Psychology

Aristotle’s On the Soul is the first treatise on the subject, and it defines the soul not as a ghost but as what makes a living thing alive, with perception, imagination and thought as its powers. Augustine’s Confessions is the first study of a mind from inside, and the tenth book, on memory, is where psychology as introspection begins. Montaigne and Pascal are its Renaissance and seventeenth-century voices.

The empiricists made the mind their subject: Locke’s Essay is the map of how ideas enter and combine, and Hume’s Treatise the demonstration that when you look for the self you find only perceptions. William James wrote the founding book of American psychology and gave the stream of consciousness its name, which Woolf and Joyce then wrote in.

Freud is the shelf’s centre, with sixteen works, most of them on the Great Books of the Western World shelf, which gave him a whole volume. The Interpretation of Dreams, the Introductory Lectures and Civilization and Its Discontents are the ones to read. Beauvoir’s Second Sex is psychology as philosophy of a whole sex, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is here because no psychologist has bettered its account of a guilty mind.