Lisa Appignanesi has written ten novels, several books of non-fiction (including Freud’s Women and Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present), and is general editor of the Small Books on Big Ideas series of Profile Books. She was one of the founding members of the Writers and Readers publishing cooperative, and is currently Chair of the Board of the Freud Museum. One of her many interests is memory, and she has written a novel and a memoir based on her research and involvement with the Brain and Behaviour Laboratory at the Open University. She is also the president of English PEN.This distillation of her biography (see her official website) shows a woman interested in the human mind, behaviour, and expression. Her latest book, All About Love: Anatomy of an unruly emotion, allows her to expand on all of these subjects. She really engages in a conversation with her readers, discussing Freud’s ideas and referring to philosophers and writers through the centuries. Numerous works of literature are analysed, from Ian McEwan to Proust to Tolstoy. It is an entertaining as well as an informative book.
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The first edition of Understanding Troubled Minds: A guide to mental illness and its treatments came out in 1997, and was written by psychiatrists Sidney Bloch and Bruce Singh. They had just finished a textbook of psychiatry for medical students and realised that a version for the general public was needed. They wanted to provide a ‘clear, well-informed , objective assessment of the nature of mental illness and its treatment’ (viii) and Bloch, in this thoroughly updated second edition, has maintained and continued that goal.