I am already in the process of drafting some of the book chapters, after months of voracious reading. Before I describe the book, I will attempt to offer a clue as to the nature of the content, by listing some of my key references so far. This book is meant to serve many purposes, most of which involve enhancing the psychological and philosophical sophistication of my readers, and also their thinking concerning complex humanly problems. The book will also, indirectly, inoculate readers against ideology, and allow them to understand other individuals with unprecedented depth. That is to say that I will provide an account of humanness and human inadequacy in such a way as to minimize stigma and contempt, and to maximize understanding (and compassion thereby). Seeing that the scope of the book’s content is rather ambitious, it will be best that I draw on a large variety of sources. These include, so far, all (or most) of the written works of the following:

Psychology:

-Erich Fromm; Abraham Maslow; Carl Jung; Karen Horney; Albert Bandura; Sigmund Freud; Erich Neumann; Kenneth Gergen

Literature:

-Aldous Huxley; Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Jack London; Margaret Atwood; George Orwell; Charles Dickens; Agatha Christie; Ken Kesey; Edgar Allan Poe; H. G. Wells

Philosophy:

-Alfred Korzybski; David Hume; Karl Marx; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; Bertrand Russell; John Locke; Jean-Paul Sartre; Søren Kierkegaard; Immanuel Kant

There are also many key references which are difficult to categorize in this way, but that are best described as either ’history’, ’political science’, or ’biography’.

Here are some of the book’s key "working" objectives, which I do expect I’ll meet fully upon completing the book:

1) I will provide what is, as far as I can tell, the most comprehensive exploration into psychopathology ever undertaken. I intend to define and conceptualize insanity (or psychopathology) in a number of ways.

2) These various ’ways’ of conceptualizing insanity will each be supplemented by the insights of many thinkers and writers. This is to say that my theses and hypotheses run parallel to many ideas which have been thoroughly expounded across the years, with great prescience and eloquence, by acclaimed intellectuals. This lends favorably to the validity of my ideas.

I will offer abundant references A) so that I may give credit where it is due, and also B) because it is a senseless waste of time to re-invent classic ideas. Moreover, C) I will be providing full unedited passages from these thinkers’ works, so that the reader may get a fuller feel for their ideas, and possibly be compelled to pursue their writings.

3) My conceptualization of ’insanity’ is likely to cause readers to grow hesitant in using the word (insanity), or words like it. This is partly because the book will cause readers to consider their own working definitions, or ’working conceptualizations’, of complex terms and concepts such as ’insanity’ or ’freedom’.

In the end, this book is likely to be best classified as either psychology, LINGUISTICS, or both, despite the fact that I include very few linguistics references. In reading the samples provided, you might get a better idea for how this is so. Two VERY IMPORTANT references have been Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, and Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity.