California psychoanalyst Douglas turns a fascinated but short- sighted eye to the life of Christiana Morgan, a woman of influence in the formative years of American psychoanalysis. A blue-blooded Bostonian through her mother, Morgan rebelled against the life of ease prepared for her by rushing into an engagement with a Harvard boy-turned-soldier on the eve of his departure for France during WW I. Busy as a nurse while her betrothed was losing his humanity to the horrors of trench warfare, Douglas found her subsequent marriage far from harmonious as Bill Morgan struggled to find his niche as a civilian. A child failed to add stability, with Christiana finding time while living in N.Y.C. to have an affair with Zionist Chaim Weizmann. Her attraction to future psychoanalyst Henry Murray led to a fiery passion when they went to Cambridge University to study, accompanied by their spouses. Jung's writings and Herman Melville's Pierre provided sustenance to feed the pair's infatuation, and when Murray and the Morgans traveled to Zurich in the mid-1920's to be analyzed, Christiana's beauty, along with her visions and drawings—rich in the archetypal imagery Jung was exploring—enchanted Jung as well. But Christiana returned to America with her self-doubts unresolved, and, though she became Murray's right hand in leading the Harvard Psychological Clinic, the couple's passion suffered from his infidelity, leading her to bouts of alcoholism and reclusion, and finally to suicide in the 1960's. Christiana's tragic life has little impact as presented here, however; Douglas's narrow focus on the Morgan/Murray love story leaves no room for a larger social and intellectual view, with the cloying intimacy of the prose, as well as extensive (and unjustified) excerpts from Morgan's correspondence and diaries, making the narrative tedious and turgid. The merits of what might have been a useful biography are squandered here in stylistic excess and single-minded scholarship.
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70378-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
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.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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