"Titillating and provocative essays from one of the freshest voices in science today -- Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does "free will" really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway? In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than thirty of his most popular essays from Scientific American and Slate, as well as two new pieces, that take readers on a bold and captivating journey through some of the most taboo issues related to evolution and human behavior. Exploring the history of cannibalism, the neurology of people who are sexually attracted to animals, the evolution of human body fluids, the science of homosexuality, and serious questions about life and death, Bering astutely covers a generous expanse of our kaleidoscope of quirks and origins. With his characteristic irreverence and trademark cheekiness, Bering leaves no topic unturned or curiosity unexamined, and he does it all with an audaciously original voice. Whether you are interested in the psychological history behind the many facets of sexual desire or the evolutionary patterns that have dictated our current mystique and phallic physique, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? is bound to create lively discussion and debate for years to come"--

"Totem and Taboo" is a collection of four essays by Sigmund Freud that were published together in German in 1913. Freud sought to apply his theories of psychoanalysis to the study of anthropology and early human history. The four essays cover a wide range of topics. In "The Horror of Incest", Freud examines the varied and common rules in primitive cultures that limit contact between members of the same family. In "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence," Freud posits that primitive cultures and their attitudes about magical objects are similar to the behavior of people with neurotic psychological conditions in the modern world. In "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought," Freud draws comparisons between the primitive belief in magic and magical animals to obsessive and compulsive disorders. Finally, in "The Return of Totemism in Childhood," Freud, influenced by one of Charles Darwin's theories about the male-dominated arrangement of early human societies, looks for parallels with his own Oedipus complex theory in the structure of primitive cultures. A classic and influential work of early psychoanalysis, "Totem and Taboo" is an important read for students of both psychology and social anthropology.

In this classic work, three eminent scientists expose and dismantle the claims that class, race, and gender inequalities are the products of our biological and genetic inheritances. Not in Our Genes provides a bold and biting critique of biological determinism and sociobiology. In refuting the claim that what individuals can and cannot do is fixed, in essence, by their genetic makeup, the authors offer an important reply to an argument raging far beyond the scientific world and widely affecting our society and our lives. This edition features a new introduction by the authors.

Tomkins' magnum opus, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness , was published by Springer Publishing Company in four volumes over 30 years. When Tomkins began writing the book in the 1950's, American psychology was dominated by psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories - neither of which placed much importance on the role of basic emotions in everyday human behavior. Tomkins challenged the status quo by developing - over the span of nearly 2,000 pages -- a theory of consciousness and motivation that placed emotion at the core of the human experience. Because so few psychologists were studying emotion at that time, Tomkins drew liberally from other academic disciplines to help formulate his ideas and support his arguments: evolutionary biology, ethology, cybernetics, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurophysiology, among others. In the process, Tomkins practically invented the field of "nonverbal behavior" through close observation of emotional expressions in people, including his own infant son. His work was a brilliantly eccentric pastiche of ideas that adhered to no strict disciplinary or ideological boundaries. In time, however, AIC came to prominence through the research of his disciples, notably Paul Ekman and Carroll Izzard, who went on to become major researchers in the psychology of emotion. Today, Tomkins's book is influential not just in psychology but in philosophy, sociology, communication studies, even in "affective computing. Springer Publishing Company is pleased to continue to offer this magisterial work in four volumes.

2011 Reprint of 1950 Translation by William Turner. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Recommended, both as a fascinating and little-known document in the history of psychology and as a provocative reading of the history of psychology. (Religious Studies Review). Will interest many students of the history of psychoanalysis... Rank's conclusions contribute to present-day controversies about the status of psychoanalysis as a science. (Psychiatric Times ) The first complete English translation of a work that Rank published in 1930. It draws on anthropology, sociology, mythology, religion, philosophy, history, and literature to chart the development of the human psyche... The book's antimaterialistic passion makes it a compelling counterpoint to the stern biology of our own age, and the bounds it sets to what psychoanalysis can claim are justly drawn. (Wilson Quarterly ) Unquestionably Rank's most important work... This new translation is an effort to create a Rank for our millennium... [and it] reads elegantly and comfortably in English... The argument is complex and intricate, consisting of a long historical/ethnographic sweep that takes us from a 'primitive' state, via animism through the Christian or sexual era to the scientific era and modern development of psychology... Along the way we find traces of many of Rank's other brilliant psychological surveys -- the double, Don Juan, heroes' birth myths, the theme of incest -- woven into this massive canvas and viewed on the largest scale... Throughout this book, the grand tapestry is set with some remarkable gems of observation. (Naomi Segal Psychoanalysis and History ) This is the first complete translation of Otto Rank's fascinating text on the nature and history of the concept of the Soul and Will in the psychological history of humankind... a tour de force in vigour, scope and application to many contemporary issues such as sexual behaviors, the nature of dreaming, incest prohibitions and narcissism, to name but a few. (L.R. Edgar Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society ) In his last years, Otto Rank turned his lifetime of thought and learning toward two of the most difficult topics in human history: religion and the soul. The result was this now-classic work, available in this new, very accessible English translation. Unlike many other intellectuals of the twentieth century, Rank maintains a place for the soul rather than dismissing it as a fantasy. The soul and the beliefs about it, he argues, set forth the foundation for psychology, with its complex analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, and personality. Rank's commentary is not limited to beliefs about individual souls but includes ideas about group souls, sometimes encompassing nations or generations. Rank suggests that it is in expression of group beliefs that the idea of the soul attains its greatest power. What is the soul? Otto Rank treats it as a universal and essential belief for individuals and their societies, constant in function but evolving in form through millennia. To borrow a post-Rankian metaphor, the soul was created in the big bang of irresistible psychological force colliding with immutable biological fact-our will to live forever against death. The collision creates a spark in our individual and social consciousness which through history has become both consolation and inspiration: the immortal soul. All ideologies reflect this phenomenon and modify its expression to suit the era. Otto Rank wrote before the atom bomb or television, both of which alter our perception of death without changing the fact. Rank's introduction of the soul as an essential part of contemporary psychology helps explain a number of perplexing, irrational phenomena in contemporary life.

In Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Life , Alexander Lowen shows how the experience of pleasure or pain determines our emotions, thinking, and behavior. Examining the psychology and the biology of pleasure, Alexander Lowen explores its roots in the nature of the body and shows that emotional health means that we are in a state of pleasure - that is, we feel good in our bodies.

A neuroscientist demystifies the subject of consciousness in this up-to-date discussion of mind-body connections. How does the firing of neurons give rise to subjective sensations, thoughts, and emotions? How can the disparate domains of mind and body be reconciled? The quest for a scientifically based understanding of consciousness has attracted study and speculation across the ages. In this direct and non-technical discussion of consciousness, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman draws on a lifetime of scientific inquiry into the workings of the brain to formulate answers to the mind-body questions that intrigue every thinking person. Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains. Edelman explores the relation of consciousness to causation, to evolution, to the development of the self, and to the origins of feelings, learning, and memory. His analysis of the brain activities underlying consciousness is based on recent remarkable advances in biochemistry, immunology, medical imaging, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, yet the implications of his book extend farther--beyond the worlds of science and medicine into virtually every area of human inquiry.

THE new psychology of dreams, as elaborated by Freud, represents one of the greatest advances ever made in our knowledge pf the human mind and of human motives. For abnormal psychology, dream-analysis can be compared only in importance with the discovery of the origin of species and of the factors of organic evolution in the field of biology. The analysis of dreams is not only of great theoretical value in the understanding of the unconscious but has its practical side as well, in giving medicine the most potent instrument which it has ever possessed in the treatment of certain functional nervous disturbances.This volume is written along purely psycho-analytic lines, and every dream therein has been personally analyzed by the author. Its aim is to give the general reader an outline of the meaning of dreams as elaborated by the psycho-analytic school, with its applications to medical science, in particular to that method of psychotherapy known as psycho-analysis. Because of the great difficulties inherent in the subject of dream-analysis, only the basic principles have been given, the details being left for the special treatises and journals on the subject.ISADOR H. CORIAT.Boston, February, 1915.

In this remarkable book by one of the great psychologists and neurologists of the early twentieth century, Kurt Goldstein presents a summation of his “holistic” theory of the human organism. In the course of his studies on brain-damaged soldiers during the First World War, Goldstein became aware of the failure of contemporary biology and medicine to genuinely understand both the impact of such injuries and the astonishing adjustments that patients made to them. He challenged reductivist approaches that dealt with “localized” symptoms, insisting instead that an organism be analyzed in terms of the totality of its behavior and interaction with its surrounding milieu. He was especially concerned with the breakdown of organization and the failure of central cerebral controls that take place in catastrophic responses to situations such as physical or mental illness. But Goldstein was equally attuned to the amazing powers of the organism to readjust to such devastating losses, if only by withdrawal to a more limited range of activity that it could manage by a redistribution of its reduced energies, thus reclaiming as much wholeness as new circumstances allowed. Goldstein’s concepts in The Organism have had a major impact on philosophical and psychological thought throughout this century, as can be seen in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Binswanger, and Roman Jakobson, not to mention the wide-ranging field of Gestalt psychology.

What exactly is "human nature"? Are we correct in accepting ourselves as unchangeable, determined by biology, or is this idea an obstacle to our cognitive, emotional, and evolutionary development? George Mandler explores these questions from a fresh evolutionary and social perspective. He examines the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology and suggests a mid-course correction. Topics are approached from a variety of backgrounds, drawing on relevant literature and Mandler's own research. He begins with what we know about evolution and gene expression, then moves on to the complex phenomena of consciuosness and emotion. The constraints of both nature and nurture are discussed as limiting forces on human development, and natural selection is considered in the context of our social fabric, which draws on both psychological and anthropological knowledge. Mandler considers human difference, particularly in regard to intelligence and gender, and discusses the nature of human values, including our need for morality and freedom. The book concludes with an appraisal of human cognition and language.