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\"Through an examination of 1980s American cultural texts and media, Kevin L. Ferguson examines how new types of individuals were created in order to manage otherwise hidden cultural anxieties during the American 1980s. Exploring a variety of strategies for fashioning self-knowledge in the decade, this book illuminates the hidden lives of surrogate mothers, crack babies, persons with AIDS, yuppies, and brat packers. These seemingly simple stereotypes in fact concealed deeper cultural changes in issues relating to race, class, and gender. Through a range of texts, Eighties People shows how the commonplace reading of the 1980s as a superficial period of little importance disguises the decade's real imperative: a struggle for self-definition outside of the limited set of options given by postmodern theorizing\"-- Provided by publisher.

As the United States rushed toward industrial and technological modernization in the late nineteenth century, people worried that the workplace had become too competitive, the economy too turbulent, domestic chores too taxing, while new machines had created a fast-paced environment that sickened the nation. Physicians testified that, without a doubt, modern civilization was causing a host of ills-everything from irritability to insomnia, lethargy to weight loss, anxiety to lack of ambition, and indigestion to impotence. They called this conditionneurasthenia. Neurasthenic Nationinvestigates how the concept of neurasthenia helped doctors and patients, men and women, and advertisers and consumers negotiate changes commonly associated with \"modernity.\" Combining a survey of medical and popular literature on neurasthenia with original research into rare archives of personal letters, patient records, and corporate files, David Schuster charts the emergence of a \"neurasthenic nation\"-a place where people saw their personal health as inextricably tied to the pitfalls and possibilities of a changing world.

\"It came from the 1950s is an eclectic, witty, and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties, and desires of their times. The essays explore the emergence of \"Hammer Horror\" and the company's groundbreaking 1958 adaptation of Dracula; the work of popular authors such as Shirley Jackson and Robert Bloch, and the effect that 50s food advertisements had upon the poetry of Sylvia Plath; the place of special effects in the decade's science fiction films; and 1950s Anglo-American relations as refracted through the prism of the 1957 film Night of the Demon\"--Provided by publisher.

One evening, while watching the news, Roger N. Lancaster was startled by a report that a friend, a gay male school teacher, had been arrested for a sexually based crime. The resulting hysteria threatened to ruin the life of an innocent man. In this passionate and provocative book, Lancaster blends astute analysis, robust polemic, ethnography, and personal narrative to delve into the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society. Drawing on classical social science, critical legal studies, and queer theory, he tracks the rise of a modern suburban culture of fear and develops new insights into the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.

Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Beginning with perhaps the most famous depiction of a corporation—Frank Norris’s The Octopus—Ralph Clare traces this figure as it shifts from monster to man, from force to “individual,” and from American industry to multinational “Other.” Clare examines a variety of texts that span the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, including novels by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Joshua Ferris; films such as Network, Ghostbusters, Gung Ho, Office Space, and Michael Clayton; and assorted artifacts of contemporary media such as television’s The Office and the comic strips Life Is Hell and Dilbert. Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend. Whether demonized or lionized, the corporation embodies American anxieties about these current conditions and ongoing fears about the viability of a capitalist system.

This essay explores some of the reasons for the continuing power of racial categorization in our era, and thus offers some friendly amendments to the more optimistic renderings of the term post-racial. Focusing mainly on the relationship between black and white Americans, it argues that the widespread embrace of universal values of freedom and equality, which most regard as antidotes to racial exclusion, actually reinforce it. The internal logic of these categories requires the construction of the \"other.\" In America, where freedom and equality still stand at the contested center of collective identity, a history of racial oppression informs the very meaning of these terms. Thus the irony: much of the effort exerted to transcend race tends to fuel continuing division.

Emotions maintain an ambivalent position in the economy of science. In contemporary debates they are variously seen as hardwired biological responses, cultural artifacts, or uneasy mixtures of the two. At the same time, there is a tension between the approaches to emotion developed in modern psychotherapies and in the history of science. While historians see the successful ascription of affective states to individuals and populations as a social and technical achievement, the psychodynamic practitioner treats these enduring associations as pathological accidents that need to be overcome. This short essay uses the career of the Glaswegian public health investigator James L. Halliday to examine how debates over the ontological status of the emotions and their durability allow them to travel between individual identity and political economy, making possible new kinds of psychological intervention.

