Fantasies of Flight - Hardcover

Ogilvie, Daniel M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019515746X ISBN 13: 9780195157468

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. Daniel Ogilvie exchanges a heart-to-heart, case study approach to understanding human behavior for the current strategies of categorizing and comparing individuals according to their manifest traits. Ogilvie asks and endeavors to answer questions like "What were the psychological conditions that led Sir James Barrie to create a character named Peter Pan?" and "What were the dynamics behind the Marshall Herff Applewhite's conviction that a space ship, hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet, would rescue him and his Heaven's Gate followers after they enacted a mass suicide pact in 1997?" Answering these questions requires him to resurrect "old" ways to think about personality and "old" strategies for studying individuals one by one.
Early in the book, Ogilvie reviews the history of why intensive case studies were discredited in psychology and describes how Sigmund Freud's psychobiographical account of Leonardo da Vinci's fascination with flight inadvertently abetted critics of psychoanalytic psychology. He then performs a partial psychobiography of James Barrie and the origins of Peter Pan, followed by an investigation of Carl Jung, who fashioned the collective unconscious to serve as humankind's link to eternity. Arguing that personality psychology needs to become less insular, Ogilvie integrates information from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience into a theory regarding the latent needs that both Barrie and Jung sought to satisfy. The theory, including its emphasis on the onset of self and consciousness, is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations. Well written and accessible, but complex and scholarly, this volume will restore interest in the investigation of people's inner lives.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel M. Ogilvie is Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University.

Review:

"Daniel Ogilvie has written and lively and interesting book about the origins and psychological correlates of a common human fantasy theme." --Journal of the Hisory of the Behavioral Sciences

"A book that carries on the fine tradition of psychobiography envisioned by Henry Murray and other early personologists. His book is an interesting mix of general theorizing and engaging psychobiography. I suspect that both students and professional psychologists will be delighted with this book."--Bill Peterson, Smith College

"...Ogilvie constructs his argument for the value of case studies with clever wit, especially in his chapter on women's flight fantasies, revealing the "rough edges" of Mary Poppins that were glossed over in the Disney version." --Choice

"There is every chance that this study can become one of the first classics of twenty-first century psychology...Ogilvie's writing style is clear, readable, colloquial, and filled with humor. He draws the reader in, keeps the reader with him, and makes the reader want to keep going."--James W. Anderson, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, Northwestern University

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 019515746X
• ISBN 13: 9780195157468
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272