The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.
C. Wright Mills’s 1959 book The Sociological Imagination is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of post-war sociology.
At its heart, the work is a closely reasoned argument about the nature and aims of sociology, one that sets out a manifesto and roadmap for the field. Its wide acceptance and popular reception is a clear demonstration of the rhetorical power of Wright’s strong reasoning skills.
In critical thinking, reasoning involves the creation of an argument that is strong, balanced, and, of course, persuasive. In Mills’s case, this core argument makes a case for what he terms the “sociological imagination”, a particular quality of mind capable of analyzing how individual lives fit into, and interact with, social structures. Only by adopting such an approach, Mills argues, can sociologists see the private troubles of individuals as the social issues they really are.
Allied to this central argument are supporting arguments for the need for sociology to maintain its independence from corporations and governments, and for social scientists to steer away from ‘high theory’ and focus on the real difficulties of everyday life. Carefully organized, watertight and persuasive, The Sociological Imagination exemplifies reasoned argument at its best.
Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important. Yet it was the product of an apparently minor, meaningless assignment. Undertaking to approach former classmates who had attended Smith College with her, 10 years after their graduation, the high-achieving Friedan was astonished to discover that the survey she had undertaken for a magazine feature revealed a high proportion of her contemporaries were suffering from a malaise she had thought was unique to her: profound dissatisfaction at the ‘ideal’ lives they had been living as wives, mothers and homemakers.
For Friedan, this discovery stimulated a remarkable burst of creative thinking, as she began to connect the elements of her own life together in new ways. The popular idea that men and women were equal, but different – that men found their greatest fulfilment through work, while women were most fulfilled in the home – stood revealed as a fallacy, and the depression and even despair she and so many other women felt as a result was recast not as a failure to adapt to a role that was the truest expression of femininity, but as the natural product of undertaking repetitive, unfulfilling and unremunerated labor.
Friedan's seminal expression of these new ideas redefined an issue central to many women's lives so successfully that it fuelled a movement – the ‘second wave’ feminism of the 1960s and 1970s that fundamentally challenged the legal and social framework underpinning an entire society.
Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless exposé of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things.
Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule.
Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.
Leon Festinger’s 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance is a key text in the history of psychology – one that made its author one of the most influential social psychologists of his time. It is also a prime example of how creative thinking and problem solving skills can come together to produce work that changes the way people look at questions for good.
Strong creative thinkers are able to look at things from a new perspective, often to the point of challenging the very frames in which those around them see things. Festinger was such a creative thinker, leading what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution” in social psychology. When Festinger was carrying out his research, the dominant school of thought – behaviorism – focused on outward behaviors and their effects. Festinger, however, turned his attention elsewhere, looking at “cognition:” the mental processes behind behaviors. In the case of “cognitive dissonance”, for example, he hypothesized that apparently incomprehensible or illogical behaviors might be caused by a cognitive drive away from dissonance, or internal contradiction. This perspective, however, raised a problem: how to examine and test out cognitive processes. Festinger’s book records the results of the psychological experiments he designed to solve that problem. The results helped prove the existence for what is now a fundamental theory in social psychology.
German sociologist Max Weber’s 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation is widely regarded as a masterpiece of political theory and sociology. Its central strength lies in Weber’s deployment of masterful interpretative skills to power his discussion of modern politics.
Interpretation involves understanding both the meaning of evidence and the meaning of terms – questioning definitions, clarifying terms and processes, and supplying good, clear definitions of the author’s own. As a sociologist accustomed to working with historical evidence, Weber based his own work on precisely these skills, solidly backed up by analytical acuity.
Politics as a Vocation, written in a Germany shocked by its crippling defeat in World War I, saw Weber turn his eye to an examination of how the modern nation state emerged, and the different ways in which it can be run – interpreting and defining the different types of rule that are possible. It is testament to Weber’s interpretative skills that Politics is famous above all in sociological circles for its clear definition of a state as an institution that claims “the monopoly of legitimate physical violence” in a given territory.
Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 The Location of Culture is one of the founding texts of the branch of literary theory called postcolonialism. While postcolonialism has many strands, at its heart lies the question of interpreting and understanding encounters between the western colonial powers and the nations across the globe that they colonized. Colonization was not just an economic, military or political process, but one that radically affected culture and identity across the world. It is a field in which interpretation comes to the fore, and much of its force depends on addressing the complex legacy of colonial encounters by careful, sustained attention to the meaning of the traces that they left on colonized cultures. What Bhabha’s writing, like so much postcolonial thought, shows is that the arts of clarification and definition that underpin good interpretation are rarely the same as simplification. Indeed, good interpretative clarification is often about pointing out and dividing the different kinds of complexity at play in a single process or term. For Bhabha, the object is identity itself, as expressed in the ideas colonial powers had about themselves. In his interpretation, what at first seems to be the coherent set of ideas behind colonialism soon breaks down into a complex mass of shifting stances – yielding something much closer to postcolonial thought than a first glance at his sometimes dauntingly complex suggests.
