Well, said he, "I have been so long engaged in the practical application of the process that I confess I can't realize any element of the strange or mysterious about it. To the eye of the philosopher nothing is wonderful, or else you may say all things are equally so. The commonest and so-called simplest fact in the entire order of nature is precisely as marvellous and incomprehensible at bottom as the most uncommon and startling. You will pardon me if I say that it is only to the unscientific that it seems otherwise. But really, my dear sir, my process for the extirpation of thoughts was but the most obvious consequence of the discovery that different classes of sensations and ideas are localized in the brain, and are permanently identified with particular groups of corpuscles of the grey matter.

Since its initial publication this critique of Freud's methods for gathering and evaluating evidence has become a classic in Freud scholarship. foreword by Frederick Crews Psychoanalysis: science or belief system? Since its initial publication this critique of Freud's methods for gathering and evaluating evidence has become a classic in Freud scholarship. Malcolm Macmillan's exhaustive analysis of Freud's personality theory describes the logical and other assumptions on which Freud's work was based and shows how these assumptions interacted with his clinical observations to produce all-embracing but faulty methods for gathering and evaluating evidence. Macmillan provides a meticulous account of the historical evolution of Freud's thought and its background in Freud's contacts with the books and people that influenced him and evaluates the entirety of the Freudian system. Included is a compilation of major criticisms of the methodology and assumptions of Freudian theory and a new comprehensive afterword by the author surveying the relevant literature published since 1989. (cloth published by Elsevier-North Holland in 1991)

Realistic writers seek to render accurate representations of the world, and their novels contain authentic details and descriptions of their characters and settings. Like Realistic authors, Naturalistic ones similarly try to portray the world accurately, but they tend to depict the darker side of life. Realism was born in Europe in the nineteenth century and soon became popular in the United States, while Naturalism became prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both traditions have continued in one form or another to the present day, and Realistic and Naturalistic novelists include some of America's most significant authors, such as Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Ambrose Bierce, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, and Jack London. This reference includes biographical and critical entries for more than 120 American Naturalistic and Realistic novelists. An introductory essay discusses the history of the Realistic and Naturalistic traditions, points to the difficulty of defining them, and surveys the many authors who have been associated with the two movements. The entries that follow are arranged alphabetically to facilitate use. Each includes basic biographical information and a narrative overview of the writer's educational background, professional career, and published works. The writer's works are briefly discussed in relation to the Realistic and Naturalistic traditions. Entries include primary and secondary bibliographies, and the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

Introduction -- Evil alchemists and Doctor Faustus -- Bacon's new scientists -- Foolish virtuosi -- Newton: a scientist for God -- Arrogant and godless: scientists in eighteenth-century satire -- Inhuman scientists: the romantic perception -- Frankenstein and the creature -- Victorian scientists: doubt and struggle -- The scientist as adventurer -- Efficiency and power: the scientist under scrutiny -- The scientist as hero -- Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: reality overtakes fiction -- The impersonal scientist -- Scientia gratia scientiae: the amoral scientist -- Pandora's box -- Robots, cyborgs, androids and clones: who is in control? -- The scientist as woman -- Idealism and conscience -- Watershed: the new scientists

Psychic trauma is one of the most frequently invoked ideas in the behavioral sciences and the humanities today. Yet bitter disputes have marked the discussion of trauma ever since it first became an issue in the 1870s, growing even more heated in recent years following official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a book that is bound to ignite controversy, Ruth Leys investigates the history of the concept of trauma. She explores the emergence of multiple personality disorder, Freud's approaches to trauma, medical responses to shellshock and combat fatigue, Sándor Ferenczi's revisions of psychoanalysis, and the mutually reinforcing, often problematic work of certain contemporary neurobiological and postmodernist theorists. Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other. A powerfully argued work of intellectual history, Trauma will rewrite the terms of future discussion of its subject.