A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity is a short paper with a long afterlife. McCulloch and Pitts propose an idealized model of neurons that fire or do not fire according to logical relations among their inputs.
Medical tag
Psychology Unconscious
Introspection, the unconscious, proto-psychoanalytic insight, inner monologue as case study.
Works
This entry joins Claude Shannon's 1938 master's thesis on relay and switching circuits with his 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The thesis made a decisive engineering move: it showed that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay circuits.
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.
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.
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought is George Boole's attempt to express logic, probability, and reasoning in mathematical form. The book begins from a bold premise: the operations of the mind in reasoning can be studied through symbols and laws analogous to those of algebra.
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.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
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.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H.
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.
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.
Kant's first Critique asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science, and answers by examining reason's own powers before trusting any of its claims about God, the soul or the world as a whole. The first-edition preface describes human reason as burdened by questions it cannot dismiss and cannot answer, and the second-edition preface proposes a Copernican experiment: instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, suppose that objects must conform to the forms of our knowing.
Cybernetics presents one of the twentieth century's boldest attempts to unite machines, organisms, and societies under a single vocabulary of control, communication, feedback, and information. Wiener begins from wartime problems of prediction, especially the effort to anticipate the path of aircraft quickly enough for anti-aircraft fire.
De Anima asks what soul is by beginning with the observable powers of living things. Aristotle reviews earlier accounts from thinkers such as Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato, then rejects explanations that make soul either a wandering body, a harmony, or a separate passenger inside the organism.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias reworks Kraepelin's deteriorating psychosis into a broader and more psychologically complex group of disorders. Its most famous act is terminological: Bleuler introduces schizophrenia to name a splitting or disjunction in psychic functions, not a split personality in the popular sense.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
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.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
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.
Meditationes de prima philosophia, published in Paris in 1641, compresses Descartes's metaphysics into six meditations, each imagined as a day's reflection by a solitary thinker seated by the fire in a dressing gown. The book was issued with six sets of Objections from learned readers (Caterus, Mersenne's circle, Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi and others) and Descartes's Replies, which are longer than the Meditations themselves; a second edition (Amsterdam, 1642) added the Jesuit Bourdin's Seventh Objections.
Ada Lovelace's Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine begin as an act of translation and become a theory of computation. Luigi Menabrea had published a French account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine after hearing Babbage lecture in Turin.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
This paired entry brings together Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem and his 1950 essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first paper attacks a precise mathematical problem: what does it mean for a number or function to be computable?
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
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.
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.
Studies on Hysteria is the classic collaborative text from which psychoanalysis narrates much of its beginning. , followed by theoretical and therapeutic reflections.
The Antichrist is Nietzsche's most direct assault on Christianity as a moral and cultural force. It argues that Christianity reverses life-affirming values, sanctifies weakness, elevates pity, falsifies psychology, and turns resentment into virtue.
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 Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
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 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 Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
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.
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
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 Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
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 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.
Jung's Psychology of Dementia Praecox attempts to make psychotic speech and behavior psychologically intelligible. Working from the Burgholzli clinic, word-association studies, Bleuler's dementia praecox, and Freud's ideas about complexes, Jung argues that seemingly senseless symptoms may express emotionally charged complexes.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
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 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.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
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.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche in compressed diagnostic form. Subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, it tests inherited idols by sounding them for hollowness.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
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 Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, Network examples
The construction of logical functions from neural arrangements anticipates models of cognitive processing.
- A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948 paper, communication system model
The source-channel-receiver model supplies language later borrowed by neuroscience, psychology, and clinical communication theory.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 6
Introspective search for the self finds only perceptions; the mind compared to a theatre with no fixed stage; sleep and death as the absence of a perceiving self.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part I, Sect. 11; Part II, Sect. 5
Sympathy as the communication of passions between people, including how the opinions of others sustain pride and how feelings reverberate between minds.
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Sect. 3–4
Reason as servant of the passions; calm versus violent passions; why strong emotion can override clear knowledge of one's interest.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXVII
Personal identity through consciousness; cases of forgetting, drunkenness, sleepwalking and alternating consciousness, and their bearing on punishment.
- 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.
- An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, Opening chapters on the laws of thought
Boole frames symbolic logic as an inquiry into the operations of the mind, relevant to later computational models of cognition.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, §§3, 6, 17, 19
Conscious thought steered by instinct and physiology; philosophy as involuntary autobiography; thoughts arriving unbidden; willing as a complex of feelings and commands.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, early chapters on Claggart
The narrator's discussion of Claggart's 'natural depravity', a quasi-clinical portrait of envy and malice.
- Characters, The Chatterer
Compulsive, poorly bounded speech becomes a recognizable social burden.
- Characters, The Late Learner and related sketches
Socially awkward self-fashioning shows personality as public performance.
- Chess, Dr B.'s narrative (chess against himself)
He splits into a white self and a black self and is consumed by compulsive play, losing sleep and appetite.
- 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.
