Governing the Soul is now widely recognized as one of the founding texts in a new approach to analyzing the links between political power, expertise and the self. This governmentality perspective has had important implications for a range of academic disciplines including criminology, political theory, sociology and psychology and has generated much theoretical innovation and empirical investigation. The second edition contains a new introduction, which sets out the methodological and conceptual bases of this approach. Also, a new final chapter has been added that considers some of the implications of recent developments in the government of subjectivity.

Today, our personal and emotional lives have become the object and target of psychologists, therapists and other professionals. This book examines the birth of these engineers of the human soul' and their influence upon our society.

But today normality itself is open to medical modification.

The fledgling science of psychoanalysis permanently altered the nineteenth-century worldview with its remarkable new insights into human behavior and motivation. It quickly became a benchmark for modernity in the twentieth century--though its durability in the twenty-first may now be in doubt. More than a hundred years after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, we’re no longer in thrall, says cultural historian Eli Zaretsky, to the “romance” of psychotherapy and the authority of the analyst. Only now do we have enough perspective to assess the successes and shortcomings of psychoanalysis, from its late-Victorian Era beginnings to today’s age of psychopharmacology. In Secrets of the Soul, Zaretsky charts the divergent schools in the psychoanalytic community and how they evolved–sometimes under pressure–from sexism to feminism, from homophobia to acceptance of diversity, from social control to personal emancipation. From Freud to Zoloft, Zaretsky tells the story of what may be the most intimate science of all.

The Lost Soul of American Politics is a provocative new interpretation of American political thought from the Founding Fathers to the Neo-Conservatives. Reassessing the motives and intentions of such great political thinkers as Madison, Thoreau, Lincoln, and Emerson, John P. Diggins shows how these men struggled to create an alliance between the politics of self-interest and a religious sense of moral responsibility—a tension that still troubles us today.

Investigates Plato's account of the tripartite soul, looking at how the theory evolved over the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus.