Our lives are dominated by technology. We live with and through the achievements of technology. What is true of the rest of life is of course true of medicine. Many of us owe our existence and our continued vigour to some achievement of medical technology. And what is true in a major way of general medicine is to a significant degree true of psychiatry. Prozac has long since arrived, and in its wake an ever-growing armamentarium of new psychotropics; beyond that, neuroscience promises ever more technological advances for the field.
However, the effect of technology on the field of...

How should we deal with mental disorder - as an "illness" like diabetes or bronchitis, as a "problem in living," or what? This book seeks to answer such questions by going to their roots, in philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind, the ways in which it can be understood, and about the nature and aims of scientific medicine.
The controversy over the nature of mental disorder and the appropriateness of the "medical model" is not just an abstract theoretical debate: it has a bearing on very practical issues of appropriate treatment, as well as on psychiatric ethics and...

In Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-philosophical Analysis, Linda Brakel tackles a range of fascinating and puzzling phenomena that lie at the border between psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind. These include - unconscious knowing, vagueness, agency, the placebo effect, and even explanation itself. Unique in its use of tools and concepts from both philosophy and psychoanalysis, the book demonstrates how this interdisciplinary approach can provide some unique solutions to some impenetrable problems.
Following the introduction, chapter two on 'unconscious knowing' puts...