The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines

By Eric G. Wilson (NHC Fellow, 2003–04)

Androids; Robots; Artificial Intelligence; Melancholy; Machines

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006

From the publisher’s description:

The Melancholy Android is a psychological study of the impulses behind the creation of androids. Exploring three imaginative figures—the mummy, the golem, and the automaton—and their appearances in myth, religion, literature, and film, Eric G. Wilson tracks the development of android-building and examines the lure of artificial doubles untroubled by awareness of self. Drawing from the works of philosophers Ficino, Kleist, Freud, and Jung; writers Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe; and movies such as Metropolis, The Mummy, and Blade Runner, this book not only offers a range of sites from which to analyze the relationship between mind and machine, but also considers a pressing paradoxical dilemma—loving machines we want to hate.

Subjects
Literature / Film and Media / Technology / Androids / Robots / Artificial Intelligence / Melancholy / Machines /

Wilson, Eric G. (NHC Fellow, 2003–04). The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.