Psychology & Psychiatry : History

From Freud to Zoloft, the first comprehensive history of American Psychotherapy. Fifty percent of Americans will undergo some form of psychotherapy in their lifetimes, but the origins of the field are rarely known to patients. Yet the story of psychotherapy in America brims with colorful characters, intriguing experimental treatments, and intense debates within this community of healers. American Therapy begins, as psychotherapy itself does, with the monumental figure of Sigmund Freud. The book outlines the basics of Freudian theory and discusses the peculiarly powerful influence of Freud on the world of American mental health. The book moves through the emergence of group therapy, the rise of psychosurgery, the evolution of uniquely American therapies such as Gestalt, rebirthing, and primal scream therapy, and concludes with the modern world of psychopharmacology, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and highly targeted short-term therapies. For a counseled nation that freely uses terms such as “emotional baggage” and no longer stigmatizes mental health care, American Therapy is a remarkable history of an extraordinary enterprise. more...

Price: $27.50

An incisive and readable book which applies the insights of complex areas of contemporary social theory, first to investigate the history of racist psychology, and then to theorise the dynamics of black feminism. more...

Price: $85.00

Dreambooks in Byzantium offers the first English translation with commentary of six of the seven extant Byzantine oneirocritica—manuals on the interpretation of dreams. Dreams permeated all aspects of Byzantine culture, from religion to literature to everyday life, and drew upon Classical and Islamic literature, oral and written Byzantine materials, and, perhaps, their own oneirocritic practices. Much of the source-material was pagan in origin and was reworked into a Christianized context, with many interpretations given a Christian coloring. more...

Price: $99.95

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, mortality, and the soul, through a reading of Freud's argument about creativity with poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Matthew von Unwerth, a young Freudian analyst, explores Freud's provocative ideas on the connections between creativity and mortality in this elegant literary musing. Taking as his starting point Freud's essay "On Transience," in which the analyst describes a walk with two unnamed companions (poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Rilke's lover, writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé), Unwerth examines the origins of human creativity from a psychoanalytic standpoint, tracing the arc of Freud's beliefs on the subject from his passionately curious teenage years to his death in 1939 after a long struggle with cancer. Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources-from The Odyssey to Goethe to Freud's earliest letters-Freud's Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and an absorbing intellectual debate. In the spirit of books by Alain de Botton, Lesley Chamberlain, and Dava Sobel, it begins with a meeting of the minds among three of Europe's great intellects-an event Freud may have significantly reimagined for his essay-and weaves a delicate and moving treatise on art, love, death, and the way the three are inextricably linked. more...

Price: $15.00

A valuable guide to current work in the social and cultural history of insanity. It provides a comprehensive summary of the debates on the growth of institutional care during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. more...

Price: $140.00