100 books like Rewriting the Soul

By Ian Hacking,

Here are 100 books that Rewriting the Soul fans have personally recommended if you like Rewriting the Soul. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry

Bonnie Evans Author Of The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in Britain

From my list on the making of the modern self.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.

Bonnie's book list on the making of the modern self

Bonnie Evans Why did Bonnie love this book?

The epic 900-page Discovery of the Unconscious is a phenomenally detailed and well-researched book that still challenges many of today’s psychological ‘truths.’ Ellenberger takes as his starting point models of the unconscious developed by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, which still influence many contemporary therapeutic treatments. He then skilfully links these models of the unconscious mind back to exorcism, magnetism, and hypnotism. Ellenberger’s detailed account of the use of magnetism and hypnosis by Jean Martin Charcot and others is fascinating because he explains exactly how Charcot's approaches premised new “uncovering” models devised by Nietzsche and the neo-Romantic movement. He also explains how Charcot’s work related to the growing interest in instincts and sexuality inspired by Darwin that culminated in the Freudian unconscious. In doing so, Ellenberger exposes what was genuinely new in the modern unconscious, and which parts of it have a much longer history. The…

By Henri F. Ellenberger,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Discovery of the Unconscious as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This classic work is a monumental, integrated view of man's search for an understanding of the inner reaches of the mind. In an account that is both exhaustive and exciting, the distinguished psychiatrist and author demonstrates the long chain of development,through the exorcists, magnetists, and hypnotists,that led to the fruition of dynamic psychiatry in the psychological systems of Janet, Freud, Adler, and Jung.


Book cover of History of Madness

Bonnie Evans Author Of The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in Britain

From my list on the making of the modern self.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.

Bonnie's book list on the making of the modern self

Bonnie Evans Why did Bonnie love this book?

Foucault’s classic 1961 book, History of Madness, was republished in 2006 in its entirety, exposing the serious omissions of the earlier English translation. In its full form, it stands the test of time as a groundbreaking book that exposed the origins of the modern rational self as the product of repeated attempts to understand, exclude, contain, eliminate, and treat ‘madness’. Foucault’s main argument was that since the Renaissance, our understanding of madness shifted from a philosophical phenomenon into an objective medical science. In the Renaissance, madness could still provide wisdom and insight. Yet, during the 17th and early 18th Centuries, numerous institutions of confinement, such as asylums and poor houses, were established to contain both madness and economic redundancy.’

Foucault characterises the modern experience of madness as defined purely by medical science. He claims this perspective is limiting and definitely not a move towards the ‘truth’ of madness. His…

By Michel Foucault, Jonathan Murphy (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked History of Madness as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'age Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.

This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.

History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions…


Book cover of Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self

Bonnie Evans Author Of The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in Britain

From my list on the making of the modern self.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.

Bonnie's book list on the making of the modern self

Bonnie Evans Why did Bonnie love this book?

Nikolas Rose’s exceptional book Governing the Soul expanded Foucault’s arguments, focusing on how government networks were created in collaboration with psychological specialists in the 20th century to create unique webs of expertise that helped individuals to manage and govern themselves. The result is an excellent exposition of the theory of governmentality. Rose begins with a discussion of how the Second World War encouraged new forms of ‘psychological warfare,’ where strength of mind could be assessed and selected to create the most successful fighting subjects. This created a group of professionals who also advised on the organisation of labour forces and who could teach the population to be productive and contented workers.

This expertise was extended to training children as young citizens who had to adapt to government needs via schools and social services. Rose’s point is that this created a system of power and government that was not top-down…

By Nikolas Rose,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Governing the Soul as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This work is now widely recognised as one of the founding texts in a new approach to analyzing the links between political power, expertise and the self. This "governmentality" perspective has had important implications for a range of academic disciplines including criminology, political theory, sociology and psychology and has generated much theoretical innovation and empirical investigation. This second edition adds a new introduction setting out the methodological and conceptual bases of this approach and a new final chapter that considers some of the implications of recent developments in the government of subjectivity.


