Psychology History

Once upon a time Martians and Venusians met, fell in love, and had happy relationships together because they respected and accepted their differences. Then they came to Earth and amnesia set in: They forgot they were from different planets.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

Donald Trump's campaign chairman went to jail. So did his personal lawyer. His long-time political consigliere was convicted of serious federal crimes, and his national security advisor pled guilty to others. Career intelligence agents and military officers were alarmed enough by the president's actions that they alerted senior government officials and ignited the impeachment process. Yet despite all this, a years-long inquiry led by special counsel Robert Mueller, and the third impeachment of a president in American history, Donald Trump survived to run for re-election. Why?

Spanning hundreds of ideas developed over the past century, 50 Psychology Classics also explores important contemporary writings, such as Gladwell's Blink and Seligman's Authentic Happiness. Listeners will gain insight into the scientific research of leading contemporary psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists. And they'll discover why we think and act the way we do from the landmark best sellers of psychology.

Buddhism is one of the most practical and simple belief systems on this planet and it has greatly helped me on my way to become a better person in every aspect possible. No matter if you are totally green when it comes to Buddha's teachings or if you have already heard something about them - this audiobook will help you systematize your knowledge and will inspire you to learn more and to take steps to make your life positively better!

With acuity, humor, and respect for human diversity, The Shortest History of Sex reveals where the many facets of our sexuality—chemical, anatomical, behavioral, social—come from. Chasing down our evolutionary family tree, from the first aquatic creatures to primate societies, David Baker sheds light on our baffling array of passions, impulses, and fetishes, and guides us toward a clear understanding of one of the deepest, most abiding forces of human nature.

We all worry about what others think of us. We all long to succeed and fear failure. We all suffer - to a greater or lesser degree, usually privately and with embarrassment - from status anxiety. For the first time, Alain de Botton gives a name to his universal condition and sets out to investigate both its origins and possible solutions. He looks at history, philosophy, economics, art, and politics - and reveals the many ingenious ways that great minds have overcome their worries. The result is a book that is not only entertaining and thought-provoking - but genuinely wise and helpful as well.

As a technology pioneer at MIT and as the leader of three successful start-ups, Kevin Ashton experienced firsthand the all-consuming challenge of creating something new. Now, in a tour-de-force narrative 20 years in the making, Ashton leads us on a journey through humanity's greatest creations to uncover the surprising truth behind who creates and how they do it.

Many have studied it, written about it and even died for it and yet, it appears, we are mostly blind to the essence of love. Dr Liat Yakir takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolution of love in history and in modern times, showing the importance of hormones, neurons and genes that dictate who we’ll fall in love with and who we’ll reject.

As with the two prior volumes of True Crime Case Histories, I want to start with a quick word of warning. Most news articles and television true crime shows skim over the sticky details of truly gruesome crimes. In my books I don't gloss over the facts, regardless of how horrible they may be. I try to give my listeners a clear and accurate description on just how demented the killers really were. I do my best not to leave anything out. The stories included in these books are not for the squeamish.

At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love—how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage, to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and home, she lost her beloved husband following a devastating battle with cancer.

Many people today are so dazzled by the long-term potential for artificial intelligence that they overlook the much clearer and more immediate potential for a new form of "collective intelligence": the intelligence of groups of people and computers working together. In Superminds, Thomas Malone explains what we need to do to take advantage of this potential. Groundbreaking and utterly fascinating, Superminds will change the way you work - both with others and with computers - for the better.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is remembered as the father of psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is one of his key works, written three decades after his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams. In it he considers the conflict between the needs of the individual acting both egotistically and altruistically in the pursuit of happiness and the myriad demands of civilised society and the ensuing tensions this clash of needs and demands generates.

In this strikingly original and groundbreaking audiobook, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Although the Iliad was written 27 centuries ago, it has much to teach about combat trauma, as do the more recent, compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.

The brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality. Throughout The Use of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?

Cultural historian Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power, Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories.

Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes.

Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism.

In 1938, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi, became the first child diagnosed with autism. Beginning with his family’s odyssey, In a Different Key tells the extraordinary story of this often misunderstood condition, from the civil rights battles waged by the families of those who have it to the fierce debates among scientists over how to define and treat it.

Sigmund Freud revolutionized the way in which we think about ourselves. From its beginnings as a theory of neurosis Freud developed psychoanalysis into a general psychology, which became widely accepted as the predominant mode of discussing personality and interpersonal relationships. Anthony Storr goes one step further and investigates the status of Freud's legacy today and the disputes that surround it.