This article describes the relations between academic psychology and psychical research in Britain during the inter-war period, in the context of the fluid boundaries between mainstream psychology and both psychical research and popular psychology. Specifically, the involvement with Harry Price of six senior academic psychologists: William McDougall, William Brown, J. C. Flugel, Cyril Burt, C. Alec Mace and Francis Aveling, is described. Personal, metaphysical and socio-historical factors in their collaboration are discussed. It is suggested that the main reason for their (...) mutual attraction was their common engagement in a delicate balancing act between courting popular appeal on the one hand and the assertion of scientific expertise and authority on the other. Their interaction is typical of the boundary work performed at this transitional stage in the development of psychology as a discipline. (shrink)

The early 20th-century French sociologist and philosopher Gabriel Tarde was an important critic of Durkheim's ontology of the social. Tarde developed a microsociological and ontological critique of the philosophical problems of resemblance and of variation underlying Durkheim's comparative sociology. Recently, thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Éric Alliez have begun to revisit Tarde and to develop a theme of the significance of Tarde's thought as a harbinger of postmodern theory. This article examines Tarde's theories in the light of (...) this new reception. It is shown that Tarde draws heavily from Leibniz's theory of the quantitative continuity of qualitative singulars in order to critique Durkheim's statistics-based social realism. While some key limitations of Tarde's critique are exposed, it is argued that Tarde finds a way to remain faithful to statistical sociology as a project even while calling radically into question the qualitative unity of the social. (shrink)

Originally published in 1926, a complement to the author's Outline of Psychology, this book surveys the field of neurotic and mental disorders in so far as they are not due to gross organic lesions. A book, not for the medical expert only, but for every man or woman interested in the riddle of human personality.

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing (...) and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

Science studies has often been against the normative dimension of epistemology, which made a naturalistic study of science impossible. But this is not to say that a new type of normativity cannot be detected at work inscience studies. This is especially true in the second wave of studies dealing with the body, which has aimed at criticizing the physicalization of the body without falling into the various traps of a phenomenology simply added to a physical substrate. This article explores the (...) work of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret in that respect, and shows how it can be used to rethink the articulation between the various levels that make up a body. (shrink)

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

Darwinian matters : life, force and change -- Biological difference -- The evolution of sex and race -- Nietzsche's Darwin -- History and the untimely -- The eternal return and the overman -- Bergsonian differences -- The philosophy of life -- Intuition and the virtual -- The future.

This essay describes the phenomenon of panic from both neurological and affective points of view. It draws on the work of Japp Panksepp, who argues for the importance of distinguishing between fear as a response to physical threat, and panic as a response to the loss of the attachment object. While fear flees, panic, perhaps contrary to appearances, seeks security. This view of panic throws a new light on classic analyses of crowd behaviour, among them those of Le Bon, Tarde (...) and Canetti, but it also has implications for how panic takes hold via electronic media, and for how outbreaks may be calmed. Finally, the essay argues that mediatised panic is a distraction from fear—in which anything at all may represent physical danger, but which at least offers a range of possible responses for addressing the problem, and offers the opportunity for the transformative work performed by cognition on affect. Here the paper draws on the script theory of Silvan Tomkins to provoke questions of the social usefulness of fear in the face of some current arguments to the contrary. (shrink)

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson’s efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his original and innovative views exercised a profound (...) influence on other philosophers--including James, Whitehead, and Santayana--as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of Bergson’s philosophy and its legacy. (shrink)

Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers, Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts -- pure difference and complex ...

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of (...) literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, "Lonely Woman" dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional realization of her concept of "loneliness.".

ORIGIN OF SPECIES. INTRODUCTION. When on board HMS 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was ranch struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings ...

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves. Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the dependency of reason and of civilization itself on the repression (...) of "the beast within." This usage followed a century of Enlightenment thought about human nature and the nature of the human mind. Smith traces theories of inhibitory control from the moralistic psychologies of the early nineteenth century to the famous twentieth-century schools of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Freud. He finds that the meanings of "inhibition" cross disciplinary boundaries and outline the growth of our belief in the self-regulated person. (shrink)

_Changing the Subject_ is a classic critique of traditional psychology in which the foundations of critical and feminist psychology are laid down. Pioneering and foundational, it is still _the _groundbreaking text crucial to furthering the new psychology in both teaching and research. Now reissued with a new foreword describing the changes which have taken place over the last few years, _Changing the Subject _will continue to have a significant impact on thinking about psychology and social theory.

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

This essay describes the phenomenon of panic from both neurological and affective points of view. It draws on the work of Japp Panksepp, who argues for the importance of distinguishing between fear as a response to physical threat, and panic as a response to the loss of the attachment object. While fear flees, panic, perhaps contrary to appearances, seeks security. This view of panic throws a new light on classic analyses of crowd behaviour, among them those of Le Bon, Tarde (...) and Canetti, but it also has implications for how panic takes hold via electronic media, and for how outbreaks may be calmed. Finally, the essay argues that mediatised panic is a distraction from fear—in which anything at all may represent physical danger, but which at least offers a range of possible responses for addressing the problem, and offers the opportunity for the transformative work performed by cognition on affect. Here the paper draws on the script theory of Silvan Tomkins to provoke questions of the social usefulness of fear in the face of some current arguments to the contrary. (shrink)