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Freud: A Graphic Guide
Freud revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. His psychoanalytic terms such as Id, Ego, libido, neurosis and Oedipus Complex have become a part of our everyday vocabulary. But do we know what they really mean?
Introducing Freud successfully demystifies the facts of Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis. Irreverent and witty but never trivial, the book tells the story of Freud’s life and ideas from his upbringing in 19th-century Vienna, his early medical career and his encounter with cocaine, to the gradual evolution of his theories on the unconscious, dreams and sexuality.
With its combination of...
Marxism: A Graphic Guide
Was Marx himself a ‘Marxist’?
What is ‘dialectical materialism’ or the ‘superstructure’?
Did Lenin and Stalin betray Marx and his ideas?
Along with Freud and Darwin, Karl Marx was among the most influential thinkers of the late 19th century. Yet Marx inspired not only revolutions in people’s minds, but colossal political upheavals, radically transforming the lives of many millions of people and the geopolitical map of the entire world.
Introducing Marxism provides a fundamental account of Marx’s original philosophy, its roots in 19th-century European...
Mind & Brain: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Mind & Brain examines a profound and mysterious puzzle: How do the three pounds of electric sponge stowed in the top of your head allow you to experience enchantment in front of an evening landscape, and then make you remember the shopping, say ‘Damn!’ and head off to the supermarket?
To put it another way, how does the biological tissue that makes up the brain give rise to the activities that our culture refers to as ‘the mind’?
This book explains what the sciences have to say about planning and action, language, memory, attention, emotions and vision. It traces the historical...
Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide
Quantum theory is one of science’s most thrilling, challenging and even mysterious areas. Scientists such as Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger uncovered bizarre paradoxes in the early 20th century that seemed to destroy the fundamental assumptions of ‘classical physics’ – the basic laws we are taught in school.
At the sub-atomic level, one particle seems to know what the others are doing, and according to Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, there is a limit on how accurately nature can be observed. And yet quantum theory explanations are amazingly accurate and...
Stephen Hawking: A Graphic Guide
‘An ideal introduction’ Independent
‘Astonishingly comprehensive … clearer than Hawking himself’ Focus
Stephen Hawking is the world-famous physicist with a cameo in The Simpsons on his CV, but outside his academic field his work is little understood. To the public he is a tragic figure – a brilliant scientist and author of the 9 million-copy-selling A Brief History of Time, and yet confined to a wheelchair and almost completely paralysed.
Hawking’s major contribution to science has been to integrate the two great theories of 20th-century physics – Einstein's General...
Evolutionary Psychology: A Graphic Guide
How did the mind evolve?
Why can’t children under three tell lies?
How is the mind a computer?
Pulling together insights and data from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and archeology, evolutionary psychologists are beginning to piece together the first truly scientific account of human nature.
How has the human mind evolved from that of our ancestors? If our minds are built by selfish genes, why are we so cooperative? Can the differences between male and female psychology be explained in evolutionary terms? Evolutionary psychology offers a new way to answer these –...