Curiosity about the human mind -- what it is and how it functions -- began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James.
Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those...
Curiosity about the human mind -- what it is and how it functions -- began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes ar...