper whose implications extend from the I Ching to quantum physics. Campbell's introduction completes this compact volume, placing Jung's astonishingly wide-ranging oeuvre within the context of his life and times. Read more

Ten Days In a Mad-House (1887) by Nellie Bly. Nellie Bly, whose given name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was a pio-neer of investigative journalism. She died in 1922. Of her many exposé assignments for Joseph Pulitzer’s NEW YORK WORLD, her voluntary (and undercover) journey into the “lunatic asylum” on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island is perhaps the most well known. In previous chapters of the series, she has (without much difficulty) fooled various doctors and authorities into deeming her insane and admitting her tothe asylum, which is located on an island just east of Manhattan. "SINCE my experiences in Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies." Read more

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In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them. The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York; a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been speculated about in the press; and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who insists he's sane and certainly not a psychopath. Ronson not only solves the mystery of the hoax but also discovers, disturbingly, that sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges. Read more

A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the two covers. Read more

A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art.   At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.   The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women’s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.   Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history. Read more

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch   At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future.   “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times   “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker   “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry Read more

“A well-written, compendious, and deeply researched history of psychoanalysis from the 1880s until World War II” (The Journal of Modern History).In a sweeping narrative, George Makari demonstrates how a new way of thinking about inner life coalesced and won followers who spread this body of thought throughout the West. Along the way he introduces the reader to a fascinating array of characters, many of whom have been long ignored or forgotten.Amid great ferment, Sigmund Freud emerged as a creative, interdisciplinary thinker who devised a riveting new theory of the mind that attracted acolytes from the very fields the Viennese doctor had mined for his synthesis. These allies included Eugen Bleuler, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, all of whom eventually broke away and accused the Freudian community of being unscientific. Makari reveals how in the wake of these crises, innovators like Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, and others reformed psychoanalysis, which began to gain wide acceptance only to be banished from the continent and sent into exile due to the rise of fascism.Groundbreaking, insightful, and compulsively readable, Revolution in Mind goes beyond myth and polemic to give us the story of one of the most controversial intellectual endeavors of the twentieth century. Read more

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was a craft, and certain actions and tools were thought to be necessary for its creation and recollection. Until now, however, many of the most important visual and textual sources on the topic have remained untranslated or otherwise difficult to consult. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski bring together the texts and visual images from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries that are central to an understanding of memory and memory technique. These sources are now made available for a wider audience of students of medieval and early modern history and culture and readers with an interest in memory, mnemonics, and the synergy of text and image.The art of memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, and those who practiced the craft used it to make new prayers, sermons, pictures, and music. The mixing of visual and verbal media was commonplace throughout medieval cultures: pictures contained visual puns, words were often verbal paintings, and both were used equally as tools for making thoughts. The ability to create pictures in one's own mind was essential to medieval cognitive technique and imagination, and the intensely pictorial and affective qualities of medieval art and literature were generative, creative devices in themselves. Read more

Wilhelm Reich was born in Austro-Hungary in 1897. After becoming a doctor of medicine and prominent psychoanalyst in Sigmund Freud's inner circle by the 1920s, Reich went on to focus his attention on the relationship between the emotional, physiological and physical functions of the biological energy underlying human emotional experience, which he called orgone. He saw psyche and soma as a unified whole and the goal of therapy to balance the body's energy metabolism by dissolving characterological and muscular defenses which he called armor. He saw the function of the orgasm, which he described as any natural living process involving the buildup of mechanical tension, energetic charge, energetic discharge and mechanical relaxation, as central to the understanding of healthy functioning. This book is a kind of scientific autobiography in which the author traces his personal and professional development from his first interactions with Freud and psychoanalysis in 1919 through the approximately 20 tumultuous and highly productive years that followed. Read more