A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
Medical tag
Altered States
Trance, ecstasy, visions, mystical or dissociative states without a named drug.
Works
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
The Enneads collect Plotinus's treatises as arranged by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine. They do not form a continuous textbook, but they return again and again to a metaphysical pattern: all reality proceeds from the One, through Intellect, to Soul, and the philosophical life is a movement of return toward unity.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion is Finney's manual of revival as method. Where Edwards treats awakening as a surprising work to be interpreted cautiously, Finney argues that revivals are not miracles in the sense of being beyond means.
On Fairy-Stories is Tolkien's defense of fairy-story as a serious form of imaginative art. He begins by rejecting narrow definitions that identify fairy tales with children, small supernatural beings, dreams, or mere folklore collection.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Whitefield's Selected Sermons preserve the voice of the eighteenth century's most famous evangelical itinerant. His preaching emphasized new birth, heartfelt conversion, human sin, Christ's mercy, and the immediate demand that hearers respond.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
This paired entry sets Jonathan Edwards's most famous terror sermon beside his narrative of revival in Northampton and neighboring towns. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is often remembered for its imagery of danger, wrath, and suspended judgment, but its structure is theological before it is theatrical.
Patrick's own writings are the narrow bridge between the global St. Patrick's Day figure and a real late Roman Christian voice.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania joins two histories that later language often confuses: the hagiographic cult of a youthful martyr and the medical naming of involuntary or epidemic movement.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. , followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
The Journey of the Mind into God is Bonaventure's compact map of contemplative ascent, written after meditation on Francis of Assisi's vision of the six-winged seraph at La Verna. The work is structured around six stages, corresponding to the seraph's wings, by which the mind rises through creation, the self, and the names of God before passing beyond conceptual mastery into ecstatic union.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Passages
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Athens and constraint
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. I
Romain Rolland's oceanic feeling explained as an infantile ego-feeling persisting alongside the adult ego; pathological states in which the boundary between ego and world becomes uncertain.
- Confessions, Book VIII.5, 8–12
The chain of habit, the divided will, physical agitation in the garden, and the conversion.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 22–23
Descent into the Cave of Montesinos and Quixote's report of dream-like visions.
- Dracula, Ch. 6–8 (Mina's journal)
Lucy's sleepwalking in Whitby and the night Mina finds her on the churchyard bench.
- Dracula, Ch. 14
Van Helsing invokes Charcot and hypnotism to persuade Seward to open his mind to the inexplicable.
- Dracula, Ch. 23–26
Van Helsing hypnotises Mina at sunrise and sunset to track Dracula through her psychic link.
- Early Christian Lives, Life of Antony, tomb and fortress episodes
Demonic assaults, terrifying visions and endurance under attack structure ascetic combat.
- Early Christian Lives, Jerome, Life of Hilarion
Fasting, travel, miracles and demonic confrontations define the holy man’s authority.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Shepherd of Hermas, Visions
Visionary encounters call the church to repentance and moral repair.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Life of St. Francis, Ch. XVII
The stigmata at La Verna are the major medieval case of sanctity written onto the body.
- Enneads, Soul and embodiment
Enneads gives this tag concrete force through its medical relevance is indirect but real: passions, embodiment, purification, attention, and the divided self make philosophy a therapy of perception
- Essays, On Socrates' Personal Deity
Speculation on how Socrates' inner divine sign communicated with him, a classical discussion of voices and inner signs.
- Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lectures on anxious sinners
The handling of conviction and distress illustrates the deliberate intensification of spiritual anxiety.
- On Fairy-Stories, Fantasy and sub-creation
On Fairy-Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is oblique: tolkien treats imagination as recovery from dulled perception and as consolation amid suffering rather than as pathology
- On the Road, Part Four
Driving into Mexico, the companions smoke marijuana with a local youth and experience the landscape in an altered state.
- Pensees, Fragment 552, Section VII
The Mystery of Jesus: Christ's self-inflicted agony in Gethsemane, the sleeping disciples, and the voice that says physicians will not heal.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 244a–245c
The four kinds of divine madness, contrasted with madness arising from human disease.
- Selected Sermons, Reports around outdoor preaching
Crowd tears, trembling, and silence became contested evidence for revival or enthusiasm.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', middle entries
A doctor's demonstration of hypnotic suggestion on the narrator's cousin in Paris.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part One, 'With the Samanas'
Years of fasting, self-mortification and meditative self-loss, which Siddhartha comes to see as temporary escape like intoxication.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Faithful Narrative, descriptions of awakenings
Reports of distress, tears, joy, and communal spread show revival emotion as an interpretive challenge.
