Fully illustrated in colour and most informative, this is a personal story about spiders and arachnophobia. With more than a touch of humour, deep curiosity and an artist’s eye the author examines her phobia and the object of her fear. What is a spider? What makes these eight-legged creatures so scary? To understand her own reactions to spiders better, she describes her many past and present encounters with them. The story takes her back to her childhood in Norway, to the USA, to holidays in Spain and Portugal, and to travels around Australia. She focuses on fine examples of these astonishing creatures from many places.

When the Vietnam War veterans returned home to Australia, neither the veterans nor their partners were aware of the psychological harm with which many had been afflicted. Post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet been recognised and as the men fell victim to terrible moods and illnesses, they capitulated to their pain and isolated themselves and their families.   With great courage and without recognition, veterans' wives held their families together despite government and community indifference, and they did so for decades.   When He Came Home is a belated recognition of these women, and it also focuses on how the issues of PTSD and suicide affect veterans who participate in contemporary conflicts. Told within an informed historical context and employing intimate narrative interviews, this important book examines the unexamined: how so many families have been brought to their knees and how such suffering can be prevented.

Mental health difficulties bring us face to face with our vulnerability as human beings, and after two years of struggling with the effects of Covid-19 concerns about mental health worldwide have never been higher. But our discussions are still fraught with issues of language and understanding. Are we all on a ‘spectrum’ of mental wellness? Is ‘well-being’ about ‘being well’ or about coping? Mental health problems can be frightening when we experience them ourselves, or see them in others. And despite all the talk, most of us find it hard to decide when or where to seek help.   What is often missing from these discussions is the most valuable resource of all – the personal accounts of those with lived experience of mental health difficulties. Making Sense of Mental Health is centred on hours of in-depth interviews with adults coping with mental health issues. The author follows their journeys from the origin of their distress to their lowest moments to eventual recovery and a sense of moving on. These lived experiences show how in times of crisis people can move forward amidst the chaos, vulnerability and uncertainty brought on by mental health problems.   There are no quick fixes or miracle cures to serious mental health issues. This book shows that ‘what works’ is whatever helps an individual make sense of what is happening to them. A problem entwined with the human condition, mental health difficulties can best be treated by understanding the experiences of those who have lived through them, and as a society by finding a way to ascribe meaning to the complex reality of mental health.  

The Trinity Circle explores the creation of knowledge in nineteenth-century England, when any notion of a recognizably modern science was still nearly a century off, religion still infused all ways of elite knowing, and even those who denied its relevance had to work extremely hard to do so. The rise of capitalism during this period—embodied by secular faith, political radicalism, science, commerce, and industry—was, according to Anglican critics, undermining this spiritual world and challenging it with a superficial material one: a human-centric rationalist society hell-bent on measurable betterment via profit, consumption, and a prevalent notion of progress. Here, William J. Ashworth places the politics of science within a far more contested context. By focusing on the Trinity College circle, spearheaded from Cambridge by the polymath William Whewell, he details an ongoing struggle between the Established Church and a quest for change to the prevailing social hierarchy. His study presents a far from unified view toward science and religion at a time when new ways of thinking threatened to divide England and even the Trinity College itself.

Giovanni Hautmann (Florence, 1927-2017) was president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and trained generations of analysts. Together with numerous articles, he has published some fundamental texts, among which: La psicoanalisi tra arte e biologia (1999), Il mio debito con Bion (1999), Funzione analitica e Mente primitiva (2002). Despite the fact that during his presidency, he had promoted for the first time the bilingual (Italian-English) publication of the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, his books have never been published in other languages and therefore his thinking remains still little known abroad. Therefore, the aim of the volume is to bring attention back to his theoretical-clinical construction and to extend it, through the dialogue with other psychoanalytic cultures.

