Stephen Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and was honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford. He is a practising psycotherapist, both privately and as a consultant in the NHS. His publications include The Book of the Mind, The Cradle of Violence: Essays on Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Literature (1995), a brief biography of Sigmund Freud (1997), and Introducing the Freud Wars (2002).

Published in 2003, The Book of the Mind brings together extracts from the key writings on the subject of psychology from all over the world, from the first written accounts to the most up-to-date research. It is not a clinical work, but an imaginative bringing together of case notes, journals and letters, from the Buddha to Philip Roth, as well as more formal writings that present humanity's most significant attempts to understand the mind and the way it works.