Frank Tallis: ‘I often feel when I write fiction that I am just doing psychology in a different way’

The psychotherapist and fiction writer on the importance of sci-fi and Freud, and the connection between love and madnessFrank Tallis is a novelist, nonfiction writer and clinical psychologist. He has heldlecturing posts in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry and neuroscience at King ’s College London. He has written horror fiction, a series of detective novels featuring the fictional detectiveMax Liebermann and four books about psychology, includingChanging Minds, a history of psychotherapy.The Incurable Romantic, an account – told through case histories of his patients – of a life spentinvestigating obsessive love, is published on 7 June (Little Brown).This is the second book you have written about the nature of love. What draws you to the subject?Its universality – and the fact that falling in love is the one experience that most people have in their lives where they can say, for a short period of time, they have flirted with madness. All of us can empathise with this strange state, where we begin to lose touch with reality and think in an entirely differe nt way.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Books Culture Psychology Science and nature books Fiction Source Type: news