In these particularly stressful times, many people are struggling with their mental health. Some are caught up in their painful past, others are fretful about an uncertain future, and even more are anxious about their current circumstances. While the worries and concerns are real, practical steps can be taken to make them more manageable.   In this insightful book, David Delaney draws on his own experiences to provide a welcome handbook on resilience and mindfulness. Becoming almost completely blind at eight years old, David struggled to fit in, and was hampered by his insecurities, doubts and low self-worth until he learned the skills to embark on a path to lasting confidence, health and happiness.   For over twenty years David has researched resilience, meditation, Tai Chi, mindfulness, Yoga, Qi Gung movements and other techniques. He then studied modern scientific research on their efficacy and started applying their helpful practices and stories to his own life and in the meditation classes he taught. He now wants to share what he has learned.   This step-by-step guide can set you free by breaking the chains of your past and helping you to embrace a bright new future. By making simple changes in your everyday world, you can make a huge difference to your life.   So, here’s the question: what’s stopping you from taking the next step? It’s your life – why not get the most from it?   Come join David on your own heroic journey of self-discovery.  

Traumatologist Paul Valent believes that knowledge of human responses in disasters can help individuals and societies to better control catastrophic events, such as the present pandemic.   This concise book will help the general reader to understand the very wide mental health effects of this pandemic, and thus to understand how distress may be better managed today and in the future.   The author summarises disaster responses as they have manifested in this pandemic. These responses are biological, psychological and social, and they affect individuals, families, children and vulnerable groups.   He also provides a framework which helps to the reader to understand, and thus be better informed to treat, the wide-ranging consequences of the pandemic.  

A difficult relationship with food affects not only adolescents but also adults. It is often the symptom of a deep pain that rises from problems of control, low self-esteem, guilt and shame, which can derive from critical or traumatic events experienced in the course of life or at a young age. This book helps the reader to understand the difficult relationship with food and the original causes of the symptoms that maintain it. The author recommends the text as a basic tool kit with the essential elements to increase knowledge, awareness, motivation and shows the best path to find a definitive solution with EMDR psychotherapy. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapeutic treatment authenticated by several researches. Mostly used for treating trauma, EMDR is a complex and global approach not only to work on past traumas but also to improve individual resources and self-esteem.

In the ancient world, many units of measurement were based, approximately, on some parts of the human body: arm, cubit, span, inch, foot; or on their functions: pace, half hour, league… I wondered if there might be some parts of the body, which weighed 4.25g: in other words, half a siqlum or half a giĝ. And I identified, albeit with wide variations, these parts in the foreskin which Abraham/Hammurabi cuts off as a symbol of a new faith, reviving - I cannot say how consciously - an ancient, now forgotten tradition which stands at the base of that antique unit of measurement with an abstract value and the form of a Ring to be worn as a bracelet or anklet on or in one’s own body (eg. nose rings, called nezem in Hebrew, and still in use as ornaments in many populations, in India for example; and earrings).   These rings would therefore have had a weight and a composition of precious material equivalent to a coin. Such coin could be connected to the Pukku, ring, belonged to Gilgamesh, which could have been the non-Indoeuropean root PKK from which Benveniste derived the word Pecunia (money), as being therefore much older than the term Pecus (herd, flock). In my work, this is the origin of the coin: round, empty, portable, also deriving from the discarded foreskin, thereby generating symbolic rings long before the Lydia of Croesus. It certainly does not arise from a non-existent god of the underworld who would defecate gold: in other words, that so often cited Mammon who has persecuted us for 2,000 years.

In every psychic experience, even in the production of a work of art, there exists a nucleus that is impossible to transform. It resists any and every action against itself.   We are used to dealing with these irreducible and radical othernesses by adapting them to our own way of knowing and our experience. In reality, they make up the ugly material of our living and, hence, of our humanity. We can, however, transform them in some way, without altering their substance, but rather organizing them in different configurations, which generate new forms.   Psychoanalysis can aid in this difficult and risky process, providing resilient equipment, much like a sophisticated spacesuit, allowing one to travel the cosmic spaces of psychic life and of human reality without bursting into flames. In the actual world, we find ourselves having to deal with problems never before encountered, which eradicate old certainties – problems which feel uncanny compared to the known experiences of ourselves and others.   We meet with disorganized and fragmentary conflict, to which psychoanalysis attempts to answer adopting an open, non-defensive procedure, aiming to widen the field of experience rather than reducing it, in accordance with the basis of its practice and theory. For this reason, the interweaving of various forms of knowledge is necessary in order to link the diverse aspects and levels of psychic and external reality.   The author examines this theme through the psychoanalytic approach, as well as through philosophy, science and art, and using stories based on personal life and clinical experiences.  

