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'What is the mind?' is a question that has
intrigued people from earliest times. Now Charles Hampden-Turner
presents the first comprehensive attempt to collect, describe,
and draw in map form the most important concepts of the
human mind put forth by the world's greatest writers, painters,
philosophers, and psychologists.
Beginning with historical and religious
ideas (Greek, Chinese, Christian and Cartesian), Maps
of the Mind differentiates among more than 50 main concepts,
including those of Freud, Jung, Fromm, Marx, Erikson, Piaget,
Maslow, Russell, Buber, Chomsky, and Marcuse.
Each idea is described clearly and represented
schematically in diagrams or 'maps' to show its relationship
to other theories, Using these 'maps' as vantage points.
Hampden-Turner creates a composite picture of the way our
minds work and of the processes of human thought, not only
in science and philosophy but also in myth, poetry, cinema,
literature, and art.
Further sections (called 'levels') look
at different theories in the fields of psychological development,
physiology of the brain, artistic and creative thinking,
language and symbolic interaction, cybernetics and psychobiology,
the paradigmatic mind, and mythic and structural thought.
Throughout the book, Hampden-Turner relates
level to level and map to map, concluding with an overview
of the different concepts he has analyzed. With the help
of literary examples, the author shows how similar many
of the ideas are. Finally Hampden-Turner puts forward a
theory of his own in the form of a highly original and thoughtful
meta map.
Charles Hampden-Turner, former president
of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, is the author
of a number of books, including Radical Man and Sane
Asylum. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard universities,
Hampden-Turner has taught at Harvard, the University of
California at Berkeley, Brandeis University, and the Tavistock
Institute in London, where for the last two years he has
been a visiting scientist.
He is the winner of the Douglas McGregor
Memorial Award and the Columbia University Prize for the
Study of Organizations, and is a former Guggenheim Fellow
and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow.
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