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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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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

- BOOK REVIEW
THE 48 LAWS OF POWER
by Robert Greene

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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.