Psychology & Anthropology

Haunted house stories tend to end in one of two ways: either the family flees, or the ghosts are soothed, and everyone – living and dead alike – is allowed to move on. Freud called this process, at...

Traditionally, it was the shaman who swallowed or sniffed intoxicating plants as a way of gaining access to the world of the spirits, but the new Western clients are focused on their own psychedelic experiences....

Resistance is at once recognition and a fantasy of catastrophe; indeed, in resisting one has always leaped forward to the impending catastrophe – the catastrophe of submitting to or complying with something...

With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just...

Milner’s method offers ordinary readers an inventive, literary self-help guide to learning from one’s senses the true shape of the life within us. Her work is not only a good deal easier to read than...

Strabo’s rather egregious overestimate of the eastern extension of Asia may have reached the ears of the mathematician and cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli, who decades later transmitted it to Christopher...

The Great Transformation was an exceptionally bold effort to make sense of contemporary developments on an international scale by telling a quasi-historical story that linked the spinning jenny, Malthus...

The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing intervention. Both of these bear an at...

What is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable....

One of the papyri excavated by the archaeologist Heba Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries...

Everywhere, it seems, human beings have believed that sexual desire must be curbed – it is ‘a source of conflict’, Maurice Godelier says, and ‘cannot be entirely left up to each individual’.

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

Pragmatism wants us to ask, what is the life we want – or think we want? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask, why do we not want to know what we want?

When do we dig up the dead, and how? Can they be robbed? What if their deadness is final, and that’s all we need to know, or can know?

It wasn’t a belief in the supernatural that marked someone out as insane, but the judgment of the authorities that this belief was held with harmful vehemence. One inmate who proclaimed himself to be...

One of the earliest terms for both the vagina and the womb is the Old English word cwitha. I shared this with my best girlfriends. They said it sounded like a lovely village in Wales, filled with men of...

The Sumerian priestess Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father, Sargon of Akkad,...