1st Edition
Inspecting Psychology How the Rise of Psychological Ideas Influenced the Development of Detective Fiction
1. The first psychologies: from rock art to the association of ideas 2. Psychology, phrenology and psychiatry: the late 18th-19th centuries and the work of Edgar Allen Poe 3. The birth of modern psychology: 1879 and the significance of apparently unconnected events 4. Psychology and mystical experiences: the late 19th century and the work of William James and Conan Doyle, allies in the mystical 5. Puzzles, riddles and Gestalt theory: the early 20th century and the work of G.K. Chesterton 6. The First World War, mental illness and shell shock: the work of Rebecca West and the detective novels of the 1920s. 7. Freud, psychoanalysis and the psychology of Agatha Christie: the golden age of detective fiction 8. Individual psychology and the inferiority complex: Lord Peter Wimsey and the work of Dorothy Sayers 9. Theories of learning and the rise of behaviourism: the 1920s and the work of Anthony Berkeley, the innovator who seized up 10. Attachment theory and the work of John Bowlby: psychology between 1930 and 1945 and the novels of Gladys Mitchell 11. Psychoanalysis and psychiatry from 1930 to 1960: Georges Simenon and the intellectual egos of Sartre and Lacan 12. Curtains: contemporary psychology, pathology porn and the enduring link with detective fiction
Biography
David Cohen got his Ph.D. on what makes children laugh. His latest books are Churchill and Attlee: The Unlikely Allies Who Won the War and Surviving Lockdown: Human Nature in Social Isolation, which was written in a hurry when we thought the pandemic would soon be over. If only. He is also a film-maker. His ITV film on the Soham murders was nominated for the Baftas. He produced London Unplugged, ten short films about London, and is planning to make a feature film based on his book The Escape of Sigmund Freud, the story of how Freud got out of Vienna in 1938.
