by Jeanne Safer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2012
A psychotherapist identifies how unresolved, destructive sibling rivalries play a special role in our adult lives, shaping both our sense of identity and how we deal with work, marriage and parenthood.
Safer (Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult's Life—For the Better, 2008, etc.) suggests that Sigmund Freud, a favored son, was unable to deal with his own guilt toward his sister. In his opinion, this left him blind-sided when he probed the crucial role of childhood experience and developed his theories about the Oedipus conflict, penis envy, etc. Today, writes the author, a shift in psychotherapy has occurred “from intrapsychic processes to interpersonal transactions,” which has led to more consideration of the importance of sibling relationships. Safer provides anecdotes—taken from case studies, interviews, experiences related to her by friends and her own disturbed relationship with her brother—to provide a road map to help readers identify the hidden dynamics within families. She also gives examples of successful efforts to achieve reconciliation between adult siblings—with and without professional help—and calls attention to pitfalls that can short circuit the sometimes-slow process of building a healthy new relationship. In families, not only may certain children be favored, creating guilt on the one hand and animosity on the other, but parents may unwittingly chose favorites on the basis of their own unresolved sibling relationships. Safer references the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers to show how such intergenerational conflicts can persist but also be resolved. She also offers several contemporary examples of successful reconciliation efforts. An important contribution to the self-help bookshelf.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-01940-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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...
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
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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...
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
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