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When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, it was twenty-four hours before anyone knew it was missing. Afterward, thousands of people flocked to see the empty space where it had once hung, many of them having never seen the painting in the first place. In Stealing the Mona Lisa, Darien Leader takes the intriguing story of the theft of the Mona Lisa and the public's reaction to it as a starting point to explore the psychology of looking at visual art. What do we hope to see in paintings, and what do they hide from us? Why should some artists feel compelled to live lives that are more colorful than their works? And why did the police bungle their long investigation into the theft of Leonardo's masterpiece? Leader combines anecdote, observation, and analysis with examples taken from classical and contemporary art to create a surprising and fearless interrogation of what we see in art and what we might hope to find....
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Fifty years ago, the terms mourning and melancholia were part of the psychological lexicon. Today, in a world of rapid diagnoses, quick cures, and big pharmaceutical dollars, the catch-all concept of depression has evolved to take their place. In The New Black, Darian Leader argues that this shift is more than semantic; rather, it speaks to our culture’s complicated relationship with loss, suffering, and grief.
Part memoir, part cultural analysis, Leader draws on examples from literature, art, cinema, and history, as well as case studies from his work as a psychologist, to explore the unconscious ways our culture responds to the experience of loss. He visits a bookstore in search of studies on mourning, and, finding none, moves on to the fiction and poetry sections, where he finds countless examples of mourning in literature. Moving from historical texts of the Middle Ages, to Freud’s essays, to Lacan, to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Leader provides an innovative tour of mourning and melancholia and our culture’s struggle to understand them. ...
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A groundbreaking study on the relationship between mental and physical health.
A stomach ache before a job interview is common enough—but how else can the mind affect the body? Can conditions like heart disease, cancer, asthma or arthritis be exacerbated, or relieved, by our own thoughts and feelings? Have you ever wondered why people get sick when they do? Does the mind really affect the body? And why does modern medicine seem to have so little interest in the unconscious process and emotional factors behind illness? And what—if anything—can we do about it?
Why People Get Sick explores the relationship between what's going on in our heads and what happens in our bodies, combining cutting-edge research with neglected findings in medical history. In light of America's growing health crisis, Darian Leader and David Corfield's study could not come at a more critical moment. With remarkable case studies and startling new insights into why we get sick, this intriguing and thought-provoking book should be read by anyone who cares about their own health and that of other people....
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For anyone intrigued by Lacan's ideas butdiscouraged by the apparent arcane quality of his writings, the lucid text and graphic illlustrations together provide the ideal introduction....
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