How mothers with postnatal depression create narcissism and psychopaths

Name: How mothers with postnatal depression create narcissism and psychopaths
Author: Hans R Arnold
ISBN: 978-1492292548

by Hans R Arnold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2014

Targets dozens of important questions but will frustrate even patient readers.

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In his first book, Arnold develops an esoteric explanation for why some people grow up to do terrible things: postnatal depression in their mothers, which Arnold identifies as the cause of narcissistic and psychopathic behavior in children on into adulthood.

Arnold’s hypothesis relies heavily on the belief that most negative behavior—from homicidal rage, to greed, to simple bullying—is a result of narcissistic inclinations within the aggressor. This hypothesis is shared to varying degrees by a large subset of the psychiatric community, but there is little consensus about what causes a person to become a narcissist—a gap Arnold attempts to fill with his book. He believes that children born to mothers suffering from postnatal depression are deprived of the attention they desperately crave in their first years of life. According to Arnold, their depressed mothers ignore them until they act out; in turn, the baby associates negative behavior with motherly attention. As they grow up, their behavior becomes increasingly malignant because their brains have been hardwired from an early age to associate destruction with affection. In order to prove his theory, Arnold looks at various dictators, murderers and psychopaths from throughout history and attempts to explore the relationships they had with their mothers. This work takes up an intriguing, urgent subject but does it without much appreciation for scholarly principles. Ideas are illustrated and purportedly proven with anecdotes, assumptions, conjecture and wild leaps of logic, but rarely with facts, figures or expert opinions. In some cases, the work doesn’t even go into the test cases’ upbringings, thereby ignoring the central hypothesis. Also, a strain of misogyny runs throughout. The theory essentially identifies mothers as the root of all evil and displays a maddeningly shallow understanding of postnatal depression, calling out feminists, career women and prostitutes in unnecessary and curiously vitriolic asides: “Apparently [Anders Behring] Breivik’s mother was a feminist and this could have contributed towards her feelings—or lack of them—towards her son.” Arnold has clearly thought about his ideas plenty, but the way they’re presented here will not convince anyone, especially the experts.

Targets dozens of important questions but will frustrate even patient readers.

Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2014

ISBN: 978-1492292548

Page Count: 128

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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

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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.