Hartmann (Psychiatry/Tufts Univ. School of Medicine; The Functions of Sleep, 1973) writes accessibly and persuasively about ``boundaries''—his way of conceptualizing the mind. Hartmann makes a strong and eloquent case for the validity of boundaries as a psychological tool. In the course of his extensive studies on nightmares, he tells us, he encountered many aspects of subjects' lives that couldn't be explained—a quandary that led him to conceive of ``thick'' and ``thin boundaries,'' and, ultimately, to develop his ``Boundary Questionnaire,'' reproduced here. The result is a ``mental map,'' deriving its terms from common sense and experience as well as from classical psychology and psychoanalysis. Boundaries pervade our lives, Hartmann says, informing every detail of the way we exist in both waking and sleeping states—determining how ``open'' we are to experiences both inner (issues of self) and outer (relationships of all kinds). While Hartmann draws on extremes of ``thick'' and ``thin'' to make his points, most of us fall somewhere in between. He claims no definitive answers to the ``nature versus nurture'' question, but boundaries do appear to change in reaction to environmental factors, though not always in adaptive ways. The author concludes by pointing to the practical clinical value of boundaries in psychotherapy (individual, couple, and group) and psychopathology, as well as indirectly in the treatment of many medical and psychological conditions. It's a concept with much potential for the ongoing study of personality, the mind, and the organization of the brain. Never reductive, Hartmann sketches an insightful map of the mind that may prove of use to professionals and laypersons alike in the endless quest ``to know ourselves.''
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-465-00739-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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