Freud's Paranoid Quest is an exceptionally broad-ranging and well-written book....Whether or not one agrees with certain of his arguments and assessments, one must acknowledge the remarkable intelligence that is displayed on nearly every page. --Louis Sassauthor of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion John Farrell's Freud's Paranoid Quest is the most trenchant, exhilarating and illuminating book I have encountered in many years. [The book] should be pondered not just by all students of Freud's thought but by everyone who senses that 'advanced modernity' has by now outstayed its welcome. --Frederick CrewsUniversity of California, Berkeley In Freud's Paranoid Quest, John Farrell analyzes the personality and thought of Sigmund Freud in order to give insight into modernity's paranoid character and into the true nature of Freudian psychoanalysis. John Farrell's Freud is not the path-breaking psychologist he claimed to be, but the fashioner and prisoner of a total system of suspicion. The most gifted of paranoids, Freud deployed this system as a self-heroizing myth and a compelling historical ideology.

"(John) Farrell argues forcefully against Freud, but does something more important in the process: his reframing of the discussion of modernity has implications for every branch of contemporary humanistic inquiry, and makes this a timely and most significant book".--HARVARD REVIEW.

Farrell (literature, Claremont McKenna College) analyzes Freud's personality and thought to give insight into modernity's paranoid character and into the true nature of Freudian psychoanalysis. He argues that Freud was afflicted with excessive grandiosity and a false sense of persecution, demonstrates that psychoanalysis borrows from the rhetoric of the satiric romance, and attempts to explain the lure of the charismatic paranoid hero. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Don Quixote is the first great modern paranoid adventurer.... Grandiosity and persecution define the characters of Swift's Gulliver, Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Melville's Ahab, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Ibsen's Masterbuilder Solness, Strindberg's Captain (in The Father), Kafka's K., and Joyce's autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus.... The all-encompassing conspiracy, very much in its original Rousseauvian cast, has become almost the normal way of representing society and its institutions since World War Two, giving impetus to heroic plots and counter-plots in a hundred films and in the novels of Burroughs, Heller, Ellison, Pynchon, Kesey, Mailer, DeLillo, and others."—from Paranoia and Modernity Paranoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century. Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature, and its peculiar constellation of symptoms—grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of persecution and conspiracy—are nearly obligatory psychological components of the modern hero. How did paranoia come to the center of modern moral and intellectual consciousness? In Paranoia and Modernity, John Farrell brings literary criticism, psychology, and intellectual history to the attempt at an answer. He demonstrates the connection between paranoia and the long history of struggles over the question of agency—the extent to which we are free to act and responsible for our actions. He addresses a wide range of major authors from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, among them Luther, Bacon, Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, and Rousseau. Farrell shows how differently paranoid psychology looks at different historical junctures with different models of agency, and in the epilogue, "Paranoia and Postmodernism," he draws the implications for recent critical debates in the humanities.

A History of Psychology places social, economic, and political forces of change alongside psychology’s internal theoretical and empirical arguments, illuminating how the external world has shaped psychology’s development, and, in turn, how the late twentieth century’s psychology has shaped society. Featuring extended treatment of important movements such as the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, the textbook approaches the material from an integrative rather than wholly linear perspective. The text carefully examines how issues in psychology reflect and affect concepts that lie outside the field of psychology’s technical concerns as a science and profession. This new edition features expanded attention on psychoanalysis after its founding as well as new developments in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and behavioral economics. Throughout, the book strengthens its exploration of psychological ideas and the cultures in which they developed and reinforces the connections between psychology, modernism, and postmodernism. The textbook covers scientific, applied, and professional psychology, and is appropriate for higher-level undergraduate and graduate students.

Intended as a follow-up to the author's earlier work, Maelzel's Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit (1994), this text looks at how Freud carried out his research and medical duties in the early years. Wilcocks (modern French literature, U. of Alberta, Edmonton) finds the picture to be less than flattering. His contention is that Freud's great influence may be attributed to his mastery of language, rather than his insight into human beings, and that he was "frequently dishonest and mostly incompetent" (from the introduction). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

SCHREBER REVISITED Zvi Lothane, The Legacies of Schreber and Freud - Shmuel Hazanovitz, Schreber's Psychosis Revisited: A Look into the Function of Passion in the Emergence of Psychosis - Bernd Nitzschke, Solution and Salvation. Daniel Paul Schreber's "Cultivation of Femininity" - Galina Hristeva, "Homo Homini Deus." Freud as a Religious Critic in "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" - Andre Bolzinger, Freud's Affectionate Regard for Schreber - Andrea Wald, On a Breakdown in Science: The Paranoid's World and the Baroque - Francois Sauvagnat, Eight Forms of Realities in the Schreber Case"

A timely exploration of intellectual dogmatism in politics, economics, religion, and literature—and what can be done to fight it Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call “fundamentalist.” In Minds Wide Shut, Morson and Schapiro examine how rigid adherence to ideological thinking has altered politics, economics, religion, and literature in ways that are mutually reinforcing and antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that animate democracy. In response, they propose alternatives that would again make serious dialogue possible. Fundamentalist thinking, Morson and Schapiro argue, is not limited to any one camp. It flourishes across the political spectrum, giving rise to dueling monologues of shouting and abuse between those who are certain that they can’t be wrong, that truth and justice are all on their side, and that there is nothing to learn from their opponents, who must be evil or deluded. But things don’t have to be this way. Drawing on thinkers and writers from across the humanities and social sciences, Morson and Schapiro show how we might begin to return to meaningful dialogue through case-based reasoning, objective analyses, lessons drawn from literature, and more. The result is a powerful invitation to leave behind simplification, rigidity, and extremism—and to move toward a future of greater open-mindedness, moderation, and, perhaps, even wisdom.

Goethe's ideas on colour and imagery crossed many borderlines: those of artistic processes and philosophical aesthetics, art history and colour theory, together with the science of perception. This investigation into his writings ranges across art from Antiquity, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, as well as exploring the centrality of these issues to Goethe's literary work. Questions find answers, but also raise new questions. This systematic sequence of essays, originally written between 1999 and 2011, appeals to readers in all these separate areas, while drawing together their essential coherence.

These days a book on psychosis composed entirely of psychoanalytic contributions is a rarity. It can create surprise that, in what some have called "the decade of the brain," scholars on psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology still continue to develop a project of understanding and explaining psychosis from a phenomenological and psychodynamic perspective. And yet such a project not only continues to exist in spite of the dominance of the neuro-biological model, but elaborates itself self-consciously in contradistinction to and even as a corrective to this model. The contributors to this publication share the following concern: "The present-day biologisation and neurologisation of psychiatry has dangerously de-emphasized the concern with the individual suffering soul, with the psyche in psychiatry. But if this means a gain in the scientific status of psychiatry, it is at the same time a loss for patients and practitioners alike."Most of the contributions made to this volume build globally on the ideas of De Waelhens, known for his studies in phenomenology on Heidegger and Merlau-Ponty, as well as for his phenomenological and psychoanalytical research in psychosis. The limits of phenomenology, as formulated by De Waelhens in the last chapter of his La philosophie et les experiences naturelles (1961), incited him to broaden the scope of his perspective; to unravel the basic existential structures to Dasein it is necessary to study human existence in its vulnerability, and it is exactly this vulnerability that breaks through in phenomena such as schizophrenia and paranoia.