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