Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Medical tag
Neurosis Anxiety
Dread, panic, phobia, nervous agitation, hypochondriacal worry.
Works
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
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.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Democracy in America is Tocqueville's great comparative study of democratic society. The first volume examines American political institutions: township government, federalism, courts, associations, parties, newspapers, religion, and the habits that sustain self-government.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings gather John Boyd's strategic thought from thermodynamics and epistemology to conflict, command, and adaptation. Destruction and Creation argues that organisms and organizations must break apart old mental concepts and rebuild new ones in order to cope with a changing reality.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
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.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
Homilies on the Statues records Chrysostom preaching to Antioch during a civic emergency in 387. After unpopular imperial taxes provoked unrest, a crowd in Antioch insulted and damaged statues of Emperor Theodosius and his family.
Frederick wrote the treatise known in English as Instructions for His Generals in the winter of 1746–1747, after the first two Silesian Wars had won and held the rich Austrian province of Silesia. Its French title was Les Principes généraux de la guerre; a German version, Die General-Principia vom Kriege, was printed in 1748 in a small number of copies for Prussian generals, who were bound to keep it secret.
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.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
Napoleon's Maxims of War is not a book Napoleon wrote but a compilation made by a French officer, General Burnod, who in 1827 published Maximes de guerre de Napoléon, drawn from the emperor's memoirs dictated on St Helena and other sources. The British officer George Charles D'Aguilar translated it into English in 1831, adding explanatory notes with examples from the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Montecuccoli, Frederick the Great and Napoleon himself.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
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.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
Calvin's Selected Sermons present the Reformation as disciplined exposition rather than only protest. Preaching in Geneva, Calvin moved sequentially through biblical books, applying Scripture to doctrine, worship, civic life, household conduct, suffering, and church reform.
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.
Moody's Selected Sermons represent revival preaching after the Civil War, in the age of railroads, urbanization, mass meetings, gospel hymnody, and organized evangelistic campaigns. Moody's style is famously plain.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises gathers the Luther who speaks from pulpit, classroom, controversy, and pastoral desk. The center is not one genre but a reformatory voice: the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgence abuse, The Freedom of a Christian, sermons on faith and good works, catechetical teaching, and occasional writings shaped by conflict.
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.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
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.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Art of War is a short treatise of thirteen chapters, around six thousand Chinese characters, written as a sequence of terse sayings introduced by the formula 'Sun Tzu said'. It begins by declaring war a matter of life and death for the state, to be studied through five constant factors: the moral law that binds people to their ruler, heaven (weather and seasons), earth (terrain and distance), the commander's qualities, and method and discipline.
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 Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
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 Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
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 Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. ' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
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.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life.
Passages
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 7
Hume's despair, dread of error, sense of monstrous isolation and 'heated' brain, followed by recovery through dining, backgammon and conversation; he names his mood a splenetic humour.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXXIII, §7–16
Associations producing antipathies (surfeit of honey), fear of the dark, rumination on injury, aversion to places of illness, unending grief, aversion to a surgeon who cured madness, and context-bound dancing.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §47
The 'religious neurosis' linked to solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence, with speculation about disguised epilepsy and mention of alienists studying the Salvation Army.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Six, §208
Scepticism diagnosed as 'nervous debility' produced by mixing of classes and races, an example of degeneration theory applied to culture.
- Characters, The Superstitious Man
Ritual fear and omen-reading govern daily behavior in ways that resemble anxiety without being clinical diagnosis.
- Characters, The Coward
Everyday danger is exaggerated into avoidance, excuses and panic.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (isolation)
Months of solitary confinement in a hotel room with no books, no activity and no human contact beyond interrogation.
- Chess, Final scene
During the second game against Czentovic, Dr B.'s agitation and confusion return until the narrator stops him.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. VII–VIII
The super-ego, unconscious guilt, and the 'need for punishment'; melancholia as the clinical picture of a harsh super-ego; the possibility of diagnosing 'communal neuroses'.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- Confessions, Books IX–XII
The growing conviction of a plot by Diderot, Grimm, d'Épinay and others, culminating in the narrative of flight and persecution.
- Democracy in America, Volume II, individualism and restlessness
Democratic equality is linked to anxiety, ambition, isolation, and private withdrawal.
- Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings, Destruction and Creation
The argument about breaking and rebuilding concepts is relevant to cognitive flexibility under uncertainty.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- Effi Briest, Kessin chapters (Ch. 8–20)
Effi's night fears of the Chinese ghost and Innstetten's ambiguous refusal to reassure her.
- Essays, On Superstition (Moralia)
Superstition analysed as fear that gives no rest, intruding into sleep and dreams, worse than atheism.
- Essays, Essay II, Of Death
Fear of death compared to children's fear of the dark; the deathbed's groans and convulsions; passions that overcome the fear of dying; death as natural as birth.
