Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology (Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics, Band 3)"

The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) recorded his moral philosophy and reflections on life as a highly original kind of correspondence. Letters on Ethics includes vivid descriptions of town and country life in Nero’s Italy, discussions of poetry and oratory, and philosophical training for Seneca’s friend Lucilius. This volume, the first complete English translation in nearly a century, makes the Letters more accessible than ever before.Written as much for a general audience as for Lucilius, these engaging letters offer advice on how to deal with everything from nosy neighbors to sickness, pain, and death. Seneca uses the informal format of the letter to present the central ideas of Stoicism, for centuries the most influential philosophical system in the Mediterranean world. His lively and at times humorous expositions have made the Letters his most popular work and an enduring classic. Including an introduction and explanatory notes by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, this authoritative edition will captivate a new generation of readers.

Donald Kalsched explores the interior world of dream and fantasy images encountered in therapy with people who have suffered unbearable life experiences. He shows how, in an ironical twist of psychical life, the very images which are generated to defend the self can become malevolent and destructive, resulting in further trauma for the person. Why and how this happens are the questions the book sets out to answer.Drawing on detailed clinical material, the author gives special attention to the problems of addiction and psychosomatic disorder, as well as the broad topic of dissociation and its treatment. By focusing on the archaic and primitive defenses of the self he connects Jungian theory and practice with contemporary object relations theory and dissociation theory. At the same time, he shows how a Jungian understanding of the universal images of myth and folklore can illuminate treatment of the traumatised patient.Trauma is about the rupture of those developmental transitions that make life worth living. Donald Kalsched sees this as a spiritual problem as well as a psychological one and in The Inner World of Trauma he provides a compelling insight into how an inner self-care system tries to save the personal spirit.

Universe of the MindA Semiotic Theory of CultureYuri M. LotmanIntroduction by Umberto EcoTranslated by Ann ShukmanA major book by one of the initiators of cultural studies."Universe of the Mind is an ambitious, complex, and wide-ranging book that semioticians, textual critics, and those interested in cultural studies will find stimulating and immensely suggestive." ―Journal of Communication"Soviet semiotics offers a distinctive, richly productive approach to literary and cultural studies and Universe of the Mind represents a summation of the intellectual career of the man who has done most to guarantee this." ―Slavic and East European JournalUniverse of the Mind addresses three main areas: meaning and text, culture, and history. The result is a full-scale attempt to demonstrate the workings of the semiotic space or intellectual world. Part One is concerned with the ways that texts generate meaning. Part Two addresses Lotman's central idea of the semiosphere―the domain in which all semiotic systems can function―presented through an analogy with the global biosphere. Part Three focuses on semiotics from the point of view of history.A seminal text in cultural semiotics, the book's ambitious scope also makes it applicable to disciplines outside semiotics. The book will be of great interest to those concerned with cultural studies, anthropology, Slavic studies, critical theory, philosophy, and historiography.Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is the founder of the Moscow-Tartu School and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics.

Who was the man behind The Scream, the iconic painting that so acutely expresses the anguish of the twentieth century?Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) was twenty-eight when he embarked on a lifelong effort to paint his ‘soul’s diary’ – and began a perverse love affair with self-destruction. This intimate and moving life of the Norwegian artist explores his turbulent early years, his time as a recluse, and his intense efforts to paint not what he saw, but what he experienced.

In 'The Decay of Lying' Oscar Wilde uses his decadent ideology in an attempt to reverse and therefore reject his audiences' 'normal' conceptualizations of nature, art and morality. Wilde's views of life and art are illustrated through the use of Platonic dialogue where the character Vivian takes on the persona of Wilde. Wilde's goal is to subvert the norm by reversing its values. Wilde suggests to us that society is wrong, not him. Calling on diverse examples - from Ancient Greek sculpture to contemporary paintings - Oscar Wilde's brilliant essay creates a witty, paradoxical world in which the only Art worth loving is that built on complete untruths.

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things aid" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methadological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now. Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutey indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.

Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. "Yoruba Ritual" is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.

Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, and enjoyment.This new translation of Jacques Lacan's deliberation on psychoanalysis and contemporary social order offers welcome, readable access to the brilliant author's seminal thinking on Freud, Marx, and Hegel; patterns of social and sexual behavior; and the nature and function of science and knowledge in the contemporary world.

Illustrated throughout with revealing images, this is the first and only work in which the world-famous Swiss psychologist explains to the layperson his enormously influential theory of symbolism as revealed in dreams.

In a series of pioneering studies, this book examines the creation—and the conflict behind the creation—of sacred space in America. The essays in this volume visit places in America where economic, political, and social forces clash over the sacred and the profane, from wilderness areas in the American West to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and they investigate visions of America as sacred space at home and abroad. Here are the beginnings of a new American religious history—told as the story of the contested spaces it has inhabited.The contributors are David Chidester, Matthew Glass, Edward T. Linenthal, Colleen McDannell, Robert S. Michaelsen, Rowland A. Sherrill, and Bron Taylor.