Exploring the Human Mind
Exploring the Human Mind
This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind during the war years and how it reflected in his writings. As he embarked on an exploration of personality disorders, Bradbury discovered Karen Horney's The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937). Horney's book enabled Bradbury to understand the often destructive cycle of anxiety and hostility that underlies all neuroses. His characters, both in his genre fiction and in the broader fantasy fiction that followed, represent the full range of neurotic behavioral manifestations. This chapter discusses Bradbury's readings related to psychology, including Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, recommended to him by Henry Kuttner. It also considers Bradbury's incorporation of a wide range of psychoanalytical scenes into his stories and novels as he continued to search for answers to two questions: how do we know what is real, and how do we know what is human?
Keywords: human mind, Ray Bradbury, Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, neuroses, personality disorders, psychology, Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend, Henry Kuttner
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
