Psychology History

Off the Deep End is the first detailed study of the effect on sanity that the vastness, loneliness and inestimable power of the sea has always had on sailors' sanity, confusing the senses and making rational thought difficult. Eminently listenable, it explores accounts that span the centuries, from desperate stories of shipwreck and cannibalism in the Age of Sail, to inexplicable multiple murders, to Donald Crowhurst's suicide in the middle of the 1968 solo Golden Globe Race.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is known around the world as the "Father of Psychoanalysis", and for good reason. If anything, Freud's first patient was himself. A sufferer of psychosomatic symptoms, Freud diagnosed himself as having a repressed antagonism against his father. From there, Freud began to build on his now famous concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression.

When Paul Collins’s son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head … but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation—or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted—will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world. In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son’s autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders.

We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are not dictated by the natural order. They are, in fact, an artificial construction of the modern world. With meticulous archival research that draws on a wide array of sources - including newspapers, restaurant menus, theater schedules, marriage records, school curricula, folklore, housekeeping guides, courtroom testimony, and diaries - David Henkin reveals how our current devotion to weekly rhythms emerged in the United States during the first half of the 19th century.

A los humanos nos gusta pensar en nosotros mismos como criaturas racionales. Sin embargo, algunos de los momentos más excepcionales de la historia no tratan de acontecimientos sino de sentimientos: los orígenes de la filosofía, el nacimiento del cristianismo, la caída de Roma, la Revolución científica o los grandes conflictos bélicos del siglo XX no pueden entenderse sin las emociones.

In his sequel to Ignorance (Oxford University Press, 2012), Stuart Firestein shows us that the scientific enterprise is riddled with mistakes and errors - and that this is a good thing! Failure: Why Science Is So Successful delves into the origins of scientific research as a process that relies upon trial and error, one which inevitably results in a hefty dose of failure. In fact, scientists throughout history have relied on failure to guide their research, viewing mistakes as a necessary part of the process.

Our world order is under pressure as never before. From new authoritarian regimes in the US, Turkey and Russia to the imminent breakup of the European Union and a social media awash with intolerance, things look set to fall apart just as abruptly as the Soviet Union did some 30 years ago. How did we get here, and what do we do now? In this searching new exploration of our crisis, Paul Mason argues that at its heart lies an attack on the idea of humanity itself.

In the summer of 1971, a psychology study at Stanford University morphed into a chilling demonstration of human behavior under the pressures of authority and submission. The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), led by psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo, aimed to explore the psychological effects of power and control in a simulated prison. What began as a planned two-week study unraveled in just six days, as participants—ordinary college students randomly assigned as 'guards' or 'prisoners'—descended into extreme and often disturbing behaviors.

The climate crisis is wreaking havoc across the globe, raising sea levels, disrupting ancient weather patterns and decimating biodiversity worldwide. But new research shows that the warming climate is not just affecting the planet's physical systems - it is affecting us all individually too. In The Weight of Nature, the neuroscientist and journalist Clayton Page Aldern examines, for the first time, the seismic consequences of climate change on the human mind, brain and body.

The vivid and emotional story of one soldier's heroic struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.1944: Norm Bussel, an introspective and happy-go-lucky teen from Memphis, finds himself bailing out of a burning B-17 bomber just months after his 19th birthday. Touching-down in a field outside Berlin, Norm was immediately seized by local farmhands, who were in the process of lynching him when a passing German soldier put a stop to the execution.

Dive into Evolutionary History, a mesmerizing journey through time, tracing the origins and development of all living beings. From the earliest single-celled organisms to the rise of Homo sapiens, this audiobook unravels the intricate tapestry of evolution with clarity and passion. Explore the wonders of life’s evolution across geological epochs, uncovering the secrets of adaptation, survival, and the remarkable journey of our ancestors.

Our investmeents are devastated, obesity is epidemic, blue-chip companies circle the drain, and popular medications turn out to be ineffective and even dangerous. What happened? Didn't we listen to the scientists, economists, and other experts who promised us that if we followed their advice all would be well?

PTSD, as the name suggests, is a stress disorder that follows a traumatic event or period of time where an individual is gripped by such terror and feelings of helplessness that it actually changes how their nervous system operates moving forward. This insidious, and far too often life-threatening disorder can arise from the aforementioned cases of war or sexual abuse, but it also can be set in motion by any and all other forms of psychological trauma.

¿Sabía que Freud fue adicto a la cocaína? ¿Y que grandes psicólogos sufrieron baja autoestima? ¿Imagina cómo fue el psicoanálisis de Hitler? Durante siglos, la histeria se creía debida a que el útero se desplazaba por el cuerpo de la mujer y, para tratarla, se recurría a duchas frías y masajes de naturaleza sexual. El camino hacia terapias basadas en la comprensión y el diálogo fue largo y requirió mucho esfuerzo. Conoceremos los aspectos más oscuros y los más luminosos de esa disciplina científica llamada psicología.

What if you knew that something terrible was going to happen? A sudden flash, the words Charing Cross. Four days later, a packed express train comes off the rails outside the station. What if you could share your vision, and stop that train? Could these forebodings help the world to prevent disasters? In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate these questions.

Sports is a religion. No, really. From pilgrimages and cathedrals, gods and fallen angels, holy wars and holy ghosts, organized sports has every aspect of an organized faith. In fact, it might be even better: all it takes to believe is to stand and cheer. Nobody knows this better than the preeminent sports documentarian Gotham Chopra, who just so happens to be the son of world-renowned spiritualist Deepak Chopra. While his father taught him to find faith through prayer, Gotham felt pulled towards the Boston Garden and Larry Bird instead.

Powerful new technologies enable us to see the details of how our neural systems work. We no longer need to speculate about how genes are expressed or the nature of consciousness. Now, we can understand how the brain functions from the bottom up, how we communicate, form ideas, and behave accordingly.

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

An entertaining, fact-filled defense of the nearly universal tendency to procrastinate, drawing on the stories of history's greatest delayers, and on the work of psychologists, philosophers, and behavioral economists to explain why we put off what we're supposed to be doing and why we shouldn't feel so bad about it.

Les années Freud racontent l'histoire de l'introduction de la psychanalyse en France : la rencontre de Freud et de Charcot, la découverte de l'hystérie, la fondation à Vienne du premier Cercle freudien, l'essor international du mouvement et, en contrepoint, l'aventure des grands pionniers français. Les années Lacan relatent l'évolution de la psychanalyse au sein de la culture française à partir de 1925, et l'émergence de la deuxième implantation du freudisme dans ce pays autour de la personnalité de Jacques Lacan.