From Tortured to Almost Free: A Psychiatric Therapist’s Life with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the story of the author’s horrific struggle with severe OCD at a time when little to nothing was known about this macabre, debilitating mental illness. Honest, unwavering, and raw, the author takes the reader along as she struggles to make it through a day, a day in which ordinary things such as cigarette butts, classroom closets, and the starting of an automobile engine create terror. Twenty years later, this same author, now a therapist to others with this horrible disorder, is armed with knowledge and techniques and the realization that how OCD behaves has everything to do with the underlying beliefs one holds of oneself. Changing these beliefs often is essential for getting well. Sharing with her readers all she has learned, the author provides a hands-on course in what gut-wrenching, severe OCD looks like and what it takes to get well. Essential reading for those who struggle with OCD and for all who are determined to help them.

Great art comes from great pain. Or that's the impression left by these haunting profiles. Pieced together, they form a revealing mosaic of the creative mind. It's like viewing an exhibit from the therapist's couch as each entry delves into the mental anguish that afflicts the artist and affects their art. The scope of the artists covered is as varied as their afflictions. Inside, you will find not just the creators of the darkest of dark literature, music, and art. While it does reveal what everyday problem kept Poe's pen to paper and the childhood catastrophe that kept Picasso on edge, it also uncovers surprising secrets of more unexpectedly tormented artists. From Charles Schultz's unrequited love to J.K. Rowling's fear of death, it's amazing the deep-seeded troubles that lie just beneath the surface of our favorite art. As much an appreciation of artistic genius as an accessible study of the creative psyche, Tortured Artists illustrates the fact that inner turmoil fuels the finest work.

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. The volume’s two-fold approach to the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ from the perspectives of both victim and beholder - as well as their combined creation of a gaze - is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies and confronting them with the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience.

FROM TORTURED TO ALMOST FREE: A PSYCHIATRIC THERAPIST'S LIFE WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER is the story of the author's horrific struggle with severe OCD at a time when little to nothing was known about this macabre, debilitating mental illness. Honest, unwavering, and raw, the author takes the reader along as she struggles to make it through a day, a day in which ordinary things such as cigarette butts, classroom closets, and the starting of an automobile engine create terror. Twenty years later, this same author, now a therapist to others with this horrible disorder, is armed with knowledge and techniques and the realization that how OCD behaves has everything to do with the underlying beliefs one holds of oneself. Changing these beliefs is essential for getting well. Essential reading for those who struggle with OCD and for all who are determined to help them.

Collects 60 of Williams's paintings. Hot rods, monsters, girls in bikinis and taco stands are among the prominent elements. The chromatic chaos disseminated by Williams in this multimedia book is about as masterful as it can get in the wood-pulp page-trade. Heisenberg's SurRealities involved continual change and self-determined subjective, bizarre singularities. Introduction by Timothy Leary.