An intellectual biography aiming to demonstrate, despite his denials, that Freud was a "biologist of the mind". The author analyzes the political aspects of the complex myth of Freud as "psychoanalytic hero" as it served to consolidate the analytic movement.

"An introduction to psychology doesn't have to be science-challenged to be student-friendly. After all, what more powerful tool is there for captivating students than the real science behind what we know? This skillful presentation centers on a smart selection of pioneering and cutting-edge experiments and examples, it effectively conveys the remarkable achievements of psychology (with the right amount of critical judgment) to introduce the field's fundamental ideas to students" - from publisher.

Reads like a good book… Written in the style of their award-winning nonfiction books, the Dans capture students’ attention in a way few textbooks can claim. Each chapter, each page is written with narrative hooks that retain student interest by engaging their curiosity, compassion, and interest in the world around them. Students who read Introducing Psychology will quickly learn to critically examine the world around them and apply the lessons of psychology to their own lives. …Teaches like a great textbook. The Dans focus the essential topics within psychology without diluting the explanation or removing examples intended to illustrate concepts. By refining their coverage to the most clear, thought-provoking, and illustrative examples, the Dans manage to accomplish two difficult goals: making thoughtful content choices covering the various fields of psychology, and doing so in a manner that retains clarity and emphasizes student engagement.

During the past decade a diverse group of disciplines have simultaneously intensified their attention upon the scientific study of emotion. This proliferation of research on affective phenomena has been paralleled by an acceleration of investigations of early human structural and functional development. Developmental neuroscience is now delving into the ontogeny of brain systems that evolve to support the psychobiological underpinnings of socioemotional functioning. Studies of the infant brain demonstrate that its maturation is influenced by the environment and is experience-dependent. Developmental psychological research emphasizes that the infant's expanding socioaffective functions are critically influenced by the affect-transacting experiences it has with the primary caregiver. Concurrent developmental psychoanalytic research suggests that the mother's affect regulatory functions permanently shape the emerging self's capacity for self-organization. Studies of incipient relational processes and their effects on developing structure are thus an excellent paradigm for the deeper apprehension of the organization and dynamics of affective phenomena. This book brings together and presents the latest findings of socioemotional studies emerging from the developmental branches of various disciplines. It supplies psychological researchers and clinicians with relevant, up-to-date developmental neurobiological findings and insights, and exposes neuroscientists to recent developmental psychological and psychoanalytic studies of infants. The methodology of this theoretical research involves the integration of information that is being generated by the different fields that are studying the problem of socioaffective development--neurobiology, behavioral neurology, behavioral biology, sociobiology, social psychology, developmental psychology, developmental psychoanalysis, and infant psychiatry. A special emphasis is placed upon the application and incorporation of current developmental data from neurochemistry, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and neuroendocrinology into the main body of developmental theory. More than just a review of several literatures, the studies cited in this work are used as a multidisciplinary source pool of experimental data, theoretical concepts, and clinical observations that form the base and scaffolding of an overarching heuristic model of socioemotional development that is grounded in contemporary neuroscience. This psychoneurobiological model is then used to generate a number of heuristic hypotheses regarding the proximal causes of a wide array of affect-related phenomena--from the motive force that drives human attachment to the proximal causes of psychiatric disturbances and psychosomatic disorders, and indeed to the origin of the self.

Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy offers mental health professionals of all disciplines and orientations the most comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the state of the art and science in integrating mindfulness, compassion, and embodiment techniques. It brings together clinicians and thinkers of unprecedented caliber, featuring some of the most eminent pioneers in a rapidly growing field. The array of contributors represents the full spectrum of disciplines whose converging advances are driving today’s promising confluence of psychotherapy with contemplative science. This historic volume expands the dialogue and integration among neuroscience, contemplative psychology, and psychotherapy to include the first full treatment of second- and third-generation contemplative therapies, based on advanced meditation techniques of compassion training and role-modeled embodiment. Advances in Contemplative Psychotherapy offers the most profound and synoptic overview to date of one of the most intriguing and promising fields in psychotherapy today.

This interdisciplinary work addresses the question, What role should psychological conceptualization play for thinkers who believe that the brain is the organ of the mind? It offers readers something unique both by systematically comparing the writings of eliminativist philosophers of mind with the writings of the most committed proponents of biological psychiatry, and by critically scrutinizing their shared “anti-anthropomorphism” from the standpoint of a diagnostician and therapist. Contradicting the contemporary assumption that common sense psychology has already been proven futile, and we are just waiting for an adequate scientifically-based replacement, this book provides explicit philosophical and psychological arguments showing why, if they did not already have both cognitive and psychodynamic psychologies, philosophers and scientists would have to invent them to better understand brains. (Series A)

Two fields of interest are combined in this volume: the history of science and the theory, or philosophy, of science (metascience). The result is a history of psychology with emphasis placed upon a metascientific analysis of the work of fourteen psychologists from various periods.Each analysis is set in historical context; a period or school is discussed in each chapter, together with a metascientific analysis of some major works from the respective period or school. The author employs a metascientific descriptive system or `systematology' developed during more than 30 years of work on comparative, metascientific studies of about 50 psychological theories. The results of those studies have been published in previous works.These analyses are also used here for verifying T.S. Kuhn's much-debated theory about the `revolutionary' development of sciences. The author revises Kuhn's theory and shows that it can be applied to the history of psychology. Thus, in a Kuhnian sense, psychology may be said to have had two `normal periods' and two `periods of crisis' leading to school formation.

The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

Edgar A. Levenson is a key figure in the development of interpersonal psychoanalysis whose ideas remain influential. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness builds on his previously published work in his key areas of expertise such as interpersonal psychoanalysis, transference and countertransference, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and sets his ideas into contemporary context. Combining a selection of Levenson’s own writings with extensive discussion and analysis of his work by Stern and Slomowitz, it provides an invaluable guide to how his most recent, mature ideas may be understood and applied by contemporary psychoanalysts in their own practice. This book explores how the rational algorithm of psychoanalytic engagement and the mysterious flows of consciousness interact; this has traditionally been thought of as dialectical, an unresolvable duality in psychoanalytic practice. Analysts move back and forth between the two perspectives, rather like a gestalt leap, finding themselves listening either to the "interpersonal" or to the "intrapsychic" in what feels like a self-state leap. But the interpersonal is not in dialectical opposition to the intrapsychic; rather a manifestation of it, a subset. The chapters pick up from the themes explored in The Purloined Self, shifting the emphasis from the interpersonal field to the exploration of the enigma of the flow of consciousness that underlies the therapeutic process. This is not the Freudian Unconscious nor the consciousness of awareness, but the mysterious Jamesian matrix of being. Any effort at influence provokes resistance and refusal by the patient. Permitted a "working space," the patient ultimately cures herself. How that happens is a mystery wrapped up in the greater mystery of unconscious process, which in turn is wrapped into the greatest philosophical and neurological enigma of all—the nature of consciousness. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness will be highly engaging and readable; Levenson’s witty essayist style and original perspective will make it greatly appealing and accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as practitioners in these fields.