Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself?

From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated.

A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

Volume four of the all-new "Handbook of Neuropsychology" addresses the disorders of visual behaviour. This work reviews the neurophysiology of spatial vision, as well as recent work on recognition deficits for faces, objects and words. Also presented are disorders of spatial representation, of colour processing and of mental imagery. Balint's syndrome, blindsight, and visuospatial or constructional disorders are discussed and the relationship between eye movements and brain damage are described in detail.

Volume four of the all-new "Handbook of Neuropsychology" addresses the disorders of visual behaviour. This work reviews the neurophysiology of spatial vision, as well as recent work on recognition deficits for faces, objects and words. Also presented are disorders of spatial representation, of colour processing and of mental imagery. Balint's syndrome, blindsight, and visuospatial or constructional disorders are discussed and the relationship between eye movements and brain damage are described in detail.

More than just a therapeutic technique, psychoanalysis as a school of thought has redefined our ideas on sexuality, the self, morality, family, and the nature of the mind for much of the twentieth century. At its broadest, Freud's thinking on civilization and social forces provides a context in which to consider the history of political struggle among individuals and societies. This volume explores a central paradox in the evolution of psychoanalytic thought and practice and the ways in which they were used. Why and how have some authoritarian regimes utilized psychoanalytic concepts of the self to envisage a new social and political order? How did psychoanalysis provide both theoretical and practical elements to legitimize resistance to those same regimes? How can a school of thought be co-opted so deftly by different groups for different political ends? Bringing together contributions from innovative scholars of history, politics, and psychoanalysis, this volume analyzes the various outcomes of this fascinating and influential theory's development under a wide spectrum of governments that restricted political and cultural freedoms from the 1930s to the present. The regimes analyzed range from Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and Spain and Hungary under Fascism and Communism; modern Latin American dictatorships, such as Brazil and Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s; and the influence of Hoover, McCarthy, and the larger Cold War on psychoanalysis in America. A fresh addition to an enormous body of scholarship, this will be required reading for academics interested in the relationship between politics and non-political systems of thoughts and beliefs, the transnational circulation of ideas, social movements, and the intellectual and social history of psychoanalysis.

Academics, analysts and artists are gathered together in this illustrated volume, which celebrates the culmination of a two-year project at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies to discover and debate current issues in psychoanalysis in the arts and humanities across five language-fields in Europe and beyond. The twenty-four essays include surveys of psychoanalytic thought in areas speaking French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish; the work of eight artists, ranging from found objects in Marseilles or the figure of Gradiva on a man-hole cover to the life of Le Corbusier, the lightest object in the world and words on a glass wall; and eight academic essays, including studies of humour in child therapy, Freud in Argentina, sibling trauma in the Schreber family and psychoanalysis in the university curriculum.

The scope of this work is to synopsize, synthesize, extend, and to challenge Bion in a reader-friendly manner. Presenting the most important legacy-ideas for psychoanalysis-the ideas that are on the cutting edge of the field that need to be known by the mental health profession at large-it highlights and defines the broader and deeper implications of his works.A Beam of Intense Darkness presents Bion's ideas faithfully and also uses his ideas as launching pads for the author's conjectures about where Bion's ideas point. This includes such ideas as "the Language of Achievement," "reverie," "truth," "O," and "transformations"-in, of, and from it, but also" L," "H," and "K" linkages (to show how Bion rerouted Freud's instinctual drives to emotions), "container/contained," Bion's ideas on "dreaming," "becoming," "thoughts without a thinker," "the Grid," his erasure of the distinction between Freud's, "primary and secondary processes" and the "pleasure" and "reality principles," "reversible perspective," "shifting vertices," "binocular vision," "contact-barrier," the replacement of "consciousness" and "unconsciousness" with infinity and finiteness, Bion's use of models, his distinction between "mentalization" and "thinking," as well as many other items.

The common, existing distance between children and adults is the basis of this work, which has been addressed in many literary and cultural works throughout history. Not being able to remember how we, now adults, thought as children -like their spontaneity or magic and omnipotent form of thinking- would leave children completely isolated, like a helpless immigrant in a foreign land. This book attempts to comprehend, how parents' misunderstanding, can induce loneliness and helplessness in children, that with time will become traumatic, and will remain unconsciously present in all of us forever. It will continue to repeat using infantile emotions, children form of thinking, and experiencing as well, loneliness, anxiety, depression, fears and the chronic need of finding a 'rescuer', in the form of power, fame, drugs, money, religion, and so on. This very innovative approach to the understanding of children's segregation and its repercussion on adult's emotional life, will be of invaluable interest to all practicing psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and parents included.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Intended for those who are troubled by their lives and want to make changes, but don't know where to begin, this is a book about relationships. It is not intended as a self-help book, but as one which will encourage the reader to really think about themselves and the way they act - how their behaviour is driven by thoughts, feelings, and impulses of which they may not have any conscious awareness. Jukes examines his 'Mad Hypothesis' - so called because it seems, at first glance, to be 'mad.' He has used it successfully in therapeutic work to refer to everything that is wrong in a patient's relationship and even their life: "You are responsible for everything that is wrong with your relationship including any behaviour of your partner which you use to justify, excuse, or in any other way account for yo own behaviour towards him/her, or the world in general." The author draws on his vast clinical experience to explore this fascinating idea and looks at other related issues such as anxiety, sulking, masochism, and attachment. He also includes many illuminating case-studies which perfectly illustrate his theories and make the text accessible to both clinicians and non-professionals.

What stands out about racism is its ability to withstand efforts to legislate or educate it away. In The Racist Fantasy, Todd McGowan argues that its persistence is due to a massive unconscious investment in a fundamental racist fantasy. As long as this fantasy continues to underlie contemporary society, McGowan claims, racism will remain with us, no matter how strenuously we struggle to eliminate it. The racist fantasy, a fantasy in which the racial other is a figure who blocks the enjoyment of the racist, is a shared social structure. No one individual invented it, and no one individual is responsible for its perpetuation. While no one is guilty for the emergence of the racist fantasy, people are nonetheless responsible for keeping it alive and thus responsible for fighting against it. The Racist Fantasy examines how this fantasy provides the psychic basis for the racism that appears so conspicuously throughout modern history. The racist fantasy informs everything from lynching and police shootings to Hollywood blockbusters and musical tastes. This fantasy takes root under capitalism as a way of explaining the failures and disappointments that result from the relationship to the commodity. The struggle against racism involves dislodging the fantasy structure and to change the capitalist relations that require it. This is the project of this book.

A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.

At the intersection between psychoanalysis (Freudian and Lacanian) and philosophy, this book is a glimpse into the life of patients, into desire and love, and into the fate of the relationship between men and women.

Groundbreaking, insightful, and compulsively readable, "Revolution in Mind" goes beyond myth and polemic to give us the story of one of the most controversial and important intellectual endeavors of the twentieth century. In this masterful history, George Makari demonstrates how a new way of thinking about inner life coalesced and won followers who spread this body of thought throughout the West. Along the way he introduces the reader to a fascinating array of characters, many of whom have been long ignored or forgotten.

"Revolution in Mind" is a brilliant, engaging, and radically new work--the first ever to account fully for the making of psychoanalysis.

Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that the representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence. According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels, sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span of Genet's work, from his early novels to the posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet, Lacan and our wanting being.