Key Writings on the Mind from Plato and the Buddha Through Shakespeare, Descartes and Freud to the Latest Discoveries of Neuroscience.
"I think, therefore I am" - Descartes
'Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?' - Shakespeare
A unique compendium of key texts of psychology, from Aristotle to cutting-edge neuroscience.
Our concern with how the mind works; how the hurt mind can be healed; has led to a massive growth of interest in popular psychology.
The ideas of such post-Freudians as Erich Fromm, RD Laing, Alice Miller, Oliver Sacks, Anthony Storr and Kay Redfield Jamison, for example, are now almost as familiar as those of the founders of Psychology on whose pioneering work they all to some extent depend.
This book brings together extracts from the key writings on the subject from all over the world from the first written accounts to the most up-to-date research. It is not a clinical work, but an imaginative bringing together of case notes, journals and letters as well as more formal writings that presents humanity's most significant attempts to understand the mind and the way the mind works.
Contributors include: Aristotle, Samuel Beckett, William Blake, Buddha, Leo Tolstoy, Immanuel Kant, Marcel Proust, Epicurus, John Locke and many others.