Book cover of Thinking in Cases

Bonnie Evans Author Of The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in Britain

From my list on the making of the modern self.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.

Bonnie's book list on the making of the modern self

Bonnie Evans Why did Bonnie love this book?

Forrester’s excellent, yet sadly unfinished, Thinking in Cases, advanced a radical new way to consider the history of the human sciences and their modelling of the self or the individual. Whereas Hacking and Foucault focused on population-based statistical styles of reasoning as the means by which the modern state operated, Forrester argues that these ‘styles of reasoning’ were always supported by what he has termed ‘case-based reasoning.’ In doing so, Forrester considers how biopolitical power has been advanced via both legal and medical cases. He describes his approach as being informed by ‘three rhizomic structures,’ namely ‘the psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; and the individual in the human sciences.’ This rhizomic model is unique to Forrester’s approach, and allows him to move freely between law, anthropology, medicine, politics, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, in his reflections on the case. He asks us to reflect on…

By John Forrester,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Thinking in Cases as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What exactly is involved in using particular case histories to think systematically about social, psychological and historical processes? Can one move from a textured particularity, like that in Freud's famous cases, to a level of reliable generality? In this book, Forrester teases out the meanings of the psychoanalytic case, how to characterize it and account for it as a particular kind of writing. In so doing, he moves from psychoanalysis to the law and medicine, to philosophy and the constituents of science. Freud and Foucault jostle here with Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and Robert Stoller, and Einstein and Freud's connection…


Book cover of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

Lisa Marchiano Author Of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents

From my list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners. 

Lisa's book list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health

Lisa Marchiano Why did Lisa love this book?

Mounk’s book is not about mental health per se, but I found that he provided a clear, compassionate framework for understanding the current obsession with identity politics – which, in my experience, relates to our current mental health crisis.

Prioritizing race, gender, and other aspects of identity means that we focus less on universal aspects of the human experience. As a therapist, I know that understanding our suffering from a universal perspective brings healing and transformation. We lose so much when we lose this.

Mounk’s book helped clarify my thinking about identity politics, and I didn’t find it narrow or polemical. 

By Yascha Mounk,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Identity Trap as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Brought to you by Penguin.

The origins, consequences and limitations of an ideology that has quickly become highly influential around the world.

For much of their history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. It is no surprise then that many who passionately believe in social justice have come to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity if they are to resist injustice.

But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minorities has transformed into an obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new…


Book cover of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Lisa Marchiano Author Of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents

From my list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners. 

Lisa's book list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health

Lisa Marchiano Why did Lisa love this book?

I loved this book because it addressed what I think is at the heart of much of our mental health crisis – that the stories that we tell ourselves can shape our mental health.

As a therapist, I know intuitively that how we think about our distress can shape the course that our illness takes. Does the story promote resilience and flexibility? Or does it fragilize us and lead to worse mental health?

Aviv tells compelling stories from a number of cultures that helped me explore these important questions further. 

By Rachel Aviv,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Strangers to Ourselves as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mind

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.

Rachel Aviv is…


Book cover of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

Lisa Marchiano Author Of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents

From my list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners. 

Lisa's book list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health

Lisa Marchiano Why did Lisa love this book?

Philosopher Kathleen Stock cuts through the confusion and obfuscation about trans to define what we mean by transgender. What is the phenomenology of trans, and how is it different from the shifting language we use to describe different states?

I found Stock’s analysis both clear and compassionate. It’s an essential tool going forward that should make it easier to have discussions in this contested area because it posits definitions we might just all be able to agree on. 

By Kathleen Stock,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Material Girls as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A clear, concise, easy-to-read account of the issues between sex, gender and feminism . . . an important book' Evening Standard

'A call for cool heads at a time of great heat and a vital reminder that revolutions don't always end well' Sunday Times

Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.

Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir's…


Book cover of Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction: An Archetypal Reading of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler

Lisa Marchiano Author Of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents

From my list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners. 