- Essays, Essay XXXI, Of Suspicion
Suspicions as defects 'not in the heart, but in the brain' that dispose wise men to irresolution and melancholy, remedied by learning more.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On Noise' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Schopenhauer's complaint that noise, especially the cracking of whips, interrupts and destroys thought.
- Fear and Trembling, Tuning Up (Exordium/Attunement)
Four retellings of the journey to Moriah, each followed by an image of a mother weaning her child by blackening her breast.
- Fear and Trembling, Speech in Praise of Abraham
Abraham's long waiting for a child in old age and the three-day ride to Moriah described as an ordeal of expectation and dread.
- Fear and Trembling, Problema III
Studies of concealment, the demonic, and the relief or impossibility of disclosure, including the merman's repentance and Sarah of Tobit's dread on her wedding night.
- Homilies on the Statues, Opening homilies after the riot
The citywide dread of imperial punishment offers a case study in mass anxiety and pastoral containment.
- Instructions for His Generals, Opening articles on the Prussian troops
Measures to prevent desertion, revealing the coercive conditions and low morale of many soldiers.
- Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Lectures on anxious sinners
The handling of conviction and distress illustrates the deliberate intensification of spiritual anxiety.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters to Bethge, late November 1943
Heavy air raids on Berlin; prisoners screaming in locked cells, Bonhoeffer assisting in the sick bay, and his reflections on fear.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Poem 'Who Am I?' (summer 1944)
Contrast between the composed figure others see and the restless, sick, caged inner self.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letters 24 and 26
Death should be contemplated in advance so it loses its power to terrify.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VI, 'Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions'
Definitions of the passions as forms of appetite and aversion, including fear, grief, anxiety and the 'Panique Terror' of crowds.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. XIII
Life in the natural condition dominated by continual fear and danger of violent death.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 7–11
Jim's account of his paralysis on the Patna deck and the moment he jumped.
- Napoleon's Maxims of War, Maxim LXXIII and Note
The commander's cool head and the unsuitability of excitable temperaments; Montecuccoli's advice never to be anxious or change countenance.
- Northanger Abbey, Vol. II, Ch. 8–9
Catherine's suspicions about Mrs Tilney's death and Henry's account of her illness and the physicians who attended her.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 1, Iphigenia
Religious fear leads to sacrificial violence, establishing superstition as a psychic and social disease.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 4, Of Danger in War
A guided walk from the staff to the firing line: shells, the fall of an acquaintance, pity for the maimed, and the loss of the power of instantaneous decision in the novice.
- On War, Book I, Ch. 7–8, Friction and Concluding Remarks
Friction as the sum of danger, exertion and uncertainty; habituation compared to the pupil of the eye adapting to a dark room.
- Passing, Part One
Irene, feeling faint in the Chicago heat, takes refuge on the hotel roof and is unnerved by a stranger's stare, with physical symptoms of acute anxiety.
- Passing, Part Two–Three
Irene's growing suspicion of an affair, accompanied by sleeplessness, headaches and intrusive thoughts.
- Pensees, Fragment 82, Section II
Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.
- Pensees, Fragment 109, Section II
Health and sickness each produce their own desires; we take medicine cheerfully when ill; our fears come from imagining a state we are not in.
- Pensees, Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II
Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.
- Poems, The Wreck and suffering
Poems gives this tag concrete force through hopkins is important for melancholia, scruple, exhaustion, vocation stress, and the language of inward suffering before modern diagnostic categories
- Pride and Prejudice, First impressions
Pride and Prejudice gives this tag concrete force through its medical angle is modest but present in nerves, hypochondriacal comedy, domestic stress, and the social management of women's bodies and futures
- Selected Sermons, Sermons addressing fear and persecution
The pulpit offers anxious refugees and citizens a theological structure for danger.
- Selected Sermons, Conversion sermons
The direct address to unconverted hearers aims to produce conviction, fear, and emotional crisis.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons on assurance and love
Moody's repeated invitation to trust functions as consolation for anxious and grieving hearers.
- Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Sermons and treatises on temptation and conscience
Luther addresses terrified conscience as a condition requiring gospel consolation rather than moral bookkeeping.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', early diary entries
Fever-like malaise, insomnia and nightmares of being strangled and drained in sleep.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Death's Duel
The sermon stages dying as theological confrontation and preparation.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Sinners, central warning sequence
The sermon intensifies fear to produce urgent self-examination and conversion anxiety.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Green Chapel
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight gives this tag concrete force through medical interest gathers around bodily vulnerability: decapitation, fear, dream, the nick on the neck, confession, and shame felt as an embodied wound
- Sixty Stories, 'Game'
Two officers confined in a missile bunker, each watching the other, deteriorate psychologically under rigid protocol.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 4, treason trials
Informers and accusations create chronic fear and self-protective speech among elites.
- The Art of War, Ch. VIII.12–14
Five dangerous faults of a general (recklessness, cowardice, hasty temper, sensitivity to shame, over-solicitude for his men), with commentators' examples of generals ruined by each.
