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Inspecting Psychology takes a sleuth's magnifying glass to the interplay between psychology, psychiatry and detective fiction to provide a unique examination of the history of psychology.
List of contents
1. The first psychologies: from rock art to the association of ideas 2. Psychology, phrenology and psychiatry: the late 18th-19th centuries and the work of Edgar Allen Poe 3. The birth of modern psychology: 1879 and the significance of apparently unconnected events 4. Psychology and mystical experiences: the late 19th century and the work of William James and Conan Doyle, allies in the mystical 5. Puzzles, riddles and Gestalt theory: the early 20th century and the work of G.K. Chesterton 6. The First World War, mental illness and shell shock: the work of Rebecca West and the detective novels of the 1920s. 7. Freud, psychoanalysis and the psychology of Agatha Christie: the golden age of detective fiction 8. Individual psychology and the inferiority complex: Lord Peter Wimsey and the work of Dorothy Sayers 9. Theories of learning and the rise of behaviourism: the 1920s and the work of Anthony Berkeley, the innovator who seized up 10. Attachment theory and the work of John Bowlby: psychology between 1930 and 1945 and the novels of Gladys Mitchell 11. Psychoanalysis and psychiatry from 1930 to 1960: Georges Simenon and the intellectual egos of Sartre and Lacan 12. Curtains: contemporary psychology, pathology porn and the enduring link with detective fiction
About the author
David Cohen got his Ph.D. on what makes children laugh. His latest books are Churchill and Attlee: The Unlikely Allies Who Won the War and Surviving Lockdown: Human Nature in Social Isolation, which was written in a hurry when we thought the pandemic would soon be over. If only. He is also a film-maker. His ITV film on the Soham murders was nominated for the Baftas. He produced London Unplugged, ten short films about London, and is planning to make a feature film based on his book The Escape of Sigmund Freud, the story of how Freud got out of Vienna in 1938.
Summary
Inspecting Psychology takes a sleuth’s magnifying glass to the interplay between psychology, psychiatry and detective fiction to provide a unique examination of the history of psychology.