Lisa's book list on understanding the increase in transgender identification and adolescent mental health

Lisa Marchiano Why did Lisa love this book?

I love Alderman’s writing. This book is dense. It isn’t long but it does take a bit of work to get through it, but it’s worth it.

He does the heavy lifting I’ve always wanted someone to do, looking carefully at the writings of Derrida and pointing out where these ideas bend back unhelpfully on themselves. He brings a Jungian lens to this exploration, battling back the nihilistic implications of deconstruction and finding again the helpful bedrock of meaning. 

By Bret Alderman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction, Bret Alderman puts forth a compelling thesis: Deconstruction tells a mythic story. Through an attentive examination of multiple texts and literary works, he elucidates this story in psychological and philosophical terms.

Deconstruction, the method of philosophical and literary analysis originated by Jacques Derrida, arises from what Carl Jung called "a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas." In the case of deconstruction, such ideas bear a striking resemblance to a figure that Jungian and Post-Jungian writers refer to as the puer aeternus or eternal…


Book cover of The Third Person

Joris Bas Backer Author Of Kisses For Jet: A Coming-of-Gender Story

From my list on authentic transgender characters.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a cartoonist with a transgender-biography and I write trans characters into my stories. Even though I value the growing awareness of transgender representation by all writers, those that were written by people with trans-experience carry special significance. I've written a graphic novel and many autobiographical, fictional, and documentary short stories. These works have centered on the themes sexual identity, gender roles, youth culture, family, social structures, and social history. With my work I aim to shed light on issues that are lesser known, with a strong social focus and the intention of using the storytelling medium and the comic format as a way of making the complex understandable.

Joris' book list on authentic transgender characters

Joris Bas Backer Why did Joris love this book?

This book impressed me because it doesn't shy away from its subject matter. The author tells about her journey and the struggles that pile up when she seeks professional help to transition but meets instead with a therapist who quickly becomes overwhelmed as they unpack trauma and dissociative identity disorder. With a whopping 904 pages, it's intense, but never gets dense. Entry is low-threshold and the quirky characters drew me in in no time. So much so that even when I didn't know who to believe, I was ready to believe anyone. This book perfectly illustrates the problems around gatekeeping of transgender healthcare and its complex intersections with mental health.

By Emma Grove,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Third Person as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A boldly drawn, unforgettable memoir about trauma and the barriers to gender affirming health care. In the winter of 2004, a shy woman named Emma sits in Toby s office. She wants to share this wonderful new book she s reading, but Toby, her therapist, is concerned with other things. Emma is transgender, and has sought out Toby for approval for hormone replacement therapy. Emma has shown up at the therapy sessions as an outgoing, confident young woman named Katina, and a depressed, submissive workaholic named Ed. She has little or no memory of her actions when presenting as these…


Book cover of Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

Rick Emerson Author Of Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries

From my list on exposés to keep you reading past midnight.

Why am I passionate about this?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the hidden histories of everyday things, especially in media and popular culture. (Who were those people on TV laugh tracks? Where did Muzak records come from?) A career in broadcasting only sharpened this interest, informing two decades of writing and performing.

Rick's book list on exposés to keep you reading past midnight

Rick Emerson Why did Rick love this book?

I'm always a sucker for "the story behind the story." That's doubly true when an author uncovers long-hidden (or unexpected) information about well-known events. Debbie Nathan is an ace reporter who has written extensively about the Satanic Panic (which is how I discovered her). In Sybil Exposed, Nathan explores a related subject, revealing the truth behind modern psychology's most famous—and controversial—patient.

By Debbie Nathan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Sybil Exposed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now available in paperback, Sybil Exposed is the New York Times bestselling book that offers a new perspective on the smash hit book and film, Sybil, and on multiple personality disorder itself.

Sybil: a name that resonates with legions of obsessed fans who followed the nonfiction blockbuster from 1973. The book rocketed multiple personality disorder into public consciousness and played a major role in having the diagnosis added to the psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But what do we really know about how Sybil came to be? In her news-breaking book Sybil Exposed, journalist Debbie Nathan…


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