Frank Tallis | |
---|---|
Born | Stoke Newington, London, England | September 1, 1958
Pen name | F.R. Tallis |
Occupation | Author, clinical psychologist |
Genre | Non-fiction, psychology, psychological journalism, crime fiction, horror fiction |
Frank Tallis (born 1 September 1958) is an English author and clinical psychologist, whose area of expertise is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He has written crime novels, including the collection of novels known as the Liebermann Papers, for which he has received several awards, is an essayist, and – under the name of F.R. Tallis — has written horror fiction. The Liebermann novels have been adapted by Stephen Thompson into the BBC TV series Vienna Blood , which first aired in 2019. [1] [2]
Frank Tallis was born Francesco de Nato Napolitano [3] in Stoke Newington in northeast London and grew up in Tottenham, a district characterised by ethnic diversity and social tensions, where he attended one of the former secondary modern schools, and describes his background as "100% Southern Italian". After he left school he initially lived an unsteady life, teaching piano and playing in a rock band. Then he married, and lived in the country for a while with his wife and their child. [4]
After he and his wife divorced he earned a doctorate in psychology and worked for the British National Health Service for a long time, taught clinical psychology and neuroscience at King's College London, and treated private patients. Tallis has been a full-time writer since the late 2000s [4] and lives in London.
Tallis has published more than 30 articles in psychology and psychiatry journals. [5] He has written four popular science books on psychology, drawing on anonymized case studies from his therapeutic practice, including The Incurable Romantic and Other Unsettling Revelations, in which he deals with the phenomenon of obsessive love. Since 2005, Tallis has been writing crime novels, published under the rubric of the Liebermann Papers and set in Vienna around the beginning of the 20th century. The two main characters are Vienna police inspector Oskar Reinhardt and his friend and adviser, psychiatrist Max Liebermann, a student of Sigmund Freud and a regular guest at Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19, now the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Neurosis is a term mainly used today by followers of Freudian thinking to describe mental disorders caused by past anxiety, often that has been repressed. In recent history, the term has been used to refer to anxiety-related conditions more generally.
Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.
Anna Freud CBE was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian–Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.
Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is a cluster C personality disorder marked by a spectrum of obsessions with rules, lists, schedules, and order, among other things. Symptoms are usually present by the time a person reaches adulthood, and are visible in a variety of situations. The cause of OCPD is thought to involve a combination of genetic and environmental factors, namely problems with attachment.
In psychoanalysis, egosyntonic refers to the behaviors, values, and feelings that are in harmony with or acceptable to the needs and goals of the ego, or consistent with one's ideal self-image. Egodystonic is the opposite, referring to thoughts and behaviors that are conflicting or dissonant with the needs and goals of the ego, or further, in conflict with a person's ideal self-image.
Karl Abraham was an influential German psychoanalyst, and a collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who called him his 'best pupil'.
Being lovestruck means having mental and physical symptoms associated with falling in love: "Love-struck ... means to be hit by love ... you are hit in your heart by the emotion of love".
Lovesickness refers to an affliction that can produce negative feelings when deeply in love, during the absence of a loved one or when love is unrequited.
Catholic guilt is the reported excess guilt felt by Catholics and lapsed Catholics. Guilt is remorse for having committed some offense or wrong, real or imagined. It is related to, although distinguishable from, "shame", in that the former involves an awareness of causing injury to another, while the latter arises from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, or ridiculous, done by oneself. One might feel guilty for having hurt someone, and also ashamed of oneself for having done so. Philip Yancey, a spiritual author who often writes about the Christian faith, has said of guilt that it "is only a symptom; we listen to it because it drives us toward the cure".
Obsessive love disorder (OLD) is a proposed condition in which one person feels an overwhelming obsessive desire to possess and protect another person, sometimes with an inability to accept failure or rejection. Symptoms include an inability to tolerate any time spent without that person, obsessive fantasies surrounding the person, and spending inordinate amounts of time seeking out, making, or looking at images of that person.
Phyllis Forbes Dennis was a British novelist and short story writer.
The Collected Worksof C. G. Jung is a book series containing the first collected edition, in English translation, of the major writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Fixation is a concept that was originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. The term subsequently came to denote object relationships with attachments to people or things in general persisting from childhood into adult life.
Paul Federn was an Austrian-American psychologist who was a native of Vienna. Federn is largely remembered for his theories involving ego psychology and therapeutic treatment of psychosis.
Edmund Bergler was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst whose books covered such topics as childhood development, mid-life crises, loveless marriages, gambling, self-defeating behaviors, and homosexuality. He has been described as the most important psychoanalytic theorist of homosexuality in the 1950s.
Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental and behavioral disorder in which an individual has intrusive thoughts and feels the need to perform certain routines (compulsions) repeatedly to relieve the distress caused by the obsession, to the extent where it impairs general function.
Stephen Thompson is a British playwright and screenwriter.
Vienna Blood is a British-Austrian procedural drama television series set in Vienna, Austria, in the early 1900s. Based on the Liebermann novels by Frank Tallis, the series follows Max Liebermann, a doctor and student of Sigmund Freud, as he assists Police Detective Oskar Rheinhardt. By providing psychological insights into the subjects’ motives, they investigate disturbing murders with success. A continuing sub-theme is the growing anti-Semitism against the Liebermann family. Max is a member of a liberal Jewish family in Leopoldstadt, a traditional Jewish district, while Oskar, a lapsed Catholic, is based at that district's police precinct.