- 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'.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Later chapters
Flora arranges for Judith to see a psychoanalyst to cure her fixation on her son.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Mr Mybug's walks with Flora
Mybug reads sexual symbolism into nature, parodying Freudian criticism.
- Confessions, Book VI.8
Alypius, dragged to the amphitheatre, opens his eyes and becomes intoxicated by the bloodshed, returning compulsively.
- Confessions, Book VIII.5, 8–12
The chain of habit, the divided will, physical agitation in the garden, and the conversion.
- Confessions, Book X.8–19
Inquiry into the structure of memory, forgetting and recollection.
- Confessions, Book I
Born 'in a very weakly and infirm state'; his mother's death after childbirth; his aunt's care; the spanking at Bossey and its lasting effect on his sexuality.
- Confessions, Book II
The stolen ribbon and the accusation of Marion, analysed as the work of overwhelming shame.
- Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction (A 98–130; B 129–169)
Synthesis of apprehension, reproduction and recognition; the unity of apperception as the condition of any coherent experience.
- Critique of Pure Reason, Paralogisms of Pure Reason (A 341–405; B 399–432)
Critique of rational psychology's claims that the soul is a simple, persisting, immaterial substance, including a response to Mendelssohn on the soul's gradual extinction.
- Cybernetics, Discussions of communication and noise
Signal degradation becomes a model for miscommunication within machines, nerves, and social systems.
- De Anima, Mind and perception
De Anima gives this tag concrete force through the work matters to medicine because perception, touch, appetite, and bodily organization become the basis for thinking about life and mind
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, memory scenes
Willy talks aloud to people from the past, including his dead brother Ben, while others watch.
- Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Fundamental symptoms
Association, affect, ambivalence, and autism become organizing signs for the diagnosis.
- Ecce Homo, Final chapter
The performance of destiny invites but also resists retrospective psychiatric diagnosis.
- Essays and Aphorisms, On Human Nature, 'Human Nature' (stored text)
Egoism, malice and the pleasure of anger and hatred; cruelty as the embittered will's attempt to relieve its own torment; Schadenfreude and envy as opposites of pity.
- Ethics, Part I, Appendix
Critique of teleology, including the observation that people marvel at the structure of the human body and attribute it to divine art because they do not know its causes.
- Ethics, Part III, Preface and Props. VI–XI
Programme of studying emotions naturalistically; conatus and the primary affects of desire, pleasure and pain.
- Ethics, Part V, Props. I–XX
Remedies for the passions: clear ideas, recognition of necessity, arrangement of mental images, and directing the mind to many causes at once.
- 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, 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.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III (the return)
Marlow wrestles with death in a long fever and returns to Europe irritable and estranged.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. II, 'Of Imagination'
Imagination as decaying sense; dreams caused by internal bodily motions; apparitions and belief in ghosts explained as misread dreams.
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation II
Identification of the self as a thinking thing whose existence is certain independent of any knowledge of the body.
- Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Note G
The Bernoulli-number procedure converts reasoning into executable steps, a key precursor for computational models of cognition.
- Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorisms XLI–XLIX
Idols of the tribe and den: the distorting mirror of human perception, the pull of first conclusions, neglect of negative instances, and belief tinctured by will and passion.
- On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, 1936 paper, definition of computing machines
The reduction of calculation to symbolic operations offers a formal ancestor for computational models of cognition.
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay I
Ressentiment becomes a psychological and historical engine of moral valuation.
- Passing, Part Two–Three
Irene's growing suspicion of an affair, accompanied by sleeplessness, headaches and intrusive thoughts.
- Passing, Part Three (ending)
Clare's fall from the window and Irene's collapse, followed by her blurred, possibly repressed recollection of the moment.
- Pensees, Fragment 233, Section III
The wager, ending with the counsel to act as if believing, taking holy water and having masses said, to abate the passions and 'deaden your acuteness'.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 246a–254e
The charioteer and two horses as a model of the soul's internal conflict.
- Studies on Hysteria, Preliminary communication
The opening essay links symptoms to memory, affect, trauma, and altered states of consciousness.
- Studies on Hysteria, Freud case histories
Freud turns symptom description into a search for hidden memories and conflicts.
- The Antichrist, Priest critique
Priestly power is analyzed as a manipulation of suffering and guilt.
- 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, §§13–15
Socrates' daemon as a warning instinct, the dying Socrates, and the faith that knowledge can heal the eternal wound of existence.
- The Gay Science, Madman aphorism
The death of God is presented through a figure whose apparent madness carries cultural diagnosis.
- 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 Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter V, typical dreams
Dreams of embarrassment at nakedness, examination dreams and dreams of the death of loved persons, leading to the Oedipus and Hamlet readings and the discussion of childhood sexuality and sibling rivalry.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, sections on regression and wish-fulfilment
The model of the psychic apparatus, regression to perception in hallucinatory dreams, and the relation of dreams to the psychoneuroses, hysterical symptoms and psychosis.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Lectures I-II
Janet defines hysteria through psychological dissociation and lowered integrative capacity.
- The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Fixed ideas
Janet connects persistent traumatic or emotional ideas to bodily and mental symptoms.
