As a psychiatric trainee at Harvard in the early 1960s, Dr Allan Hobson was taught commitment to psychoanalytic theory that was already suspect and is now almost entirely obsolete. Via a series of clinical case reports, the author first apologizes for the arrogant ignorance that he adopted from his teachers and then replaces Freudian doctrine with a scientific alternative called Psychodynamic Neurology. The new approach is solidly grounded in sleep and dream science and restores hypnosis to its rightful place in the therapeutic armamentarium. A central precept of Ego Damage and Repair is that the self and its subjective experience (including symptoms) are natural accompaniments of spontaneous and prenatal brain activation that persists throughout life as REM sleep dreaming. Far from being the nonsense theory that psychoanalytic opponents mock, Psychodynamic Neurology views the unconscious as a hyper-meaningful set of predictions about the world that constitutes a virtual reality model which is continuously updated by personal experience. To showcase the changes in psychotherapeutic practice that are recommended, the self treatment of Dr Glen Just is described in detail.

The editors of this critical volume have compiled a rich group of authors comprised of professors, psychotherapists, counselling practitioners, and doctoral students, to address society’s struggle to find meaning. A rich classroom resource, this book is a particularly important contribution to the Academy given our current lived experience in research, and also for personal reflection. Still in the throes of recovering from the COVID 19 pandemic, economic challenges, environmental disasters, and conflicts in various places in our world, to name only a few of our current challenges, the search for meaning and purpose has become an important pursuit for many. Many people today are looking for an often elusive “more.” This book poses numerous questions reflecting a variety of perspectives on the connections between meaning and service. These diverse perspectives offer readers points of engagement in their own pursuit of integrating meaning and service in their own personal and professional life.

Image Transformations of the Brain-Mind is his latest book that addresses basic questions about SELF and CONSCIOUSNESS. Dr. Just has two major concerns—how the mind emerges from its fetal beginning and matures through adulthood to enable free will (the Supervening SELF) and how sensory image transformations of the brain-mind lead to subjective experience. This book shares numerous insights into: • Virtually transformed sensory images that feel like a little person (homunculus) in our brains. • How the Physical-SELF is transformed into the Virtual-SELF. • How the SELF in dreams feels just as real as it does in waking. • The author’s dream classifications according to type of sensory experience. • Transformative brain-mind images that underlie altered mental states and various religious experiences. • How dream memories and the 24-hour mind become waking déjà vu experiences. • Psychological and philosophical questions of autonomy and determinism.

From antiquity to the early modern period, many philosophers also studied anatomy and medicine, or were medical doctors themselves -- yet the history of philosophy and of medicine are pursued as separate disciplines. This book departs from that practice, gathering contributions by both historians of philosophy and of medicine to trace the concept of health from ancient Greece and China, through the Islamic world and to modern thinkers such as Descartes and Freud. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Health demonstrates the synchronicity and overlapping histories of these two disciplines. From antiquity to the Renaissance, contributors explore the Chinese idea of qi or circulating "vital breath," ideas about medical methodology in antiquity and the middle ages, and the rise and long-lasting influence of Galenic medicine, with its insistence that health consists in a balance of four humors and the proper use of six "non-naturals" including diet, exercise, and sex. In the early modern period, mechanistic theories of the body made it more difficult to explain what health is and why it is more valuable than other physical states. However, philosophers and doctors maintained an interest in the interaction between the good condition of the mind and that of the body, with Descartes and his followers exploring in depth the idea of "medicine for the mind" despite their notorious mind-body dualism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific improvements in public health emerged along with new ideas about the psychology of health, notably with the concept of "sensibility" and Freud's psychoanalytic theory. The volume concludes with a critical survey of recent philosophical attempts to define health, showing that both "descriptive," or naturalistic, and "normativist" approaches have fallen prey to objections and counterexamples. As a whole, Health: A History shows that notions of both physical and mental health have long been integral to philosophy and a powerful link between philosophy and the sciences.

This book presents three lectures by Allan Hobson, entitled “The William James Lectures on Dream Consciousness”. The three lectures expose the new psychology, the new physiology and the new philosophy that derive from and support the protoconsciousness hypothesis of dreaming. They review in detail many of the studies on sleep and dreaming conducted since the days of Sigmund Freud. Following the lectures are commentaries written by scholars whose expertise covers a wide range of scientific disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, psychology, neurology, neuropsychology, cognitive science, biology and animal sciences. The commentaries each answer a specific question in relation to Hobson’s lectures and his premise that dreaming is an altered state of consciousness. Capitalizing on a vast amount of data, the lectures and commentaries provide undisputed evidence that sleep consists of a well-organized sequence of subtly orchestrated brain states that undoubtedly play a crucial function in the maintenance of normal brain functions. These functions include both basic homeostatic processes necessary to keep the organism alive as well as the highest cognitive functions including perception, decision making, learning and consciousness.

Twenty-nine years since the first edition was released, Frank Summers has renewed his lucid and thorough clarification of the various object relations theories to demonstrate their evolution and continued significance for therapeutic practice. This volume includes elucidation of the major scholarship that has advanced the ideas of object relations theorists such as Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut, since the publication of the first edition. A thorough and detailed new chapter devoted to the emergence and development of relational psychoanalysis has been added to make this volume a “state of the art” articulation of current object relations thinking. The ideas and assumptions of each theory relative to metapsychology, psychopathology, and treatment are expounded, alongside a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of each approach. With extensive use of historic case material, Summers shows how each object relations theory yields specific clinical approaches to a variety of syndromes, and how these approaches entail specific modifications in clinical technique. This volume will be essential reading for all analysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers who wish to familiarize themselves with object relations theories in general, sharpen their understanding of the work of specific object relations theorists, or enhance their ability to employ these theories in their clinical work.

This volume contains current evidence-based diagnosis and therapeutic interventions for people with mental disorders. Students and professionals alike will find the mental health field addressed as a whole in a coherent and understandable way. Readers are offered a unified presentation of psychological and sociological approaches to diagnosis and treatment.