- St. Patrick's Writings, Confessio X
The voice from Ireland is a central religious experience that later psychology might compare with conversion and vocation narratives.
- Studies on Hysteria, Anna O. case
Breuer's case history centers on catharsis, speech, dissociation, and the making of a therapeutic legend.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 111, Arts. 3–4
How angels or demons can move the imagination and senses, set against natural causes of dream-visions and hallucinations in disturbed humours.
- The Aeneid, Book 6
The Sibyl’s possession and Aeneas’ descent to the dead frame prophecy as an altered state.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, prologue
Dionysus announces his punitive arrival and the women’s ecstatic departure to the mountain.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, first messenger speech
The bacchants nurse animals, strike the ground for water and wine, and tear cattle apart.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, Pentheus disguised
Pentheus’ desire to spy is manipulated through cross-dressing, fascination and altered perception.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 11
The vision of Krishna's universal form, which leaves Arjuna terrified, bewildered and trembling.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §2
Contrast between Greek Dionysian festivals and the sexual licence and cruelty of barbarian orgies, which Nietzsche calls a mixture of lust and cruelty.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §7
The lethargic gulf of oblivion after Dionysian ecstasy; return to everyday reality brings nausea and an ascetic, will-paralysing mood; art as a healing enchantress.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Rome section ('Sinbad the Sailor')
Franz eats hashish in the Count's grotto on Monte Cristo and experiences vivid visions.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 12
Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.
- The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Golden Ass, Book 3
Lucius applies the wrong magical ointment and becomes a donkey while retaining human mind.
- The Golden Ass, Books 4–6
Cupid and Psyche explores forbidden sight, trials and divine affliction inside the larger transformation plot.
- The Golden Ass, Book 11
Isis restores Lucius through ritual procession and roses, framing recovery as religious initiation.
- The Journey of the Mind into God, Through the world
The Journey of the Mind into God gives this tag concrete force through the work is not clinical, but its language of the mind, affection, illumination, ecstasy, and disciplined desire belongs to philosophy as therapy
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Bisclavret'
The baron's periodic transformation into a werewolf and his confession to his wife.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Eliduc'
Guilliadun falls into a deathlike swoon and is revived with a red flower used by a weasel to restore its mate.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Apology 31c–d; 40a–c
Socrates' divine sign, an inner voice that only ever restrains him, and its silence on the day of the trial.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Symptom lectures
Anesthesia, paralysis, contracture, amnesia, and crises are treated as disturbances of function and synthesis.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 4-7
Pym's confinement in the Grampus hold combines darkness, foul air, hunger, thirst, fear and possible delirious misperception.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Final chapters
The flight from Tsalal into the polar unknown produces terror, exhaustion and visionary perception at the edge of narrative collapse.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter VIII
Mass poisoning by wild honey: dose-dependent intoxication, vomiting, diarrhoea, inability to stand, delirium and collapse, with recovery after a day and convalescence over three to four days.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter VIII: The Relations of Minds to Other Things
Hysterical anaesthesia and blindness, Janet's and Binet's experiments, automatic writing and the secondary or subconscious self.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IX: The Stream of Thought
Interruptions of consciousness under nitrous oxide and other anaesthetics, in epilepsy and fainting, and how the edges of experience merge across the gap.
- The Symposium, Symposium setting
The guests regulate drinking after earlier excess, making intoxication part of the social frame.
- The Trial of Joan of Arc, Condemnation trial, first voice testimony
Joan describes onset, fear, time of day, location, light, and auditory experience, giving material often cited in medical speculation.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism
The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.
- The Waves, Rhoda's soliloquies
Rhoda repeatedly experiences terror, unreality and separation from ordinary social identity.
Quotes
“Take up and read; Take up and read”
“I was in an agitation which approached a delirium”
“Rogamus te, sancte puer, ut venias et adhuc ambules inter nos”
“so that sometimes while asleep a man may judge that what he sees is a dream, discerning, as it were, between things, and their images”
“Indeed, the commotion of the spirits and humors may be so great that such appearances may even occur to those who are awake, as is seen in mad people, and the like”
Frequently cited
“But the world's Wise are not wise, Claiming more than mortal may”
Frequently cited
“There may be many shapes of mystery, And many things God makes to be, Past hope or fear”
“It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness”
“There are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health”
Frequently cited
“There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.”
“A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door”
“Pass that by. I was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father's garden”
“If I were in a wood, I could easily hear the Voice which came to me. It seemed to me to come from lips I should reverence. I believe it was sent me from God”
“I would He might send me yet more, so that it might be discerned that I am come from God and that it is He Who hath sent me”
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”
“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”
Frequently cited
“our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different”
“Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map”
“The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent—: and sprang up”