- The Meek One, Author's preface
Dostoyevsky describes the narrator's state of shock and disordered thinking hours after the suicide.
- The Meek One, Part One, Ch. 5–6
The wife stands over her husband with a revolver at his temple while he feigns sleep.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, opening chapters
Quinn's bereavement, pseudonymous writing life and willingness to answer a call meant for another person set up identity as a fragile compensatory structure.
- The New York Trilogy, Ghosts
Blue's assignment to watch Black becomes a closed circuit of isolation, projection and increasingly paranoid interpretation.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3
Voluntary action, choice and deliberation define responsibility and agency.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7
Akrasia examines knowing the better course but acting under appetite or pleasure.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, A Telephone Call
The unnamed speaker's waiting becomes a loop of bargaining, self-reproach and anxious dependence.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- 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 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 Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Association experiment chapters
Jung uses reaction times and verbal responses to infer affective complexes.
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, Clinical interpretation chapters
Delusions, stereotypies, and neologisms are read as meaningful products of disturbed complexes.
- The Republic, Book 9
The tyrannical soul is ruled by lawless desires, dreams and compulsions.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 11-12
Dimmesdale's vigils, self-punishment and wasting health show guilt translated into bodily and mental suffering.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, school expulsion and surveillance
Miles's unclear misconduct and the governess's scrutiny raise questions about child psychology, projection and moral panic.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Aspern Papers, narrator's pursuit
The scholar's fixation on the papers becomes a study in monomania and professional self-excuse.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures IX and X: Conversion
Sudden and gradual conversion explained through subconscious incubation, with cases of drunkards rescued by religious experience, including S. H. Hadley.
- The Waves, Childhood sections
The early voices establish distinct sensory and affective patterns, suggesting personality as rhythm before biography.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourses III–IV: Backworldsmen; The Despisers of the Body
Otherworldly belief traced to the weariness of the sick body; the ego as the instrument of a bodily Self; the body as 'a plurality with one sense'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse VI: The Pale Criminal
A murderer whose reason misinterprets his own impulses; 'madness before the deed' and 'madness after the deed'; a plea to judges to say 'invalid' rather than 'wretch'.
- Twelve Angry Men, Discussion of witnesses
The jurors test memory, perception, age, stress and inference in eyewitness testimony.
- Twelve Angry Men, Juror Ten's speech
The group confronts explicit prejudice as a contaminant of judgment.
- Twelve Angry Men, Juror Three's final reversal
Personal trauma around his son breaks through the facade of certainty and punitive anger.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Middle poems
Distance, jealousy and memory turn erotic longing into repetitive thought and emotional dependence.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter III
Conscience analysed as a learned feeling of pain at violating duty, encrusted with associations from childhood, religion and self-esteem.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter IV (will, desire and habit)
Will as 'the child of desire' that can come under the dominion of habit; the example of those 'who have contracted habits of vicious or hurtful indulgence' acting against their own deliberate preference.
- Washington Square, Early Sloper household chapters
Dr. Sloper's grief over his wife and disappointment in Catherine establish a physician-father whose intelligence is emotionally punitive.
- We, Records after meeting I-330
D-503 experiences desire, jealousy and dreams as illness or infection of the self.
- White Nights, First night
The dreamer's solitary walks and attachment to buildings show urban loneliness converted into imaginative companionship.
Quotes
“As liars, by the frequent repetition of their lies, come at last to remember them”
“reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas”
Frequently cited
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception”
“they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement”
“The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations”
“the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each others emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated”
Frequently cited
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”
“Custom, then, is the great guide of human life”
“though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only whilst that trunk was there”
“every great philosophy up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography”
“A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength--life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof”
“a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish”
“I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory yields”
“I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself”
“I did not fear punishment, but I dreaded shame: I dreaded it more than death, more than the crime, more than all the world”
“The “I think” must accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought”
“I study myself more than any other subject; ‘tis my metaphysic, my physic”
“it is the will to live, which, more and more embittered by the constant sufferings of existence, seeks to alleviate its own torment by causing torment in others”
“I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids”
“PROP. III. An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof”
“The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future”
“Imagination therefore is nothing but Decaying Sense”
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, 'I have been harmed.' Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away.”
“Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction’s sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.”
“But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows”
“The human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the will”
“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing”
“Imagination.--It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more deceptive that she is not always so”
Frequently cited
“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain”
Frequently cited
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”
Frequently cited
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes”
“in most cases men willingly believe what they wish”
“the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish”
“King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realised wish of our childhood”
“Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us”
“Hamlet can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father out of the way, and has taken his father’s place with his mother”
Frequently cited
“The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious”
“Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic”
“An hysterical woman abandons part of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it together”
Frequently cited
“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred”
“terrified Nature seizes upon _madness_ as the last resource of life”
“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star”
“Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body”
“The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external motives apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see nothing embarrassing to those whose standard is utility, in the question, what is the sanction of that particular standard”
“Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit”