Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I. In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the urban- and freedom-oriented impulse of the progressive architecture of the time. Leslie Topp considers the paradoxical position of designs that promoted an illusion of freedom even as they exercised careful social and spatial control over patients. In addition to discussing the physical and social aspects of these institutions, Topp shows how the commissioned buildings were symptomatic of larger cultural changes and of the modern asylum’s straining against its ideological anchorage in a premodern past of “unenlightened” restraint on human liberty. Working at the intersection of the history of architecture and the history of psychiatry, Freedom and the Cage broadens our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of modern architecture’s engagement with the state, with social and medical projects, and with mental health, psychiatry, and psychology.

Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I. In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the urban- and freedom-oriented impulse of the progressive architecture of the time. Leslie Topp considers the paradoxical position of designs that promoted an illusion of freedom even as they exercised careful social and spatial control over patients. In addition to discussing the physical and social aspects of these institutions, Topp shows how the commissioned buildings were symptomatic of larger cultural changes and of the modern asylum’s straining against its ideological anchorage in a premodern past of “unenlightened” restraint on human liberty. Working at the intersection of the history of architecture and the history of psychiatry, Freedom and the Cage broadens our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of modern architecture’s engagement with the state, with social and medical projects, and with mental health, psychiatry, and psychology.

Often we can feel trapped in thoughts, trapped in identity, trapped in conditioning. It can seem as if we are trapped in the cage of our own minds. This book points you out of this, to show you that both the cage and the person who feels trapped in it, are not real. This book also looks at some of the insane ways we have been taught to approach life and to function in the world, and how to be free of these conditioned behaviours. The content within each chapter is split into passages, each passage being a pointer in itself. You may feel inclined to only read a single passage, and pause to allow time for the words to sink in before moving on. This book is very useful for contemplative or meditative reading. Once you understand what is meant by the cage (simply the conditioned, personal mind that creates suffering) - this book becomes a helpful guide in that as well as being able to read it conventionally from cover to cover - you can pick it up and read any passage at random. Rather than being a book that teaches you anything to remember, it is a tool to point you back towards who you really are before conditioning took over. May this book help you realise your inherent freedom, and allow you to function sanely, effectively and happily in the world.

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.

Hope springs eternal in the human heart. When socialism overwhelms the United States one young woman stands ready to do all she can to bring back the sanity of Democracy. Our heroine, Faith sets out to first escape the mad world that her country has become. Her goal is to spread the word to the rest of the world about the fate of America. A fate that is unknown since the US has ejected all foreign media.Food is being rations, travel has been halted except within your own state, and the President has become its dictator tossing out further elections. The Constitution has been destroyed and is in pieces at the foot of Lady Liberty. But even so there is hope, hope that things can be returned to sanity.Faith is determined to escape and when the opportunity arises, she takes it. Faith meets many true Americans along the new Underground Railroad that smuggles out patriots. This small groups of patriots hopes to rally those around the country to fix what has gone wrong in the United States. This group is looking forward to the restoration of the Constitution.

"Get clarity on what really matters to you; figure out how to live the life you want, whatever your circumstances; make a shift from worry and fear to feeling alive and inspired; find the courage and confidence to shape your future; reignite old passions, and discover new ones; feel much freer, and happier, every single day"--Amazon.com.