A worthy companion to books by Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, and other students of the always puzzling human mind.
When asked to imagine a brown cow, what takes place inside your head? This pleasantly winding survey offers some clues.
Per John Lennon, can we really imagine that there’s no heaven? Perhaps, writes Davies (Cognitive Science/Carleton Univ.; Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One With the Universe, 2014), but given that imagination seems to be strongly tied to memory, it may be that we can’t really know what we haven’t experienced—or perhaps we can. Either way, it shouldn’t keep us from trying: Imagination is, after all, a component of creativity and of problem-solving. As the author reveals, imagination is strongly linked as well to the related word “imagery,” which opens onto a universe of symbols with its own grammar, declarative and otherwise. Memory recall is a work of imagination “because memories are reconstructed every time they are retrieved”—and therein lies the possibility of negative consequences, since reconstructed memories can be unhappy ones. Good or bad, Davies examines how thinking works, always in a complicated way, since, as he notes, “there’s a saying in neuroscience: if the brain can do things five different ways, it does all ten.” His discussion covers such matters as hallucinations, which defy description, and imaginary friends: Some readers may take comfort in knowing that there’s no requirement that one abandon them at an early age. “When the child perceives that the parent starts to disapprove,” writes Davies, “the imaginary companions go dark: the children stop sharing information about companions, and only play with them when parents aren’t around.” At the close of his ever engaging book, Davies notes that the visual and spatial components of the brain and the contents it holds are often “bewildering.”
A worthy companion to books by Oliver Sacks, Daniel Dennett, and other students of the always puzzling human mind.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-203-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing, if only partly successful, effort to apply Buddhist insights, particularly from meditation, to patient- therapist dynamics. A New Yorkbased psychiatrist and consulting editor to the Buddhist review Tricycle, Epstein does a good job of explaining the six Buddhist stages of existence and four essential truths. At times he draws parallels between such Buddhist concepts as ``bare attention'' (``an approach to working with our own minds and emotions [that] is impartial, open, nonjudgmental, interested, patient, fearless and impersonal'') and the Freudian charge to the therapist to listen to a patient with ``evenly suspended attention.'' Epstein's efforts to apply Buddhist masters' and his own insights from meditation to therapy are at times fascinating, at times quite elusive—the latter perhaps in part because the Buddhist concept that ``self'' is an illusion is so distant from Western philosophy and sensibilities; in part because prolonged and disciplined meditation at its most profound is a quasi-mystical phenomenon that is best experienced firsthand before being analyzed. Epstein, of course, has had this experience, but many of his readers will not have. Still, the author makes an eloquent and persuasive case that serious meditation is usually best used not as a substitute but as a complement to and preparation for psychotherapy; it can strengthen psychological preparedness by helping the ego observe itself. As a longtime student of Buddhism and meditator, and as an experienced therapist, Epstein offers an accessible, thoughtful guide to how the insights of one can be adapted to the other. No facile synthesis of the two systems here, but rather a thoughtful account that allows their paths to converge and diverge without losing sight of the distinctive contributions of each to deeper self-understanding.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-03931-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
A ringing, persuasive call for injecting moral considerations- -both personal and political— into the often self-oriented world of psychotherapy. A psychologist who is director of family therapy at the Univ. of Minnesota and coauthor of Medical Family Therapy (not reviewed), Doherty rightly decries the fact that therapists tend to be ``more comfortable with the language of techniques than with the language of morality.'' He advocates that clinicians help their clients not only to achieve greater self-fulfillment but to become sensitive to interpersonal ethics—such as commitment to relationships and the need for just behavior and truthfulness in those relationships. Similarly, while mental health professionals sometimes reduce clients' communal and political activism to an escape from emotional problems, Doherty asks, ``Are we helping clients create psychological cocoons for themselves at the expense of their communities?'' Along with such contemporary communitarian thinkers as Amitai Etzioni and Mary Ann Glendon, he extols engagement in larger societal concerns as beneficial for individual psychic health as well as for the common weal. Doherty concludes with short sections on how the therapist might strive towards a moral practice, exploring such concepts as personal courage (i.e., in clinical interventions). His final short, helpful section tells how to find a morally good therapist. Doherty's approach is balanced, for he does not believe that therapists should be ethically prescriptive but that they should serve as ``moral consultants.'' Still, once or twice, Doherty goes too far, as when he relates giving a client her senator's phone number when she raises concerns about US policy during the Gulf War. And his chapter on prudence (in interpretations or other interventions) seems less about morality than about good clinical practice. Overall, a finely nuanced, beautifully written work, one that is rich in case studies and should help clinicians and patients alike to move therapy beyond the morally sterile culture of narcissism in which it's too often stuck.
Pub Date: April 26, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-02068-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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