On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”

Analyzes the processes of adjustment and their relation to personality, focusing on models of adjustive success and failure, adaptation, behavior theory, stress and coping, and psychodynamic therapy

This is the original work on which Hans Eysenck's fifty years of research have been built. It introduced many new ideas about the nature and measurement of personality into the field, related personality to abnormal psychology, and demonstrated the possibility of testing personality theory experimentally. The book is the result of a concentrated and cooperative effort to discover the main dimensions of personality, and to define them operationally, that is, by means of strictly experimental, quantitative procedures. More than three dozen separate researches were carried out on some 10,000 normal and neurotic subjects by a research team of psychologists and psychiatrists. A special feature of this work is the close collaboration between psychologists and psychiatrists. Eysenck believes that the exploration of personality would have reached an advanced state much earlier had such a collaboration been the rule rather than the exception in studies of this kind. Both disciplines benefit by working together on the many problems they have in common. In his new introduction, Eysenck discusses the difficulty he had in conveying this belief to scientists from opposite ends of the psychology spectrum when he first began work on this book. He goes on to explain the basis from which Dimensions of Personality developed. Central to any concept of personality, he states, must be hierarchies of traits organized into a dimensional system. The two major dimensions he posited, neuroticism and extraversion, were in disfavor with most scientists of personality at the time. Now they form part of practically all descriptions of personality. Dimensions of Personality is a landmark study and should be read by both students and professionals in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and sociology.

Newly available in paperback, this is the first book to bring together classic and contemporary readings illustrating the new subdiscipline, evolutionary psychopathology. Each chapter demonstrates how evolutionary arguments are being brought to bear on the study of a different psychiatric condition or pathalogical behaviour. The Maladapted Mind is aimed primarily at primarily at advanced students and researchers in the fields of psychiatry, abnormal psychology, biological anthropology, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

No writer plunged more wholeheartedly into the chaotic energies of the 1960s than Norman Mailer, as he fearlessly revolutionized literary norms and genres to capture the political, social, and sexual explosions of an unsettled era. Here, for the first time in one volume, are his unforgettable books of the 1960s: two disruptive and visionary novels, and two radically innovative journalistic masterpieces. War hero, television star, existential hipster, seducer, murderer: such is the protagonist of An American Dream, Mailer's hallucinatory voyage through the dark night of an America awash in money, sex, and violence. In Why Are We in Vietnam? a motor-mouthed 18-year-old Texan on the eve of military service recounts with manic and obscene exuberance a grizzly bear hunt in Alaska that exposes the macho roots of the war. The acclaimed "non-fiction novel" The Armies of the Night (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) and its follow-up Miami and the Siege of Chicago are on-the-scene, in-the-scene accounts of an antiwar march on the Pentagon and the party conventions of 1968, as Mailer casts himself as a player in the drama he reports, bringing a sharp and merciless eye on the decade's political upheavals.

A thorough examination of psychological disorders and their effects on the body and society, originally published in 1963. Best for a historical perspective on the science of psychology.

Book by Brenner, Charles

"Heitler has established herself as a leader in what is evolving as an extraordinary, valuable integration of systems perspectives, cognitive and behavioral methodologies, and traditional views of personality and therapy."--Psychotherapy in Private Practice

The tension between Freud's clinical discoveries about the power of human emotions and the theoretical framework in which he embedded these discoveries has been most eloquently detailed by Freud himself. His agoniz ing reappraisal. in 1926, of the libido theory of anxiety is just one example. But, as is usually the case, theoretical difficulties point to gaps in existing knowledge. At the time when Freud made his fundamental discovery that hysterical symptoms (and dreams) were understandable as reflections of for bidden ("strangulated") affect, anthropology was essentially nonexistent as a science. The cultural nature of human beings (our species' unique adaptation to life) could only be adumbrated by Freud (for example, in the myth of Totem and Taboo). As a consequence, the primacy of human attachment emotions in the acculturation process could not be postulated as a theoretical base. What Freud adopted as his base of theorizing was the most forward looking materialist concept of his the Darwinian concept of individual instincts as the driving force in life. Freud assumed that the vicissitudes of in stincts determine the fate of "ideas" in consciousness. Freud's theoretical base thus impelled him to speculate about the origin and fate of ideas instead of about the origin and fate of human emotional connectedness. This book is a small step along the road which should ultimately bring Freud's discoveries into a modem theoretical framework in psychology."

With case studies showing how unwarranted, negative self-images cause most psychological problems, the author sets forth guidelines for overcoming these problems and improving relationships with friends, family, and co-workers

Anticipating one of the central findings of post-Freudian psychiatry, he argues that "truth" is irrelevant to the work of therapy. He contrasts the negative externalization of will, which leads to denial and guilt, with the creative power of will, tracing this conflict in both the individual and the history of human society. Rank's development of will psychology led him to a philosophy of the psychological, outlined in Truth and Reality . Here he explores the psychological determinants of the relationship of inner world to outer reality.

Book by Ellis, A.

For more than half a century, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life’s work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece. Art historians and the legal system seek to distinguish forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other hand—physicians, patients, politicians, health insurance providers, and legal professionals—take the opposite stance when faced with the challenge of distinguishing everyday problems in living from bodily diseases, systematically authenticating nondiseases as diseases. The boundary between disease and nondisease—genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood—thus becomes arbitrary and uncertain. There is neither glory nor profit in correctly demarcating what counts as medical illness and medical healing from what does not. Individuals and families wishing to protect themselves from medically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left to their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about human dilemmas miscategorized as “mental diseases” and about medicalized responses misidentified as “psychiatric treatments.” Delivering his sophisticated analysis in lucid prose and with a sharp wit, Szasz continues to engage and challenge readers of all backgrounds.

Human behaviour, which holds a fascination for most people, can best be viewed as lying on a spectrum - from normality at one end to extreme deviation at the other, with obvious grey areas in-between. Even the most deviant-seeming behaviours appear to have their counterparts in normality, and such behaviours can often be explained (at least in part) when viewed in their socio-cultural and psychological context.

softcover book

This book brings together significant articles and excerpts on psychoanalytic technique written by Freud's contemporaries-- analysts who provided some of the most important contributions to their field.

Book by Stekel, Wilhelm