In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In doing this, Sedgwick provides a history of sexuality that contends that the dualistic homo/heterosexual model is as much a basis for modern culture as it is an outcome of it. Thus, Sedgwick laid the foundations of Queer Theory, contributing to the contemporary debates regarding the relationship between desire and normative structures of power, the question of empirical sexuality, and the intricacies of the relationship between sexuality and gender.
Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metaphor of the cyborg to champion socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics. Until Haraway’s work, few feminists had turned to theorizing science and technology and thus her work quite literally changed the terms of the debate. This article continues to be seen as hugely influential in the field of feminism, particularly postmodern, materialist, and scientific strands. It is also a precursor to cyberfeminism and posthumanism and perhaps anticipates the development of digital humanities.
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture,he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
What motivates us to do a good job? When does the pressure of work impact upon our health and well-being? How can employers choose the right candidates? The Psychology of Working Life shows how, whether we like it or not, the way we work, and our feelings about it, play a fundamental role in overall well-being. From the use of psychometrics in recruiting the right candidate, to making working life more efficient, the book illustrates how work in industrialized societies continues to be founded upon core psychological ideas. Motivation and job satisfaction have become recognized as key to job design and The Psychology of Working Life suggests that changing the way we work can impact on our stress levels, overall health, and productivity.
Why do some of us become overweight? Why is it so difficult to lose weight? How can we adopt healthy attitudes towards food? The Psychology of Dieting takes a broad and balanced view of the causes of weight gain and the challenges involved in dieting. Exploring the cognitive, emotional and social triggers which lead us to make poor decisions around food, the book considers what it means to diet well. By understanding our psychological selves, the book shows how we can change our unhealthy behaviours and potentially lose weight. In an era of weight problems, obesity, and dangerous dieting, The Psychology of Dieting shows us that there is no such thing as a miracle diet, and that we must understand how our minds shape the food choices we make.
KOCHAJ. ŻYJ MIŁOŚCIĄ. BĄDŹ MIŁOŚCIĄ. Od 24 lat jestem w szczęśliwym związku. Jego punktem zwrotnym był kryzys, który przeżyliśmy trzynaście lat temu. Mogliśmy wtedy oddalić się od siebie, rozstać się, stworzyć nowe związki, ale wybraliśmy inaczej – weszliśmy na drogę rozwoju i głębszej miłości. Teraz cieszymy się bliskim, radosnym, dojrzałym związkiem, którego wspaniałym owocem jest nasza ukochana córeczka Helenka. Dziś pragnę pomóc Ci zajrzeć w swoje serce i podążyć za jego głosem. To Ty jesteś centrum Twojego wszechświata. Twoja wartość nie jest uzależniona od mężczyzny, pracy czy czegokolwiek innego. W Tobie jest wszystko. Pragnę, byś stała się istotą emocjonalnie niezależną. Byś mogła dawać miłość i dzielić się miłością tak, jak tego pragniesz. Byś mogła żyć miłością również wtedy, gdy jesteś sama – bo nawet kiedy jesteś sama, nie jesteś samotna. Możesz kochać i dzielić się miłością na wiele sposobów. Twoje serce Cię poprowadzi. Jak kochać, jak żyć miłością, jak tworzyć trwałe i wartościowe relacje z samą sobą, z partnerem, z dziećmi, z rodziną i z otaczającym światem – o tym piszę w mojej najnowszej książce. Dołącz do mnie w przepięknej podróży do źródła miłości. Z miłością Agnieszka
Ryszard Kapuściński wysoko cenił dzieło Herodota i to właśnie on zauważył, że "[...]zawsze mówi się o nim jako o historyku, o tym, czy było dokładnie tak, jak on pisał, czy może inaczej. Nikt nie zwrócił jednak uwagi, że Herodot był przede wszystkim pierwszym, wspaniałym reporterem....". Podróże z Herodotem są pochwałą Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego dla zasług starożytnego historyka i podróżnika, ale też autoportretem samego autora Szachinszacha, ogarniętego pasją podróżowania i poznawania świata.
Jedna z podstawowych lektur na studiach psychologicznych.
Horney przedstawia obraz neurotyka, z jego konfliktami, lękami, cierpieniem I trudnościami, jakie ma on z samym sobą oraz w kontaktach z innymi ludźmi, a także próby ich rozwiązania. Jest to podsumowanie pierwszych doświadczeń zdobytych przez autorkę w pracy klinicznej nad nerwicami, a jednocześnie ilustracja pewnego etapu rozwoju myśli neopsychoanalitycznej. Do dziś jedna z podstawowych lektur na studiach psychologicznych.
