Paradise is found in a vivid, colorful world under clear blue tropical waves, as sea turtles and bright fish become her dive buddies. She finds serenity in the serenade of a hot, young musician. His beautiful soul carries her to the outermost galaxies, but is this love or just her imagination? Love is delayed and faith is tested when a second musician enters the picture. She is caught between self-interest and national security—a decoy that makes Big Brother’s ever-watchful eyes cross. Solace is found beneath the placid Pacific until climate change brings winter waves, currents, and surf so strong that there may be no returning from the sea. How does one distinguish between coincidence and the intricate connection of life’s unseen undercurrents? Time moves on. Peace found beneath the ocean is not found on dry land as health concerns and bills overtake her. In her darkest hour, lessons are learned. The world crashes in on her soul like a tidal wave tossing her around the sea. She is caught in a tsunami, wave after wave after wave, with no way back to shore—or is there?

Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of contemporary patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul. Knot of the Soul moves from the experience of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, to the visionary torments of the soul in poor urban neighborhoods, to the melancholy and religious imaginary of undocumented migration, culminating in the liturgical stage of the Qur’anic cure. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the “ordeal” of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation. This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.

25th Anniversary Edition Special edition of the the bestselling Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. The new e-text has images, a new preface and additional commentary on Vertigo's selection as the Best Film Ever Made by the BFI's Sight and Sound.

Everything you want is on the other side of your greatest fear. Although we are sometimes resistant, hard times, challenges, and difficulties help make us who we are. Like the transformative metamorphosis from black coal to diamond, only after extreme pressure, and the passing of time, do we see the result. It is up to us whether we focus on the pain or the result. Many self-help books will say that if we just ask for what we want, we will get it, but what if we never learned to ask for what we really want? In this book, author Karinna Damgård explores how learning from a young age not to trust intuition, not to ask for help for fear of being a burden, has held us back. How will you learn the grandness of truth, if you were always told a lie? How can you learn to empower yourself, if life always taught you the opposite? How can you learn to better yourself if you are always busy watching out for the next big earthquake? Interweaving personal experiences with her expertise as a clairvoyant, healer, mentor, spiritual advisor, and intuitive soul, Damgård seeks to guide others through an introspective and inspirational step-by-step process that encourages movement away from self-imposed fears and expectations and into a new phase of personal growth where we recognize our own beauty, light, divinity, and how we shine with help from God, even in a chaotic world. A Touch of Vertigo is a down-to-earth guide that leads positive change seekers down a thoughtful path of personal growth and spiritual transformation to address fears and move forward into a new beginning filled with divine miracles.

Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called “sciences of the mind” reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling—which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall—has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti’s stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock’s most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock’s brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of “pushing away and bringing closer” which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my “here” flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger’s “being-toward-death,” Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.

Sometimes doubt, fear and disappointment cause the Christian to lose confidence in God. In this book, Dwayne E. Mercer helps readers see past disappointments through God’s eyes and gain courage from biblical examples of faith. He provides tools for the discouraged Christian to take faith-risks for God again, stepping out in courageous faith.Sometimes doubt, fear and disappointment cause the Christian to lose confidence in God. In this book, Dwayne E. Mercer helps readers see past disappointments through God’s eyes and gain courage from biblical examples of faith. He provides tools for the discouraged Christian to take faith-risks for God again, stepping out in courageous faith.

This book is a collection of essays that examine the integrated relationship that the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo has with the history and culture of California and the San Francisco Bay area.