Shakespeare for the Intelligence Agent: Toward Understanding Real Personalities

by Yair Neuman Ben Gurion University of

Overview

What if you found yourself working for an intelligence agency and suddenly your understanding of other human beings had become a matter of life or death? Yair Neuman draws us into a unique thought experiment, using portraits from some of Shakespeare’s most stirring works to illustrate how our psychological understanding of human nature can be significantly enriched through literature. Provocative and engaging, Shakespeare for the Intelligence Agent: Toward Understanding Real Personalities invites you to a challenging, enjoyable, and in many cases humorous reading of human personality through Shakespeare’s plays.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442256798
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/08/2016
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Yair Neuman, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He is the author of Introduction to Computational Cultural Psychology, and his work has been published extensively in leading journals for various disciplines including psychology, psychoanalysis, and information sciences.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

Introduction xiii

Part I What Should the Intelligence Agent Learn About Personality? 1

1 On Baboons, Masks, and Character 3

2 Dr. Bach's Flower Remedies and the Complexity of Personality 7

3 We Have Never Been Too Modern: The Cognitive-Biological Roots of Personality 19

4 We Have Always Been Too Modem: How to Weave Together the Biological and Cultural Threads of Personality 47

Part II Shakespeare for the Intelligence Agent 53

5 Julius Caesar: On Trust and Reason 55

6 King Lear: On Flattery, Grooming, and Treason 83

7 Othello: On Sperm Competition and the Paranoid General 105

8 Macbeth: Personalities as Formed in between People 127

9 The Merchant of Venice: On the Importance of Substitutes 143

Conclusions: Our Intelligence Agent Is Getting into the Groove 153

References 159

Index 165

About the Author 167

Editorial Reviews

Lively, informed, accessible, and intellectually stimulating. Yair Neuman presents a fluid theory of personality as multiply constructed, contextual, and continually in flux.

Amy Schwartz Cooney

Yair Neuman has produced a highly original book, full of scholarly insight and imaginative understanding. As he applies ideas about personality to the works of Shakespeare, he moves easily from psychology to literature and back again. This is a book to enjoy and learn from.

Michael Billig

The synthesis of psychodynamic and biological perspectives on personality is useful, insightful, and original. Neuman moves smartly and persuasively among thinkers such as Bowlby, McWilliams, and Dylan Thomas.

Marshall Alcorn