Showing results by publisher "MuseumAudiobooks.com" in Psychology & Mental Health

Alfred Adler was an Austrian physician, psychotherapist, and one of the founding fathers of modern psychology. In Understanding Human Nature, (1928), Adler sets out to acquaint the general public with the basics of Individual Psychology, which holds that the driving force of human behavior is the individual’s striving for power, partly to compensate for feelings of inferiority. The purpose of the book is to identify mistaken behaviors and show how they undermine healthy relationships, in order to gently guide the individual towards adjustment.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

A motivational text with profound insights, Thought Vibration is a classic of metaphysics. The author examines the laws of attraction and of gravity, pointing out the similarities.

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a landmark work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which was published in 1956. The book examines the case of a UFO cult in Chicago called the Seekers, their expectation of an imminent apocalypse, and their coping mechanisms after the event did not occur.

This collection features some of the most prominent works written by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founding father of psychoanalysis.

Carl Jung held an interest in occult phenomena from the start of his professional career. After working as an assistant physician at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zürich, in 1902 he published his doctorate titled The Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. In it, he describes various clinical cases of split consciousness, twilight states, and somnambulism, and presents the case of an adolescent medium whose séances he had attended in the 1890s.

This 1920 essay by Sigmund Freud is considered to be one of his most complex writings. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" marks a major departure in his theoretical approach. Freud had previously attributed most human behaviour to the sexual instinct (Eros or libido). In this essay, he went beyond the pleasure principle by adding the death drive (thanatos) as another instigator of human behavior.

The Theory of Psychoanalysis comprises Carl Jung’s 1912 lectures at Fordham University, that outlined the future of his work in psychoanalysis, and represented a decisive break from the theories of his friend and colleague, Sigmund Freud. In these lectures, he develops his own theories of psychology based on his practical experience. He first looks at infantile sexuality, the conception of libido, and the etiological significance of the infantile sexuality. In chapters five to seven, he discusses the unconscious and its contents in detail, including the dream.

In this monograph, Freud describes the psychological mechanisms at work within mass movements. According to Freud, the individual in a mass movement acquires a sense of infinite power to act on impulses that would otherwise have been restrained in the individual. This is accompanied by a loss of conscious personality so that the mass is controlled almost exclusively by the unconscious.

In this 1912 work, Jung seeks to find symbolic meaning and purpose behind a given set of symptoms within the larger context of the psyche. It examines the fantasies of a patient whose vivid and poetic mental images enabled Jung to redefine libido as psychic energy which arises from the unconscious to manifest itself consciously in symbolic form. The work marks a theoretical divergence between Jung and Freud on the nature of the libido.

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize laureate. His novel The Magic Mountain was first published in 1924, and is considered to be one of the most significant works of 20th century German literature. Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years leading up to 1914 was already displaying symptoms of its destructive and irrational mindset. Hans Castorp, an ordinary young man, arrives for a short visit to the sanatorium and ends up staying for seven years.

Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie (1857-1926) was a French psychologist and pharmacist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on autosuggestion. Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion is the famous work in which he explains how we can access a great healing power within us.

In the essay "On the Significance of Number-Dreams", Carl Jung explains why numbers are not just artifacts of the conscious mind but hold a deeper significance. Through the study of the "number" dreams of his patients, he discovered that the smaller natural numbers are symbols in the same sense that the people and events of our dreams are symbols of behavioral situations and personified collective character traits. Number is tied to synchronicity and has an archetypal foundation, defined by Jung as an "archetype of order".

As a Man Thinketh is an inspirational book by James Allen, first published in 1903. It deals with the power of thought, and particularly with the use and application of thought to create happy and prosperous circumstances. The writing is simple, so that all can easily grasp the teachings and put the methods into practice. In the earlier work, From Poverty to Power: The Realization of Prosperity and Peace, (1901) Allen emphasizes that a disciplined mind and a focus on serving others are the keys to achieving prosperity.

This 1914 work is a polemic against competing theories in psychotherapy, directed at those who opposed his psychoanalysis. Adler and Jung, for example, had previously been followers of Freud but objected to his emphasis on sexual matters. The book is divided into three chapters, through which Freud threads a history of psychoanalysis from his perspective.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud explores the tension between the individual’s desire for unbridled freedom and the expectations of society. Explaining his view of the basic friction between civilization and the individual, he maintains that the conflict stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom versus civilization's demand for conformity and the repression of instincts.

Freud considers different scientific views on dream interpretation, which he finds flawed. He then provides his own view by describing three main types of dreams: direct prophecies, the foretelling of a future event, and the symbolic dream.

Jung contends that the personal unconscious consists of more or less superficial layers, but that it rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience; it is not a personal acquisition but an inborn quality. He calls the deeper layer the collective unconscious and explains that it is universal; it contains images and modes of behavior that are more or less similar everywhere, in all individuals. Jung describes the collective unconscious as a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every human being.

In The Content of the Psychoses (1908), Jung presents case studies as proof that the purely anatomical approach to psychoses leads only indirectly to an understanding of psychic disturbances. He believes that many psychoses, and particularly schizophrenia, were psychogenic, resulting from an abaissement du niveau mental - a reduced state of concentration and attention, accompanied by a loosening of inhibitions and relaxation of restraints, in which unexpected contents may emerge from the collective unconscious.

Aristotle’s influence on western philosophy is immense. In this work, he claimed that everything that is learned in life is learned through sensory perception. He was also the first philosopher to establish the foundational principles of logic.