FROM PLACEBO TO PANACEA

With the latest generation of psychoactive drugs, has pharmacology at last triumphed over mental illness? A close look at world scientific literature would suggest otherwise. The sobering truth is that many claims about the efficacy of drug therapies for everything from depression to schizophrenia have been exaggerated. What, then, accounts for the inflated confidence clinicians and the lay public alike often have in the new generation of "wonder drugs"? Find out in From Placebo to Panacea.

From Placebo to Panacea is not an indictment of drug...

It would be impossible to tabulate fully the debt modern psychology owes to Sigmund Freud. Freud's theories of the unconscious, the role of parents in personality development, psychological defense mechanisms, psychosomatic symptoms, body image, and sexual behavior patterns, to name just a few, continue to exert a powerful influence on most contemporary schools of psychological thought. So, too, elements of the original psychoanalytic method have become a fixture in the modern psychotherapeutic armamentarium. But, as the authors of this book point out, Freud's approach was more intuitive than...

This volume documents how sexual practices and fictions infiltrate and are influenced by a person's feelings about the self and the body. Using paradigms derived from self and body image theory, Fisher combines research from the past several decades dealing with sexual behavior to test major theories concerning diverse sexual phenomena. The book integrates, within a broad conceptual scheme, research findings concerning major aspects of sexual behavior such as the development of sexual competence, orgasm consistence, clitoral versus vaginal preference, and homosexuality.

The major goal of this book is to explore and integrate all that is scientifically known about the utility of magical plans and strategies for coping with life's inevitable absurdities. Make-believe has great adaptive value and helps the average individual to function better in cultures saturated with puzzling contradictions. This book traces the origins of pretending (illusion-construction) and the developmental phases of this skill. Further, it analyzes how parents depend on pretending to secure conformity and self-control from their children. It unravels the ways in which make-believe is...

Broadly scanning the biologically oriented treatments for psychological disorders in 20th century psychiatry, the authors raise serious questions about the efficacy of the somatic treatments for psychological distress and challenge the widespread preference for biologically based treatments as the treatments of choice. For graduate and undergraduate courses in clinical, social, and health psychology, behavioral medicine, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. psychopharmacology, psychiatry, and clinical social work.