Fifteen all-too-brief case studies that show how abusive or emotionally neglectful father figures can permanently scar their children's lives. British psychotherapist and feminist Sayers (Mothers of Psychoanalysis, 1991) claims convincingly that ``we are all at risk of succumbing to imagined images of menas patriarch or phallus, monster or idolsustained by the harmful childhood fixations, acted-out rebellion and inward defenses my tales describe.'' The people she analyzes range from a compulsively and joylessly sexual Don Juan to a psychologically self-emasculating ``wimp,'' from a woman who so rigorously denies any male presence in her life that she is convinced her child is the result of a virgin birth to several women who repeatedly become involved with abusive men as a paradoxical way of trying to overcome disenchantment with the male sex. Sayers frames her tales with brief, usually illuminating Freudian analyses; she views her book as a corrective to the excessive emphasis laid on the child's relation with the mother by most British neo-Freudians (e.g., Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion). Yet she overstates her case, ignoring in particular the influences of classsurprisingly so, given the dreary near-uniformity of her subjects, almost all of whom are socially isolated, lower-middle-class English men and women with limited education and little psychological self-awareness. Perhaps for these reasons, Sayers's attempts at helping them improve distorted, unhappy lives usually seem brief and ineffectual. And because her subjects' pain is not always reducible to Freudian and feminist terms, the book's subtitle seems contrived and the author's approach of less value than one that would take socioeconomic factors into account. Fascinating stories, but told with a reductionist analysis.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-04557-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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