A work of personal conviction backed by scholarly research, sure to arouse controversy among feminists and psychologists.
The author brings her experiences as a mother of three, her expertise as a psychologist, and her sympathies as a feminist to a consideration of women’s powerful desire to nurture.
Wanting to care for children is a major feature of many women’s lives, de Marneffe argues forcefully, but our individualistic culture has devalued and misinterpreted this desire. In the writings of feminist theorists she finds an erroneous conflation of femininity with motherhood and of housework with child care that has obscured the unique character of mothering, making it difficult to understand women’s options and possible sources of oppression. Further, the author states, psychoanalytic thinking has not fully explored the strength of maternal desire or the idea that a woman expresses her subjectivity through caring for children. We need a psychology that makes sense of the experience of motherhood, de Marneffe asserts, a psychology that considers the relationship between women’s individual aspirations and their maternal impulses and offers a way to think about and manage the conflicts between them. She calls for open discussion of this topic so that women can come to a clearer understanding of maternal desire and better comprehension of their own needs and conflicts. Chapters on “Adolescence,” “Fertility,” and “Fathers,” look at the stages of life and aspects of human experience most affected by maternal desire. De Marneffe is at her most accessible when writing as a parent; other mothers will have no difficulty recognizing the epiphanies she experiences. When she dons her professional robes, her prose becomes more demanding, but it is here that she probes most deeply into the nature of maternal desire and the misconceptions surrounding it.
A work of personal conviction backed by scholarly research, sure to arouse controversy among feminists and psychologists.Pub Date: March 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-05995-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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
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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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