"Everyone must read this book." – Lucia Osborne-Crowley"Extraordinary and utterly compelling." – Adam Phillips"An almost impossible balancing act." – Merve Emre“Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, part history, Rees’s genre-bending meditation on hypochondria references everyone from Freud to Kafka to Seinfeld in a provocative search to find out why, exactly, we believe we’re sick.” – The New York T...

A personal and literary examination of hypochondria.A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria is expansive in its range of references, from the writings of Franz Kafka to original yet accessible readings of theorists like Lauren Berlant. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne, or his own hypochondriac past, Rees reveals himself to be a wry and perceptive critic, exploring the causes — and the costs — of our desire for certainty. Wit...

"Psychopathology of Everyday Life" by Sigmund FreudAbout: In this work, Freud explores how seemingly trivial and minor errors (like slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and mistakes) can reveal deeper unconscious thoughts and desires, laying the foundation for psychoanalytic theory.

From the master of Freud debunkers, a critical biography that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator.Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud's scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freu...

This fascinating story of madness reveals the radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the present day.Roy Porter explores what we really mean by 'madness', covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac.The origins of current debates about how we define and deal with insanity are examined through eyewitness accounts of those treating patients, w...

In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their chi...

**From the author of the bestselling classic The Drama of the Gifted Child—a book that believes that children are inherently good and traces all forms of criminal deeds to past mistreatments.In direct opposition to the Freudian drive theory, "Alice Miller writes lucidly and passionately, asks daring questions and sees through conventions that most of us take for granted" (San Francisco Chronicle).

The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the common-sense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that can seize hold of some of us: these are a part of our shared human experience whatever culture we come from. Nowadays, mental disturbance is most commonly (though not always) viewed through a medical lens, but human beings have also always sought to make sense of the depredations of madness through invocations of the religious and the supernatural, ...

Madness is something that frightens and fascinates us all. It is a word with which we are universally familiar, and a condition that haunts the human imagination. Through the centuries, in poetry and in prose, in drama and in the visual arts, its depredations are on display for all to see. A whole industry has grown up, devoted to its management and suppression. Madness profoundly disturbs our common sense assumptions; threatens the social order, both symbolically and practically; creates ...

The story of Freud's involvement with cocaine and how it affected research long after he died... The book tells of a number of drug related tragedies Freud was involved in including the death of Ernest Fleischl and that of the less well known Otto Gross who was a good analyst, a cocaine addict and has advanced ideas about sex which led him to founding an orgiastic commune in Italy. Freud devotees will be unhappy with the book because it depicts their hero as all too human but it is a balan...

A provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mindA New Yorker Best of the Week Pick**“Jay is a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and Psychonauts is the latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the ninetee...

The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology is a work on psychology by Alfred Adler, first published in 1924. In his work, Adler develops his personality theory, suggesting that the situation into which a person is born, such as family size, sex of siblings, and birth order, plays an important part in personality development. Adler is among the many therapists who have noted the significance and impact of the relationship between attitudes towards oneself and others, and highlighting ...