This text weighs the influence of psychology on culture, traces the therapeutic model to its roots, and examines the connection between psychology and the marketing of goods and ideas. The author finds that the influence of psychology has saturated contemporary life both public and private. The book tracks the expansion of the therapeutic project from its beginnings in Locke and considers reflections on and of psychology in a number of authors, including Orwell, Conrad and Dostoevsky.

This text takes up questions of literary history and theory even as it explores sources of power harnessed by modern political doctrines and the journalism that conveys them to the public. These forces of opinion are traced to a tradition deeper and older than either - satire.

When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world"--now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale.

Only when...

When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world" - now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale. Only when influenced...

The Nocebo Effect documents the transformation of normal conditions into medical problems and brings out the risks that flow from this inflationary practice. One notable risk is that people labeled as sick may find themselves living up to their label through the alchemy of the nocebo effect. The lingering effect of revoked diagnoses, the over-detection of lumps through breast self-examination, the occurrence in placebo groups of adverse events listed in consent forms, and the persistence of labeled as opposed to unlabeled symptoms-all illustrate the kind of signal distortion likely in a...