Entertaining, enlightening and refreshingly light on psychobabble.
A researcher who is both a scholar and an experienced motivational speaker makes the subject of personality psychology come to life.
Little (Psychology and Business/Cambridge Univ.; co-editor: Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Action, and Human Flourishing, 2006) explains the factors that constitute one’s personality and how those personality traits affect one’s outlook on life. Personality psychology is broad in scope, looking not just at the major traits or dimensions of personality—conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion (the author’s preferred spelling)—but also at their biological, social and cultural influences (“personality is more complex than the simple acting out of our biological dispositions”). In addition to these relatively stable traits, Little introduces the concept of free traits, behaviors that arise from pursuit of core personal projects that give one’s life meaning and emotional richness. To explore this concept, he not only describes experiments and cites research, but he also entertains with anecdotes featuring himself, former students and clients. In the early chapters, the author opens with choice quotes from assorted sources—William James, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Federico Fellini, T.S. Eliot, Erasmus, Aldous Huxley and even Lady Gaga—but he inexplicably abandons this pattern in the second half of the book. Scattered throughout the text are a number of personality inventories, scales and quizzes that Little invites readers to take—but not too seriously. Their purpose here is not to diagnose but to promote self-reflection. The book could be considered a self-help book, but it is by no means a do-it-yourself instruction manual. Rather, the author introduces concepts in personality psychology that may be relevant to readers’ personal situations and invites readers to reflect on them and perhaps apply them.
Entertaining, enlightening and refreshingly light on psychobabble.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1586489670
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing, if only partly successful, effort to apply Buddhist insights, particularly from meditation, to patient- therapist dynamics. A New Yorkbased psychiatrist and consulting editor to the Buddhist review Tricycle, Epstein does a good job of explaining the six Buddhist stages of existence and four essential truths. At times he draws parallels between such Buddhist concepts as ``bare attention'' (``an approach to working with our own minds and emotions [that] is impartial, open, nonjudgmental, interested, patient, fearless and impersonal'') and the Freudian charge to the therapist to listen to a patient with ``evenly suspended attention.'' Epstein's efforts to apply Buddhist masters' and his own insights from meditation to therapy are at times fascinating, at times quite elusive—the latter perhaps in part because the Buddhist concept that ``self'' is an illusion is so distant from Western philosophy and sensibilities; in part because prolonged and disciplined meditation at its most profound is a quasi-mystical phenomenon that is best experienced firsthand before being analyzed. Epstein, of course, has had this experience, but many of his readers will not have. Still, the author makes an eloquent and persuasive case that serious meditation is usually best used not as a substitute but as a complement to and preparation for psychotherapy; it can strengthen psychological preparedness by helping the ego observe itself. As a longtime student of Buddhism and meditator, and as an experienced therapist, Epstein offers an accessible, thoughtful guide to how the insights of one can be adapted to the other. No facile synthesis of the two systems here, but rather a thoughtful account that allows their paths to converge and diverge without losing sight of the distinctive contributions of each to deeper self-understanding.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-03931-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
A ringing, persuasive call for injecting moral considerations- -both personal and political— into the often self-oriented world of psychotherapy. A psychologist who is director of family therapy at the Univ. of Minnesota and coauthor of Medical Family Therapy (not reviewed), Doherty rightly decries the fact that therapists tend to be ``more comfortable with the language of techniques than with the language of morality.'' He advocates that clinicians help their clients not only to achieve greater self-fulfillment but to become sensitive to interpersonal ethics—such as commitment to relationships and the need for just behavior and truthfulness in those relationships. Similarly, while mental health professionals sometimes reduce clients' communal and political activism to an escape from emotional problems, Doherty asks, ``Are we helping clients create psychological cocoons for themselves at the expense of their communities?'' Along with such contemporary communitarian thinkers as Amitai Etzioni and Mary Ann Glendon, he extols engagement in larger societal concerns as beneficial for individual psychic health as well as for the common weal. Doherty concludes with short sections on how the therapist might strive towards a moral practice, exploring such concepts as personal courage (i.e., in clinical interventions). His final short, helpful section tells how to find a morally good therapist. Doherty's approach is balanced, for he does not believe that therapists should be ethically prescriptive but that they should serve as ``moral consultants.'' Still, once or twice, Doherty goes too far, as when he relates giving a client her senator's phone number when she raises concerns about US policy during the Gulf War. And his chapter on prudence (in interpretations or other interventions) seems less about morality than about good clinical practice. Overall, a finely nuanced, beautifully written work, one that is rich in case studies and should help clinicians and patients alike to move therapy beyond the morally sterile culture of narcissism in which it's too often stuck.
Pub Date: April 26, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-02068-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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