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THE PREGNANT MAN

Name: THE PREGNANT MAN
Author: Deirdre Barrett
ISBN: 0-8129-2905-5

AND OTHER CASES FROM A HYPNOTHERAPIST'S COUCH

by Deirdre Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1998

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As the title indicates, some strange cases turn up in a hypnotherapist’s office, and there’s a choice assortment of them in this little collection that both entertains and explicates the hypotherapist’s art. Barrett, who practices in Cambridge, Mass., and teaches at Harvard Medical School, has selected seven instructive cases from her more than two decades of practice. While disguising her patients— identities and sometimes employing a composite of patients, her stories use actual dialogue from therapy sessions. They are presented in chronological order, beginning when she was a trainee and inadvertently put her supervisor into a trance. Although that case, titled “The Counterfeit Adult,” has a happy ending—Barrett helped an asthmatic young woman to give up smoking—not all are success stories. In the second, “The Assailant and the Baby-Sitter” Barrett, still a trainee, suspected that her patient, who could be both violent attacker and gentle caregiver, suffered from multiple-personality disorder, but the therapy sessions ended with the case unresolved. One case that was resolved, although the patient couldn—t be described as totally satisfied, is that of the book’s title character, whose bizarre story is told in “Mourning Sickness.” In it, the grief of a gay Texas oil worker for his dead lover takes the form of a false pregnancy, complete with swollen belly and breasts. Another story, about a patient with hallucinations, becomes a vehicle for Barrett to explain how spurious alien-abduction reports may be elicited from a patient by a hypnotist’s leading questions about spaceships and extraterrestrials. It’s to the levelheaded Barrett’s credit that she doesn—t promote hypnotherapy as superior to other therapies, nor does she claim to have any extraordinary powers. For those interested in trying it themselves, she concludes with advice on finding a reliable hypnotherapist. From a skilled psychotherapist, a fine introduction to hypnosis.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-8129-2905-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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THE ART OF THINKING CLEARLY

by Rolf Dobelli translated by Nicky Griffin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013

Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.

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A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.

To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?

Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.

Pub Date: May 14, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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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.