In recent years, the American fiction writer David Foster Wallace has been treated as a symbol, as an icon, and even a film character. Ordinary Unhappiness returns us to the reason we all know about him in the first place: his fiction. By closely examining Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and The Pale King, Jon Baskin points readers to the work at the center of Wallace's oeuvre and places that writing in conversation with a philosophical tradition that includes Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Cavell, among others. What emerges is a Wallace who not only speaks to our postmodern addictions in the age of mass entertainment and McDonald's but who seeks to address a quiet desperation at the heart of our modern lives. Freud said that the job of the therapeutic process was to turn "hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness." This book makes a case for how Wallace achieved this in his fiction.

This book approaches David Foster Wallace not only as a fiction writer but also as a cultural critic and a moral philosopher whose formal innovations were intended as "therapies" for the pervasive dis-eases of our time.

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers. A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

The pursuit of happiness is a defining theme of the modern era. But what if people aren't very good at it? This and related questions are explored in this book, the first comprehensive philosophical treatment of happiness in the contemporary psychological sense. In these pages, Dan Haybron argues that people are probably less effective at judging, and promoting, their own welfare than common belief has it. For the psychological dimensions of well-being, particularly our emotional lives, are far richer and more complex than we tend to realize. Knowing one's own interests is no trivial matter. As well, we tend to make a variety of systematic errors in the pursuit of happiness. We may need, then, to rethink traditional assumptions about human nature, the good life, and the good society. Thoroughly engaged with both philosophical and scientific work on happiness and well-being, this book will be a definitive resource for philosophers, social scientists, policy makers, and other students of human well-being.

Integrative psychotherapy is a groundbreaking book where the authors present mindfulness- and compassion-oriented integrative psychotherapy (MCIP) as an integration of relational psychotherapy with the practice and research of mindfulness and compassion. The book elucidates an approach which is holistic and based on evidence-based processes of change related to the main dimensions of human experience. In this approach, mindfulness and compassion are viewed as meta-processes of change that are used within an attuned therapeutic relationship to create a powerful therapeutic model that provides transformation and growth. The authors offer an exciting perspective on intersubjective physiology and the mutual connection between the client’s and therapist’s autonomic nervous systems. Comprised of creatively applied research, the book will have an international appeal amongst psychotherapists/counsellors from different psychotherapy traditions and also students with advanced/postgraduate levels of experience.

“Should be read by every parent, teacher, minister, and Congressman in the land.”—The Atlantic In The Conquest of Happiness, first published by Liveright in 1930, iconoclastic philosopher Bertrand Russell attempted to diagnose the myriad causes of unhappiness in modern life and chart a path out of the seemingly inescapable malaise so prevalent even in safe and prosperous Western societies. More than eighty years later, Russell’s wisdom remains as true as it was on its initial release. Eschewing guilt-based morality, Russell lays out a rationalist prescription for living a happy life, including the importance of cultivating interests outside oneself and the dangers of passive pleasure. In this new edition, best-selling philosopher Daniel C. Dennett reintroduces Russell to a new generation, stating that Conquest is both “a fascinating time capsule” and “a prototype of the flood of self-help books that have more recently been published, few of them as well worth reading today as Russell’s little book.”

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we’re so lousy at predicting what will make us happy – and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off? Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Guardian This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was. Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfully—he is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his books, and his daily life behind. But he’s also gathering material for his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction to yoga. Four days later, there’s a tap on the window: something has happened. Forced to leave the retreat early, he returns to a Paris in crisis. Life is derailed. His city is in turmoil. His work-in-progress falters. His marriage begins to unravel, as does his entanglement with another woman. He wavers between opposites—between self-destruction and self-control; sanity and madness; elation and despair. The story he has told about himself falls away. And still, he continues to live. This is a book about one man’s desire to get better, and to be better. It is laced with doubt, animated by the dangerous interplay between what is fiction and what is real. Loving, humorous, harrowing and profound, Yoga hurls us towards the outer edges of consciousness, where, finally, we can see things as they really are.

Author Ilham Dilman explains why a "thoughtful psychology," encompassing the varied modes of being experienced by humans, is the best tool for investigating the nature of good and evil. To illustrate, he employs Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky's axe-murdering protagonist in Crime and Punishment, following his alienation from goodness, his return to it, and finally, his ethical rebirth.

This spiritual manual describes mahamudra meditation from the perspective of the "gradual path," a progressive process of training that is often contrasted to sudden realization. The book contains a step-by-step description of the ways to practice, precise descriptions of the various stages and their intended realizations, and the typical problems that arise along with their remedies. Drawn from a variety of sources, "Pointing Out the Great Way" distills the experiences of many great masters who have traversed the path of meditation to the point of perfect mastery.