In Repressed Spaces Paul Carter tours the cultural history of agoraphobia, the fear of open space. Its symptoms were first described in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton, the British scholar and writer, although it wasn’t until 1871 that Carl Otto Westphal coined the term to describe several of his patients who experienced severe anxiety when walking through streets or squares. There have been many attempts to explain and treat the condition: critics of modernization have linked it to bad city planning; psychoanalysts, calling it "street panic", have blamed it on the Oedipus complex; psychiatrists have tied it to existential insecurity and describe it as the fear of places or situations that have triggered panic attacks. Freud believed that agoraphobia, like all phobias, was part of an "anxiety neurosis" and had a sexual origin. Taking as his starting-point the fact that Freud himself was agoraphobic, and analyzing the way people have negotiated open spaces from Greek and Roman times to the present day, Paul Carter finds that "space fear" ultimately results from the inhibition of movement. Along the way, the author asks why Freud repressed his agoraphobia, and examines literature, the work of architects and theorists – including Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin and R. D. Laing – artists such as Munch, Lapique and Giacometti, and the German "street films" of the 1920s. He concludes by proposing a new way of regarding open space, a new "poetics of agoraphobia", one that is sensitive to the agoraphobe’s point of view and provides lessons for architects and urban planners today.

'This is what I really want. I want to discover ways to discriminate the important things in human life. I want to find ways of getting past this blind fumbling with existence.' - Marion Milner, from A Life of One’s Own. How often do we really ask ourselves, 'What will make me happy? What do I really want from life?' In A Life of One’s Own Marion Milner, a renowned British psychoanalyst, artist and autobiographer, takes us on an extraordinary and compelling seven-year inward journey to discover what it is that makes her happy. On its first publication, W. H. Auden found the book 'as exciting as a detective story' and, as Milner searches out clues, the reader quickly becomes involved in the chase. Using her own personal diaries, she analyses moments of everyday life that can bring surprising joy, such as walking, listening to music, and drawing. She also records, in a disarmingly clear and insightful manner, the struggle between the urge to order and control one’s thoughts and standing back to let them wander where they may. A pioneering account of lived experience that also anticipates the contemporary phenomenon of mindfulness, A Life of One’s Own is a great adventure in thinking and living whose insights remain as fresh today as they were on the book’s first publication in the 1930s. This Routledge Classics edition includes a revised Introduction by Rachel Bowlby.

Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.

New York Police Department "cop doc" Dr. Dan Rudofossi delves into what it meant to live as a deep-cover operative through narratives with Joe Pistone, the FBI agent who spent six years living as Donnie Brasco as a member of the Bonanno crime family. When Operation Donnie Brasco abruptly closed, it was the longest and most successful infiltration of a Mafia family. Dr. Rudofossi underscores Pistone’s genius to survive daily challenges of infiltration by using innovations in the ecological niches of Mafia violence. Donnie Brasco’s "mental toughness," resilience, and ingenuity are understood through Rudofossi’s signature Eco-Ethological Existential Analysis. Mapping out why and how trauma shaped functional dissociation as unconscious adaptation, the author’s experience as a police psychologist—that is, a "cop doc"—helps decode the bigger picture of conflict, resolution, and compromise in the disparate worlds of policing and organized crime. This unique look at the costs and successes of tracking, infiltrating, arresting, and convicting those involved in organized crime is a groundbreaking read for law enforcement personnel, criminal justice, homeland security, law students, police psychologists, as well as anyone fascinated by the world of organized crime.

An insightful look into contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction and the problem of Chinese postmodernity

The fledgling science of psychoanalysis permanently altered the nineteenth-century worldview with its remarkable new insights into human behavior and motivation. It quickly became a benchmark for modernity in the twentieth century--though its durability in the twenty-first may now be in doubt. More than a hundred years after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, we’re no longer in thrall, says cultural historian Eli Zaretsky, to the “romance” of psychotherapy and the authority of the analyst. Only now do we have enough perspective to assess the successes and shortcomings of psychoanalysis, from its late-Victorian Era beginnings to today’s age of psychopharmacology. In Secrets of the Soul, Zaretsky charts the divergent schools in the psychoanalytic community and how they evolved–sometimes under pressure–from sexism to feminism, from homophobia to acceptance of diversity, from social control to personal emancipation. From Freud to Zoloft, Zaretsky tells the story of what may be the most intimate science of all.