Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around the World


Pete Tombs - 1998
    Fully illustrated, this book includes an Indian song-and-dance version of Dracula; Turkish version of Star Trek and Superman; China's "hopping vampire" films, and much more.

The Dream and the Underworld


James Hillman - 1975
    In a profound extension of Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious, Hillman goes back to classical theories in terms of the poetics of mythology. He relates our dreaming life to the myths of the underworld--the dark side of the soul, its images and shadows--and to the gods and figures of death. This leads to a revisioning of dream interpretation in relation to the psychology of dying. He concludes with the long section on specific dream images and themes as they appear in psychological praxis.

Mind Without a Home: A Memoir of Schizophrenia


Kristina Morgan - 2013
    With the intimacy of private journal-like entries and the language of a poet, she carries us from her childhood to her teen years when hallucinations began to hijack her mind and into adulthood where she began abusing alcohol to temper the punishing voices that only she could hear.This is no formulaic tale of tragedy and triumph: We feel Kristina's hope as she pursues an education and career and begins to build strong family connections, friendships and intimacy-and her devastation as the insistent voices convince her to throw it all away, destroying herself and alienating everyone around her. Woven through the pages of her life are stories of recovery from alcoholism and the search for her sexual identity in relationships with both women and men. Eventually, her journey takes her to a place of relative peace and stability where she finds the inner resources and support system to manage her chronic illnesses and live a fulfilling life.

The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness


Alice Miller - 1988
    She is as determined as ever to cut through the veil that, for thousands of years now, has been so meticulously woven to shroud the truth. When she lifts that veil and brushes it aside, the results are astonishing, amply demonstrated by her analyses of the works of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz, Buster Keaton, and others. With the key shunned by so many for so long--childhood--she opens rusty locks and offers her readers a wealth of unexpected perspectives. What did Picasso express in Guernica? Why did Buster Keaton never smile? Why did Nietzsche heap so much opprobrium on women and religion and lose his mind for 11 years? Why did Hitler and Stalin become tyrannical mass murderers?Miller investigates these and other questions thoroughly in this book. She draws from her discoveries that human beings are not "innately" destructive, that they are made that way by ignorance, abuse, and neglect, particularly if no sympathetic witness comes to their aid. She also shows why some mistreated children do not become criminals, but instead bear witness as artists to the truth about their childhoods, even though in purely intuitive and unconscious ways.

Feeling Unreal: Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self


Daphne Simeon - 2006
    These are quotes from actual people, experiencing something they don't understand. What they are saying is being heard by friends, families, and physicians today more than ever before. They do not simply suffer from anxiety, or depression, and they are not schizophrenic. They have found themselves trapped in a very real and singular disorder, yet few even know its name. Their enigmatic state of mind has been studied for more than 100 years, but only recently has it become clear how prevalent and how distinctive it really is. The condition is called Depersonalization Disorder, and Feeling Unreal is the first book to reveal what it's all about.This important volume explores not only Depersonalization, but the philosophical and literary implications of selflessness as well, while providing the latest research, possible treatments, and ways to live and thrive when life seems unreal. For those who still believe that such experiences are merely part of something else, that depersonalization is just a symptom and not a disorder in its own right, Feeling Unreal presents compelling evidence to the contrary. This book provides long-awaited answers for people suffering from Depersonalization Disorder and their loved ones, for mental health professionals, and for all students of the condition, while serving as a wake up call to the medical community at large.

The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness


Stanton Marlan - 2005
    Although modern psychology has seen darkness primarily as a negative force, it actually has an intrinsic importance to the human psyche. In this book, Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan reexamines the paradoxical image of the black sun and the meaning of darkness in Western culture. Marlan draws on not only clinical cases, but also literature such as Goethe's Faust and Dante's Inferno, the black art of Rothko and Reinhardt, and other inspirations to explore the influence of light and shadow on the fundamental structures of modern thought as well as the contemporary practice of analysis. He shows that the black sun accompanies not only the most negative of psychic experiences but also the most sublime. The Black Sun offers insight into modernity, the act of imagination, and the work of analysis in understanding depression, trauma, and transformation of the soul. on a postmodern sensibility to develop an original way to look at the black sun and helps us explore the unknown darkness conventionally called the Self.

The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression


Tracy Thompson - 2006
    This event, the culmination of more than twenty years of silent suffering, became the point of departure for an in-depth, groundbreaking book on depression and her struggle with the disease. The Beast shattered stereotypes and inspired countless readers to confront their own battles with mental illness. Having written that book, and having found the security of a happy marriage, Thompson assumed that she had learned to manage her illness. But when she took on one of the most emotionally demanding jobs of all—being a mother—depression returned with fresh vengeance.Very quickly Thompson realized that virtually everything she had learned up to then about dealing with depression was now either inadequate or useless. In fact, maternal depression was a different beast altogether. She tackled her problem head-on, meticulously investigating the latest scientific research and collecting the stories of nearly 400 mothers with depression. What she found was startling: a problem more widespread than she or any other mother struggling alone with this affliction could have imagined. Women make up nearly 12 million of the 19 million Americans affected by depression every year, experiencing episodes at nearly twice the rate that men do. Women suffer most frequently between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four—not coincidentally, the primary childbearing years.The Ghost in the House, the result of Thompson's extensive studies, is the first book to address maternal depression as a lifelong illness that can have profound ramifications for mother and child. A striking blend of memoir and journalism, here is an invaluable resource for the millions of women who are white-knuckling their way through what should be the most satisfying years of their lives. Thompson offers her readers a concise summary of the cutting-edge research in this field, deftly written prose, and, above all, hope.

Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley


Donald C. Laycock - 2001
    John Dee, an advisor in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, began a series of experiments intended to explore the ability to contact the spirit world. With Edward Kelley acting as the medium in these experiments, Dee was able to record these communications as they were transmitted in Enochian - the language of the angels.Donald Laycock has thoroughly analyzed the work of Dee and Kelley. In this volume, he recounts the history of their experiments. The rest of the work consists of a pronunciation guide for the twenty-one letters, significant to untangling both the meaning and the derivation of the messages handed down from Dee and Kelley, and a basic Enochian-English/English-Enochian dictionary. The result is a fascinating linguistic and magical mystery story, integral to any study of the Enochian tradition.Stephen Skinner's lucid preface sets the tone and historical context for today's readers.

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition


Michael Tomasello - 1999
    Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from.Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates.Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.

Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners


Bruce Fink - 2007
    He clearly outlines the fundamentals of working with dreams, daydreams, and fantasies, discussing numerous anxiety dreams, nightmares, and fantasies told to him by his own patients. By examining transference and countertransference in detail through the use of clinical vignettes, Fink lays out the major differences (regarding transference interpretation, self-disclosure, projective identification, and the therapeutic frame) between mainstream psychoanalytic practice and Lacanian practice. He critiques the ever more prevalent normalizing attitude in psychoanalysis today and presents crucial facets of Lacan's approach to the treatment of neurosis, as well as of his entirely different approach to the treatment of psychosis.Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique is an introduction to psychoanalytic technique from a Lacanian perspective that is based on Fink's many years of experience working as an analyst and supervising clinicians, including graduate students in clinical psychology, social workers, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts. Designed for a wide range of practitioners and requiring no previous knowledge of Lacan's work, this primer is accessible to therapists of many different persuasions with diverse degrees of clinical experience, from novices to seasoned analysts.Fink's goal throughout is to present the implications of Lacan's highly novel work for psychoanalytic technique across a broad spectrum of interventions. The techniques covered (all of which are designed to get at the unconscious, repression, and repetition compulsion) can be helpful to a wide variety of practitioners, often transforming their practices radically in a few short months.

Verbal Behavior


B.F. Skinner - 1957
    F. Skinner that analyzes human behavior, encompassing what is traditionally called language, linguistics, or speech. For Skinner, verbal behavior is subject to the same controlling variables as any other operant behavior, although Skinner differentiates between verbal behavior which is mediated by other people, and that which is mediated by the natural world. The book “Verbal Behavior” is almost entirely theoretical, involving little experimental research in the work itself. It was an outgrowth of a series of lectures first presented at the University of Minnesota in the early 1940s and developed further in his summer lectures at Columbia and William James lectures at Harvard in the decade before the book’s publication. A growing body of research and applications based on “Verbal Behavior” has occurred since its original publication, particularly in the past decade.

The Women on My Couch: More Stories of Sex, Love and Psychotherapy


Brandy Engler - 2015
    Dr. Brandy Engler, psychologist and sex therapist, allows readers access into the therapy room to witness how women are handling dilemmas such as: a husband’s proposal for a threesome, post- wedding disappointment, a new lover’s unusual kink, the temptation to cheat, love vs. singlehood, using sex work to pay for college loans and the ubiquitous loss of sexual desire.The Women on My Couch gives women a voice, and helps them find their voice, in a rapidly changing culture, where freedom is both liberating and confusing, exhilarating and at times disappointing. Women will see their lives mirrored back to them with honesty, warmth and humor.

The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory


Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson - 1984
    An expose of the origins of psychoanalysis argues that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory was not the result of scientific research.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice


Chris Chambers - 2017
    The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology diagnoses the ills besetting the discipline today and proposes sensible, practical solutions to ensure that it remains a legitimate and reliable science in the years ahead.In this unflinchingly candid manifesto, Chris Chambers draws on his own experiences as a working scientist to reveal a dark side to psychology that few of us ever see. Using the seven deadly sins as a metaphor, he shows how practitioners are vulnerable to powerful biases that undercut the scientific method, how they routinely torture data until it produces outcomes that can be published in prestigious journals, and how studies are much less reliable than advertised. He reveals how a culture of secrecy denies the public and other researchers access to the results of psychology experiments, how fraudulent academics can operate with impunity, and how an obsession with bean counting creates perverse incentives for academics. Left unchecked, these problems threaten the very future of psychology as a science--but help is here.Outlining a core set of best practices that can be applied across the sciences, Chambers demonstrates how all these sins can be corrected by embracing open science, an emerging philosophy that seeks to make research and its outcomes as transparent as possible.

The Modularity of Mind


Jerry A. Fodor - 1982
    Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence.