A collection of eleven stories depicts the complexity of modern urban society through characters who try to use their dreams to overcome tragic realities.

In the 1980s, Jane Collier revisited a village in Andalusia, where she and others had conducted fieldwork twenty years earlier, to investigate changes in family relationships and to explore the larger question of the development of a "modern subjectivity" among the people. Whereas the villagers she met in the sixties stressed the importance of meeting social obligations, the people she interviewed more recently emphasized the need to think for oneself: status concerns in choosing a spouse had apparently been replaced by romantic love, patriarchal authority by partnership marriages, parental demands for obedience by hopes of earning children's affection, mourners' respect for the dead by personal expressions of grief. In each of these areas, the author detected a modern concern for "producing oneself," which emerged with changes in how villagers experienced social inequality. Collier notes that when inheritance appeared to determine social status, villagers protected family reputations and properties by demonstrating concern for "what others might say." Once villagers began participating in the national job market, where individual achievement appeared to determine a worker's income, they focused on realizing their inner abilities and productive capacities. Sensitivity to one's feelings, thoughts, and aptitudes, along with "rational" assessments of the costs and benefits entailed in "choosing" how to use them, testified to a person's unceasing efforts to realize inner potentials. The author also traces shifts in the meaning of "tradition," suggesting that although "modern" people cannot "be" traditional, they must have traditions in order to produce themselves.

Unmasteredis a new kind of book that allows us to think afresh about desire. Incisive, moving, and lyrical, it opens up a larger space for the exploration of feelings that can be difficult to express. Touching on experiences of desire and pleasure, as well as grief and pain, the book probes the porousness between masculine and feminine, thought and sensation, self and culture, power and pliancy. Katherine Angel reflects on the history of her own feelings, on her encounters and beliefs, and shows how our lives can be shaped by sexuality and feminism; by the words we use, and the stories we tell. The result is a book letting light into places that are often dark and constrained - a searching, erotic work that shifts in meaning and resonance even as it is read.

Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life is a two-volume medical work by Erasmus Darwin dealing with pathology, anatomy, psychology, and the functioning of the body. Its primary framework is one of associationist psychophysiology. The book is famous for its early ideas relating to the theory of evolution, specifically forms of developmentalism similar to Lamarckism. The first volume is divided into 40 sections, on a range of topics related to the body, the senses, and disease. He classifies bodily and sensory motions as "irritative," "sensitive," "voluntary," and "associative." He presents theories on the production and classes of ideas, and seeks to explain the causes and mechanisms of sleep, reverie, vertigo, and drunkenness. He then discusses anatomy, especially the operation of the circulatory system and various glands. The second volume, published in 1796, is focused on classifying diseases into classes, orders, and genera. The book is divided into four major sections, based on his four classes of disease: diseases of irritation, sensation, volition, and association.

In the last two decades there has been a flourishing research carried out jointly by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists. This meltdown of competences has lead towards original approaches to investigate the mental and cognitive mechanisms involved in the way the economic agent collects, processes and uses information to make choices. This research field involves a new kind of scientist, trained in different disciplines, familiar in managing experimental data, and with the mathematical foundations of decision making. The ultimate goal of this research is to open the black-box to understandthe behavioural and neural processes through which humans set preferences and translate these behaviours into optimal choices. This volume intends to bring forward new results and fresh insights into this matter.