In the late 1930s, the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University developed a research program on conflict and anxiety as an outcome of Clark Hull's informal seminar on the integration of Freud's and Pavlov's theories. The program was launched at the 1937 Annual Meeting of the APA in a session chaired by Clark L. Hull, and the experiments continued through 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War. In an effort to apply the findings from animal experiments to the war situation, John Dollard and Neal E. Miller decided to study soldiers' fear reactions in combat. As a first step, they arranged interviews with a few veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Taking these interviews as a point of departure, Dollard devised a questionnaire to which 300 former Lincoln brigaders responded. The present paper analyzes the main outcomes of the questionnaire, together with the war experiences reported in the interview transcripts. Our purpose was to evaluate a project which was initially investigated by the FBI because of the communists among the Lincoln ranks, but eventually supported by the American Army, and which exerted great influence on the military psychology of the time. A finales de la década de 1930 el Institute of Human Relations de la Universidad de Yale desarrolló un programa de investigación sobre el conflicto y la ansiedad como resultado del seminario informal de Clark H. Hull sobre la integración de las teorías de Freud y Pavlov. El programa se puso en marcha en la reunión anual de la APA de 1937 en una sesión presidida por Hull y los experimentos continuaron en 1941, cuando los Estados Unidos entraron en la segunda guerra mundial. En un intento de aplicar los hallazgos de los experimentos con animales a la situación bélica, John Dollard y Neal E. Miller decidieron estudiar las reacciones de miedo de los soldados en el combate. Como primer paso concertaron entrevistas con unos pocos veteranos de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln. Tomando estas entrevistas como punto de partida, Dollard diseñó un cuestionario al que contestaron 300 antiguos brigadistas de la Lincoln. Este artículo analiza los resultados principales del cuestionario, así como las experiencias de guerra reflejadas en las transcripciones de las entrevistas. Nuestro propósito ha sido evaluar un proyecto que fue investigado inicialmente por el FBI por la presencia comunista en las filas de la Lincoln, pero finalmente apoyado por el ejército norteamericano, y que ejerció una gran influencia sobre la psicología militar de la época.

From the first to the current fourth edition, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has grown considerably in size and complexity. The DSM-III (1980) represented a paradigm shift in psychiatric diagnoses and is the main focus of the article's five propositions attempting to make sense of basic historical changes in the manual. The first two propositions concern theoretical changes in the manual; they critically examine the effort to evict unverified etiological assumptions from diagnoses, the adoption of formulations of disorders as discretely constituted, and the role of the multiaxial context in diagnoses. The next two propositions attempt a new development: a set of concepts designating the structural changes in the DSM histories of individual disorders. The fifth proposition examines historical forces supporting the neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists' efforts to produce the DSM-III. The conclusion brings the propositions together to explain the DSM's growth in size and complexity and to show that the general pattern of the DSM changes are aimed at remedicalizing the profession of psychiatry.

Disasters can be defined as catastrophic events that challenge the normal range of human coping ability. The technological/human-caused disaster, a classification of interest in this article, is attributable to human error or misjudgment. Lower socioeconomic status and race intersect in the heightened risk for technological/human-caused disasters among people of color. The experience of the Navajo with the uranium industry is argued to specifically be this type of a disaster with associated long-standing psychological impacts. The history of the Navajo with uranium mining and milling is reviewed with a discussion of the arduous efforts for compensation. The psychological impacts of this long-standing disaster among the Navajo are organized around major themes of: (a) human losses and bereavement, (b) environmental losses and contamination, (c) feelings of betrayal by government and mining and milling companies, (d) fears about current and future effects, (e) prolonged duration of psychological effects, (f) anxiety and depression, and (g) complicating factors of poverty and racism. The paper concludes with suggestions for culturally-appropriate education and intervention.