Psychology History

The formal study of psychology as a scientific enterprise began in Germany in the late 19th century, but the observation of human behavior dates back to ancient Greece. Defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, psychology has attained a range of branches including clinical, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, forensic, health, and neuropsychology. In a wide-ranging audiobook, listeners are introduced to the world of psychology and those who formed the science as we know it.

To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children, a masterly new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed and betrayed by a desire for a world beyond her own. Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago...

With profound implications for our most foundational assumptions about gender, Gender Mosaic explains why there is no such thing as a male or female brain. For generations, we've been taught that women and men differ in profound and important ways. Women are more sensitive and emotional, whereas...

If you want to know your Freud from your Jung and your Milgram from your Maslow, strap in for this whirlwind tour of the highlights of psychology.

Most of us spend a significant part of the day in front of a screen. Our work and social lives play out through our computers, tablets and phones: on email, social media, video conference calls and gaming servers. But what is all this screen time doing to our health, our sleep, and our relationships? Professor Pete Etchells studies the way we use screens, and how they can affect us. In UNLOCKED, he delves into the real science behind the panic about our alleged device addiction and withering attention spans.

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.

"Enthralling . . . A page-turner that can hold its own with any one of the many murder-minded podcasts out there." —Jezebel From the acclaimed biographer--the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, leading Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and...

Nearly everyone swears - whether it's over a few too many drinks, in reaction to a stubbed toe, or in flagrante delicto. And yet we sit idly by as words are banned from television and censored in books. We insist that people excise profanity from their vocabularies, and we punish children for yelling the very same dirty words that we'll mutter in relief seconds after they fall asleep. Swearing, it seems, is an intimate part of us that we have decided to selectively deny.

"While it may seem as if we live in a man's world," reports Pollack, "we do not live in a boy's world." Many boys today are struggling either silently, with low self-esteem and feelings of loneliness and isolation, or publicly, by acting out feelings of emotional and social disconnection through...

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

A mother kisses her child's scraped knee. A father embraces his long-lost son. A dog greets its owner with desperate joy. Every culture, every species, every corner of the living world engages in these intimate acts of connection. We've been told these are merely displays of affection. But what if there’s something more? WHAT IF A KISS IS MORE THAN JUST A KISS? For the first time in human history, we are starting to see the hidden force that builds life through connection—not because we discovered something new, but because we have broken something ancient.

Gustave Le Bon was a French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. Other than the cover suggests, this book does not deal with the Russian Revolution, but revolutions and their pre-conditions in general. Le Bon who grew up in France during the revolutionary wave that was pravelent in Europe in the mid 19th century uses in this book the French Revolution as his study case.

E. Fuller Torrey's audiobook provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public.

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home. In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150...

Why listen to a book on Freud? As long as man views guilt as a problem for science instead of religion, the influence of Sigmund Freud will remain lurking in the mind of modern man. Freud was an architect of the modern mind - and unholy builder - like Marx and Darwin. Freud was also a hater of religion - specifically the Bible and its absolute standard.

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way...

It's been said that, after 9/11, the 2008 financial crash and the COVID-19 pandemic, we're a more fearful society than ever before. Yet fear, and the panic it produces, have long been driving forces - perhaps the driving force - of world history: fear of God, of famine, war, disease, poverty, and other people. In Fear: An Alternative History of the World, Robert Peckham considers the impact of fear in history, as both a coercive tool of power and as a catalyst for social change.

This gripping book traces the evolution of brainwashing from its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media. When Pavlov introduced scientific approaches, his research was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and Stalin, setting the stage for major breakthroughs in tools for social, political, and religious control.

Am I happy enough? This has been a pivotal question since America's inception. "Am I not happy enough because I am depressed?" is a more recent version. Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg shows how depression has been manufactured---not as an illness but as an idea about our suffering, its source, and its relief. He challenges us to look at depression in a new way.