- The Art of War, Ch. XI.23–28
Troops in desperate straits lose fear and fight to the death; Sun Tzu describes soldiers weeping on the day of battle and then fighting with the courage of legendary heroes.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 1.28–1.47
Arjuna's physical and emotional collapse: trembling, dry mouth, burning skin, a reeling mind and refusal to fight.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 2
Fortune’s mutability is reframed so loss becomes expected rather than metaphysically shocking.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 4–5
Competing diagnoses (floating kidney, appendix); Ivan Ilyich reads medical books and becomes absorbed in his symptoms.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Athanasian Creed, opening and closing warnings
The creed's severe salvation clauses show how doctrinal therapy can become anxious boundary policing as well as communal reassurance.
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Suffering and anxiety chapters
Descriptions of grief, fear, anxiety, and bodily signs are useful for histories of affect and psychiatry.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter IV
Anxiety and unpleasant dreams, the dreams of patients that seem to contradict the theory, and the introduction of the censor and dream distortion.
- The Master and Margarita, Part One, Ch. 13
The Master tells Ivan of his novel's persecution, his fear, the burning of the manuscript and his flight to the clinic.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, surveillance of Stillman
Quinn maps Stillman's walks into patterns and lets the case consume sleep, home and ordinary social reality.
- The New York Trilogy, Ghosts
Blue's assignment to watch Black becomes a closed circuit of isolation, projection and increasingly paranoid interpretation.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part One, final articles (c. Art. 45–50)
The soul's indirect power over the passions; habits that join movements of the gland to thoughts; the example of training animals; the claim that no soul is so weak that it cannot acquire mastery.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 112–135)
External signs of the passions: changes of colour, trembling, languor, fainting, laughter, tears, groans and sighs, each explained by the motion of blood and spirits.
- The Passions of the Soul, Part Two (c. Art. 136)
Strange aversions in some people, such as an inability to bear the smell of roses or the presence of a cat, explained by impressions received in infancy.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, A Telephone Call
The unnamed speaker's waiting becomes a loop of bargaining, self-reproach and anxious dependence.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Lovely Leave
A wartime reunion compresses longing, resentment, panic and bodily expectation into a brief domestic interval.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Rome marriage chapters
Isabel's life with Osmond is marked by constriction, watchfulness and psychological coercion rather than overt physical violence.
- The Prince, Chapters XVII and XIX
Analysis of fear, love, hatred and contempt as the emotional forces that hold or dissolve a state; a ruler should be feared without being hated.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter XI: Attention
The definition of attention and its opposite, the dazed scatter-brained state of distraction; discussion of effort and fatigue.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (forms of the synthesis)
Despair of infinitude lost in fantasy and despair of possibility, set against fatalistic and philistine despair of necessity; descriptions often compared to grandiosity and to depressive hopelessness.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part Two, B
Despair over one's sin and of forgiveness as intensifications of despair, relevant to religious guilt and scrupulosity in clinical settings.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, early Bly chapters
The governess's isolation, attraction to the absent employer and first apparition establish an anxious perceptual field.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, final scene
The confrontation with Miles joins possible exorcism, panic, coercion and child death.
- The Vampyre, Aubrey's return to England
Aubrey suffers fever, terror and apparent mental disorder after Ruthven returns and the oath prevents disclosure.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul
Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.
- Twelve Angry Men, Opening deliberation
Heat, impatience and life-or-death stakes create a pressure environment for group decision-making.
- White Nights, Fourth night and morning
The dreamer's sudden hope and loss form a compact study of attachment, disappointment and depressive return.
Quotes
“I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster”
“Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence”
“skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness”
“My arteries began beating so violently that I not only felt their motion, but even heard it, particularly that of the carotids, attended by a loud noise in my ears”
“I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine, and, had I not been already indisposed, I am certain I should have become so from this study”
“Remorse, shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection, despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel inroads from these tormentors”
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul”
“MEN fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children, is increased with tales, so is the other”
“As for the passions, and studies of the mind; avoid envy, anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated”
“Dejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY, apparent also in divers manners; as in haunting of solitudes, and graves; in superstitious behaviour; and in fearing some one, some another particular thing”
“And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition”
Frequently cited
“and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand”
“The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head--that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad”
“Some men are so physically and morally constituted as to see everything through a highly-colored medium”
“The young soldier cannot reach any of these different strata of danger without feeling that the light of reason does not move here in the same medium, that it is not refracted in the same manner as in speculative contemplation”
“When we are well we wonder what we would do if we were ill, but when we are ill we take medicine cheerfully; the illness persuades us to do so”
Frequently cited
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”
“It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him”
“For I know well that ye are Sir Gawain, whom all the world worships, wheresoever ye may ride”
“The common sort define it to be a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion”
“5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble”
“Soldiers when in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm”
“Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought”
“He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory”
“suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence”
“That shape am I_, I felt, potentially”