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THE CULTURE OF SHAME

Name: THE CULTURE OF SHAME
Author: Andrew P. Morrison
ISBN: 0-345-37484-3

by Andrew P. Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1996

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A ponderous, touchy-feely examination of shame, its causes, and its role in the psychotherapeutic process. While psychoanalyst Morrison (Harvard Medical School) still holds Freud dear, he diverges sharply with his contention that shame—not sex and guilt—lies at the root of most neuroses. Whether the malaise is depression, mania, or feelings of rage, Morrison believes it's usually shame that's to blame. And behind shame, the cause of it all is those most reprehensible of villains, parents, who fail to respond in ways that give a child a sense of self-worth. Society is also guilty of causing shame—through general attitudes toward poverty, race, aging, etc. According to Morrison, the psychoanalyst's job (though you can also try this at home on your own, he notes) is to unmask shame in all its guises, trace its origins, and then help the patient either discuss the shame or develop alternative sources of self-esteem. Some psychoanalysts, such as Stuart Schneiderman in his Saving Face: The Politics of Shame and Guilt (published last month), argue that shame can actually speed the psychoanalytic process, and Carl Goldberg (see p. 194) believes shame can lead to self- understanding. But Morrison can see no good in it. For although shame is sometimes warranted or ``deserved,'' although it helps to preserve civility and social cohesion, Morrison prefers the high road of blind self-affirmation and cosseting the inner child. But beyond the merely anecdotal (cases drawn from his practice), the author offers nothing approaching scientific proof for any of these assertions. Even his case studies are too brief and superficial to make his point.

Pub Date: April 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-345-37484-3

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

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by Robert Greene

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by Robert Greene

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.