A welcome study of an element of life that is often “forgotten, overlooked, and postponed.”
AP reporter Randall provides a brisk tour of sleep research and what it means for individuals hoping to feel well rested.
The author engaged with sleep research in part because of his sleepwalking. The book is not a seamlessly constructed narrative but rather a loose progression of chapters about different sleep-related issues: the sometimes fatal dangers in various occupations caused by lack of sleep; causes of and partial cures for insomnia; the ugly reality of sleep apnea; why dreams happen and whether they can be interpreted sensibly; what happens when an infant enters a household; the advantages of romantic couples sleeping in separate beds; and much more. Randall explains how the invention of electricity led to countless cases of sleep deprivation; the lack of utter darkness after sunset is often the enemy of sound sleep. Researching the world of sleep is obviously difficult because sleeping subjects selected for studies rarely remember anything concrete. Nonetheless, Randall interviewed sleep researchers and read academic papers to glean what he could from those who devote their careers to the science of sleep. Depending on the quality of their sleep, readers may be alternately saddened or validated by research suggesting that sleeping pills rarely improve the quality of sleep and rarely increase quantity by more than a few minutes. Randall emphasizes the too-often neglected common-sense realization that sleep is no void; rather, it is perhaps one-third of the puzzle to living well. The author also notes that sleep is not an undifferentiated continuum; the most restful sleep arrives in five stages of about 90 minutes each.
A welcome study of an element of life that is often “forgotten, overlooked, and postponed.”Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08020-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Two long essays by longtime Freud nemesis Crews that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, along with reprints of 23 letters from psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners, and Crews's responses to them. Crews (The Critics Bear It Away, 1992, etc.) has read and written widely on Freud and modern psychoanalysis. In ``The Unknown Freud,'' the first essay here, he effectively summarizes recent revisionist scholarship on Freud and convincingly demonstrates that the founder of psychoanalysis often badgered patients into accepting his contrived, even bizarre, interpretations of their verbal material. Crews also provides some very telling evidence for his conclusion that ``Freud's scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low,'' as when the father of psychoanalysis strongly encouraged a wealthy patient of his to donate money for psychoanalytic study. ``The Revenge of the Repressed,'' the essay on ``recovered memory'' (by which adult patients supposedly are helped to remember childhood incidents of sexual abuse) is devastating in that it demonstrates the often empirically spurious nature of therapeutic evidence of abuse. But this essay also is far more problematic than the first, in part because Crews tries to trace a direct line between Freud's somewhat indistinct conception of ``repression'' and recovered memory therapists' claims concerning the repression of trauma. Crews also considerably undermines his case through some selective quoting out of context and through recurrent, rancorous polemical overkill. For example, he claims that advocates of the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder ``constitute the Satan-fearing, lunatic fringe of present- day psychiatry.'' He apparently is so obsessed with refuting his adversaries' views that he sometimes barely listens to, much less engages, them. Thus, the letters serve little purpose other than providing material for his sometimes intellectually scintillating, but often gratuitously snide, rhetorical counter-thrusts. Like Freud himself, penetrating but flawed.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-940322-04-8
Page Count: 314
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
Mitchell and Black bring clarity to the complex, confusing world of contemporary psychoanalysis. More specifically, they outline the development of what Mitchell, an analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, has elsewhere called ``relational concepts'' in psychoanalysis. That is, they trace the shift from Freud's drive- based theory, in which relationships with other people are secondary to one's internal wishes and needs, to more recent theories in which the impulse to relate to others is seen as primary. Ego is privileged over id and analysis is viewed as a joint, subjective effort by patient and analyst, rather than as objective interpretation by the analyst alone. Mitchell and Black (of the National Institute for Psychology) offer a lucid discussion of many major psychoanalytic thinkers, using case histories to illustrate the application of their ideas. Melanie Klein offers a dark view of life as an attempt to balance aggressive and libidinal impulses. Object-relations theorist D.W. Winnicott highlights the role of parenting in the development of an authentic sense of self. Erik Erikson considers the cultural context for ego development, and Heinz Kohut the need for the analyst to understand the patient's internal state of mind. Even the obscure work of French analyst Jacques Lacan becomes almost comprehensible in the authors' capable hands. Mitchell has covered much of this material elsewhere (most powerfully in Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, not reviewed). And one should be wary of the subtitle: Given the ``relational'' perspective here, much is omitted, such as Jungian thought, and as important a thinker as Karen Horney is mentioned only in passing in a brief overview of feminist critiques of psychoanalysis. So this volume is by no means comprehensive. But it is an excellent starting place for anyone unfamiliar with the radical shift psychoanalytic thinking has undergone since Freud.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-01404-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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