When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases "global village" and "the medium is the message" in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril.
Why do so many people love gardening? What does your garden say about you? What is guerrilla gardening? The Psychology of Gardening delves into the huge benefits that gardening can have on our health and emotional well-being, and how this could impact on the entire public health of a country. It also explores what our gardens can tell us about our personalities, how we can link gardening to mindfulness and restoration, and what motivates someone to become a professional gardener. With gardening being an ever popular pastime, The Psychology of Gardening provides a fascinating insight into our relationships with our gardens.
Masz w głowie chomika!Ten mały niewidzialny gryzoń w ułamku sekundy przyciąga całą twoją uwagę i rozpoczyna bieg w kołowrotku, aż całkowicie zamąci ci się w głowie!To właśnie on odpowiedzialny jest za kłębiące się myśli, które utrudniają ci życie, są przyczyną cierpienia, a w konsekwencji ograniczają twoją wolnośćNie musisz bezradnie znosić obecności chomika w swojej głowie. Poznaj metodę dzięki, której dowiesz się:Jak powstrzymać bieg myśli i uzyskać wewnętrzny spokój;Jak uwolnić się od cierpienia i udręki spowodowanych natrętnymi myślami;Jak zidentyfikować myśli i rozpoznać, czym są tak naprawdę.Poskrom chomika w swojej głowie i uspokój swój umysł!Dr Serge Marquis lekarz specjalista zdrowia publicznego i konsultant medycyny pracy w zakresie zdrowia psychicznego; popularyzator nauki, prelegent i wykładowca na licznych konferencjach dotyczących zdrowia.
Zapraszam Cię do zajrzenia w głąb siebie i zadania kilku ważnych pytań: Jak mam strzec swego serca? Jak sprawić, że będzie w nim wewnętrzny pokój, pomimo trudności i wyzwań? Jak zatroszczyć się o jego wewnętrzną siłę i jak nie pozwolić, by paraliżował je lęk? Bóg daje nam odpowiedź w swoim Słowie odkryjmy ją wspólnie!Trzymasz w ręku praktyczny i prosty poradnik o szukaniu pokoju serca, wewnętrznej sile, pokonywaniu lęku, budowaniu zdrowych relacji, zaufaniu Bogu, o ciszy i zatrzymaniu w życiowej gonitwie. Inspiracją do jego napisania były słowa z Księgi Przysłów: Z całą pilnością strzeż swego serca, bo życie ma tam swoje źródło.
Zaprezentowane w książce rozważania i badania mają zarówno walor poznawczy, jak i aplikacyjny. Dają nie tylko szansę zrozumienia, czym jest starość i jak funkcjonują ludzie w późnej dorosłości, ale dostarczają wskazówek odnośnie do tego, jak powinniśmy się komunikować z osobami starszymi, jak je wspomagać i chronić przed poczuciem osamotnienia i społecznego wykluczenia. Wskazują również na możliwości osób w późnej dorosłości i tkwiący w nich potencjał, który warto wykorzystać zarówno dla dobra osób starszych, których apetyt na życie może wzrosnąć, gdy poczują się potrzebni i docenieni, jak i społeczeństwa, które może wiele zyskać korzystając z mądrości i doświadczenia życiowego osób w okresie senioralnym.
Z recenzji dr hab. Doroty Czyżowskiej
Przedstawione teksty dają zróżnicowany obraz funkcjonowania starego człowieka w różnych sferach: ruchowej, poznawczej, społecznej. Obraz starego człowieka jest wynikiem jego unikatowej życiowej historii, w której istotna jest realizacja potrzeb rozwoju, takich jak: intencjonalność, kształtowanie przeznaczenia, kompetencja biograficzna. Ważna jest adaptacja do starości; najlepszym sposobem jej osiągnięcia jest podejmowanie nowych form aktywności, zaś wrogiem – bezczynność. Człowiek stary żyje w zmieniającej się rzeczywistości, co należy wziąć pod uwagę przy analizie procesów adaptacyjnych seniora. Na adaptację seniora należy patrzeć zarówno z punktu jego przystosowania się do nowych technologii, jak i z perspektywy procesu społecznego metapoznania młodego pokolenia.
Mam nadzieję, że wiedza zawarta w poszczególnych tekstach niniejszej monografii będzie przydatna w zarówno w wielokierunkowych badaniach nad człowiekiem starym, jak i w przygotowaniu rozwiązań społecznych dostrzegających tę grupę ludzi.
Z Wprowadzenia prof. dr hab. Marii Kielar-Turskiej
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