The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines

Explores the cultural significance of androids.

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.