Book Notices

Akhtar S, Volkan V, editors (2004). Mental zoo: Animals in the human mind and its pathology. Madison, CT:  Int. Univ. Press.  335 pp.

Akhtar S, Volkan V, editors (2005). Cultural zoo: Animals in the human mind and its sublimations. Madison, CT:  Int. Univ. Press.  293 pp.

These lively and unique collections are dedicated to the co-editors' and their relatives' pets, past and present (including, in addition to the usual cats and dogs, a cow, donkeys, pythons and a tiger), and conclude with the co-editors' reflections on immigration, animals and national identity. They give psychoanalyst contributors an opportunity to write about pet concerns and readers several windows on to animals in and out of the consulting room. Mental zoo includes an overview chapter on animals in psychiatric symptomatology, a section on ‘Freud's menagerie’, including articles on rat people, horses and horsewomen, and the wolf in the consulting room, and a section on other animals in psychic life and fantasy, including dogs, birds, snakes, spiders and cats. Cultural zoo focuses on cultural psychology, including investigations of cross-cultural perspectives on the human-animal bond, patients' dreams about animals, and animals in adult and children's literature, movies, music and religion.

Albarella C, Racalbuto A, editors (2005). Isteria [Hysteria]. Rome:  Borla.  296 pp.

It is with his work on clinical cases of hysteria that Freud became interested in neurotic psychopathology and, more generally, to understand what determines the process of thinking in human beings, attempting to establish some of the laws that regulate it. Even the concept of transference is related to hysteria and to those hysterical patients Freud wrote about in his case histories. This book of collected essays attempts to stimulate a renewed interest in hysterical phenomena. This, however, is not so much concerned with the area developed by Freud, but rather emphasises the fertility of a methodology and the possibility of making furt