Overview

Our concern with the mind and how the hurt mind can be healed has led to a massive growth of interest in psychology and the way our brains work. ""The Bloomsbury Book of the Mind"" brings together key writings from all over the world from the earliest recorded accounts to the most up-to-date research in an imaginative assembly of case notes, journals, poetry, fiction and letters as well as more formal writings. In six sections on Perception, Memory, Emotion, Thought, Consciousness and the Self, Stephen Wilson ranges from the big questions (What is consciousness? Is there an unconscious?) to the quirkier mysteries of the human mind (the effects of hypnotism, the experience of a phantom limb, or an imaginative cure for sexual impotence). The linking commentary sets each extract in the context of its time and in relation to the other pieces around it.

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9780747568575

Table of Contents

Reviews

'The ultimate brainy dip-in anthology ... Can you resist?' Financial Times 'Both a good primer and an agreeable recapitulator for old hands ... there is much pleasure to be had by nibbling away at our ignorance, as this book does so appetisingly' Independent 'From the Freudian slip to the frontal lobe: every aspect of the human mind is considered here ... just the thing for the armchair psychologist' Scotsman 'Immensely informative for the general reader: a glittering selection of the persistent mysteries of the human mind' Times Literary Supplement

Stephen Wilson's new book is an anthology that gives readers the chance to access, compare and contrast the writings of some of the greatest thinkers on the Mind in one volume. Compiled with the insight we've come to expect from the author of The Cradle of Violence: Essays on Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Literature, the contents are neatly categorized under the headings of Perception, Memory, Emotion, Thought, Consciousness and Self. Advances in neuroscientific technique have provided a better idea of the workings of the brain but it's still a mystery how brain activity relates to subjective experience. It may be that the mind is simply incapable of knowing itself in any objective way. Wilson comes at the problem from numerous different angles. Key ideas have been chosen for their early perceptiveness, for being significant even if false or because they appeal to the author's sense of the bizarre. A brief biographic background precedes each contribution but readers are left to draw their own conclusions. Many early ideas firmly rejected by contemporaries later proved possible. Herman von Helmholtz's notion that there could be inferences without consciousness was considered ridiculous in the 19th century but is now obvious to anyone typing a sentence beginning 'Yours' on the computer and finding that the computer has annoyingly responded with 'truly'. In the section on Perception, a poem by Wordsworth: 'Blessed the infant babe' indicated that he saw the development of imagination as the product of a nurturing loving relationship between mother and child. 200 years later, Professor Allan Schore's thesis confirms that early social environment mediated by the primary caregiver directly influences the final wiring of the circuits in the brain. Discussing Memory, the author takes the views of Coleridge, Hazlitt and Proust on the transcendental in the transformation of experience into the remembered past, and contrasts them with current neuroscientific thinking on the synaptic junction between nerves. In principle, Plato's description of memory as the impress of a signet ring on a wax seal is also comparable to the latest findings on brain plasticity. Emotion looks at Bertrand Russell on 'Desire and Feeling', Erich Fromm on 'Passions', Robert Louis Stevenson on 'Love' and Francis Bacon on 'Unregulated Emotion'. Daniel Goleman argues that scientific views of human intelligence are far too narrow without a consideration of emotion since they fail to correlate with success in life and relationships. The section on 'Thought' brings together such odd bedfellows as Tolstoy, Anthony Storr, Descartes and B F Skinner. In 'Consciousness' the author enlists the help of Gilbert Ryle and includes excerpts from The Upanishad, Dostoyevsky and Samuel Beckett. Finally in 'Self', he examines the difficulties of trying to understand ourselves as individuals, looking at the Jungian, the Freudian and the Adlerian unconscious as well as the Buddhist doctrine of conquering self. Literature weighs in with Philip Roth on the problem of Being Oneself in 'The Counterlife' and David Lodge on the idea of a unique self in his comic novel Thinks. Stephen Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a practising psychotherapist. He's already an expert at drawing contrasting and complementary theories out of apparently disparate sequences of literature, philosophy and psychiatry, and this entertaining volume is a worthy addition to his previous work and a 'must have' for anthology lovers. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Stephen Wilson is a practising psychotherapist and the author of THE CRADLE OF VIOLENCE: ESSAYS ON PSYCHIATRY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE, a brief biography of Sigmund Freud and INTRODUCING THE FREUD WARS (2002).

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