Customer Reviews

From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James

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I had the good fortune to review this for _Library Journal_ and was dismayed to learn of the author's untimely death before I could send a letter of compliments. He tells us how the less scientific "soul" concept got transformed by scientific interests. But he goes by way of Mary Shelly's _Frankenstein_ (1815), which bootlegged a radical psychology that could not have been taught or allowed in church at the time. Frankenstein's creature was dispatched into a hostile world, abused, etc. and paid "humanity" back with monstrous acts. Mary S. was a teenager when she wrote it, and most popular retellings obscure the point that Reed brings forward.
Readers who like this may also want to read Otto Rank's _Psychology and the Soul_ (1930/1998).

This book is written as an essay, with no footnotes. A bibliographical essay in the appendix serves for documentation. The style is extremely lucid, in spite of the complexity of the intellectual history recounted here. Immensely instructive, original in the connections established and information unearthed, entertaining, marvellous. Can be read as a handbook or as a consecutive narrative (that will hold your attention)