Secondhand Psychology & Psychoanalysis Bargain Book Box SP2870

Secondhand Psychology & Psychoanalysis Bargain Book Box SP2870

Nineteen books from the disputed borders of the human mind — where Freud meets his sharpest critics, where R.D. Laing challenges the entire psychiatric project, and where Oliver Sacks finds his most extraordinary patients. Psychology as literature, and it reads like it.

1. Playing and Reality — D.W. Winnicott (Pelican) — one of the most influential books in psychoanalytic thought: Winnicott's argument that play is not recreation but the foundation of all creative and cultural life.
2. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — Oliver Sacks (Picador) — the neurologist's landmark collection of clinical tales, which proved that medicine could be literature of the highest order.
3. The Integrity of the Personality — Anthony Storr (Pelican) — Storr's influential account of what a mature, integrated personality looks like and how psychotherapy might help achieve it.
4. Sexual Deviation — Anthony Storr (Pelican) — a calm, humane, and clinically authoritative examination of sexual behaviour outside the norm, remarkable for its lack of moralising.
5. Sanity, Madness and the Family — R.D. Laing and A. Esterson (Pelican) — the landmark study of eleven families of schizophrenic women, arguing that madness is a rational response to an impossible situation.
6. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry — edited by Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill (Penguin) — a collection of essays engaging with Laing's radical critique of psychiatry, including responses from both defenders and critics.
7. A Good Enough Parent — Bruno Bettelheim (Pan) — the definitive work on the crucial issues we all face in bringing up children, from the author of The Uses of Enchantment.
8. The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl — D.W. Winnicott (Pelican) — Winnicott's detailed case study of a two-year-old child in analysis, a masterpiece of clinical writing and one of his most moving books.
9. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis — Richard Webster — the most comprehensive and sustained critique of Freudian theory, arguing that psychoanalysis is not a science but a secular religion.
10. The Psychoanalytic Movement (Paladin Movements and Ideas) — Ernest Gellner (Paladin) — the philosopher's wickedly sharp examination of how psychoanalysis became a self-confirming intellectual movement immune to refutation.
11. Thinking About Thinking: Or, Do I Sincerely Want to Be Right? — Antony Flew — the philosopher of logic on self-deception, motivated reasoning, and the defences the mind constructs against uncomfortable truths.
12. The Strange, Familiar and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness — Israel Rosenfield (Picador) — a neuroscientist argues that memory, perception, and consciousness are inseparable, drawing on Freud, Edelman, and clinical case studies.
13. The Politics of the Family and Other Essays — R.D. Laing (Pelican) — Laing's account of how the family structure itself creates the psychological disturbance it claims to protect against.
14. Freud and Man's Soul — Bruno Bettelheim (Pelican) — the argument that Freud's translators systematically mistranslated his work into clinical jargon, losing the humanistic and literary dimensions of the original.
15. Freud for Beginners — Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate — the classic illustrated introduction to Freudian thought, which has introduced more readers to the subject than almost any other book.
16. The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis — Ernest Lawrence Rossi — a scientific account of how hypnosis and suggestion actually work at the level of biology, drawing on state-of-the-art neuroscience.
17. Metaphors of Mind: Conceptions of the Nature of Intelligence — Robert J. Sternberg — the cognitive psychologist's landmark analysis of the different theories of intelligence and the hidden metaphors that shape each one.
18. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times — Christopher Lasch (Picador) — the author of The Culture of Narcissism on the psychology of survival in an age of uncertainty, and what it costs the self to adapt.