Freud’s study about Moses and monotheistic religion combined Egyptology and anthropology in a critical analysis of the biblical faith. This book reviews the Egyptological and anthropological bases of Freud’s arguments. There is also a chapter devoted to Pater Wilhelm Schmidt, Freud’s foremost opponent among anthropologists. The text is simultaneously a hommage to Freud as well as a critique incorporating many necessary corrections of his views.

Psychoanalysts of all schools have generally dismissed and sometimes openly disapproved feminism and its critique of male universalism. While other disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, have welcomed the contributions of feminist theory, psychoanalysis remains hindered by its own unconscious, which is patriarchal. This book wants to cast light on the unthought of Freudian and Lacanian theory by way of an analysis of the concept of femininity. The aim is to show how phallocentrism functions as a screen which obscures the real relations between the sexes, the meaning of desire and the understanding of sexual difference.

Surprisingly, jihadi groups like ISIS do not only attract female supporters coming from Muslim communities, but also Western women who grew up in non-Muslim environments. Trauma, depression and the need for a more exciting life outside the constraints of Western society brought some women to embrace the political cause of waging jihad and supporting terrorism. This book discovers the hidden psychological and sociological drivers that can lead young Western women to support jihadi ideology, violence and sometimes suicide. Through real and uncanny stories, supported by reliable official data, the book provides a scientific analysis of the mechanisms that can lead any “girl next door” to approve and passionately fall for a destructive movement, which she perceives as a heroic, romantic and empowering act.

Exploring human nature takes the reader deep into the human experience of being in nature. Our current ecological predicament highlights the need to change people’s nature awareness and behaviour. This pioneering mixed methods study investigates a method to do this through facilitated Solo time in the wilderness. Solo time is an ancient, ritualised and pan-cultural practice of spending time alone in nature, that has been reintroduced into our current time and culture.   The study focuses on the phenomenology of young adults’ immersive experiences in nature and the evaluation of long term impact on their personal development, their relationship with nature, community participation and ecological behaviour.   However, this work is not only about the content of research, it is also about how research is done. On a methodological level the study takes a systemic approach: it explores and integrates an expanded, interconnected worldview and methodology. In practice, this encompasses working with participants’ dreams as data and including different ways of knowing in an expanded view on validity. It also includes collecting data on the researcher’s own experience and integrating it as a parallel narrative in the thesis.   In this manner the book not only tackles the pressing issue of an increasing psychological and physical separation between humans and nature. It also calls into question how conventional research and its prevailing tendency to investigate the world in isolated pieces may contribute to the problem.   Overall, this book provides a practical example of how a systemic approach may be integrated in the research process and in academic writing. It also serves as a valuable reference point for future work on promising triggers for change and highlights powerful elements for prospective programmes focussing on individual empowerment, sustainability and nature awareness. It addresses all researchers interested in ecopsychology and experiential education but also those who are curious to explore subjectivity as part of an expanded worldview and methodology in research.    

“The time is out of joint”. This famous line from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet helps to describe the impression of de-centering, of deconstruction, which we currently live and experience. This phenomenon is caused by various factors and while it is happening worldwide, partly as a result of globalization, it is perceived in different ways in the various cultures and countries in the world. We find ourselves in front of an hybrid individual, the product of different cultures blending together. Such is the novelty and the spread of new means of communication and of social organization, that we might be witnessing the rise of a new type of subject: a bearer of transformations, the extent of which is difficult to measure. The contemporary world is dominated by radically new media, virtual space, technologies that subvert the perception of our body, post-humanism tending towards the cyborg, a cult of the body and youth, new definitions of sexuality, of procreation and of the family – all this reveals to us an overflowing of the subject in the direction of a dislocated fragmentation, lying far beyond its traditional boundaries and identity.