Book Loot: Week Ending November 15th, 2009

Another very small loot this week..

• The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression by Darian Leader
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Leader book looks really interesting, all about how perceptions and treatments of depression have altered over time, and how our current method of dealing with it has strayed from traditional psychoanalytic approaches. I was a bit of a psychoanalysis nerd when I was at university, I loved Freud’s theories – especially those related to death, mourning, melancholia and group psychology – and made use of them in my undergraduate thesis. It wasn’t especially fashionable to be into Freud, but luckily my advisor was an exceptional Freudian scholar who encouraged my dedication of psychoanalysis, and Freud really, at that time, helped me come to a greater understanding of the world around and within me. God, that sounds terribly earnest, but hey I was young. It’s too easy to dismiss Freud on the basis of some of his questionable life choices and his more controversial theories, but I still think that some of his work is very valuable. Ahem, in summary, Leader is a practicing psychoanalyst and I’m very interested to read about how he interprets modern depression.

I love the cover art as well, from Francisco Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’: