Six long, probing essays on Freudian psychoanalysis and its cultural legacy, which stand in welcome contrast to some of the recent facile debunkings of Freudianism. Forrester (coauthor of Freud's Women, not reviewed; History and Philosophy of Science/Cambridge Univ.) writes on topics ranging from justice and envy to the deeper meaning of the sculptures and other objects from classical antiquity that Freud collected. He is particularly adept at making cross-cultural and interdisciplinary links, noting, for example, that both the neo-Freudian Melanie Klein and St. Augustine understood the notion of envy as deriving from the infant's resentment at dependency on the seemingly ever- flowing breast and the fear of losing its supply of sustenance. While Forrester's prose is sometimes quite difficult, it's never ponderous, and can even be entertaining. And in the title essay, perhaps the book's best, he responds in careful, measured tones to such contemptuous anti-Freudian polemicists as Frederick Crews and Stanley Fish. These and other critics who fault psychoanalysis for pretending to be a ``natural science'' while lacking empirical verifiability misunderstand its essential nature, Forrester contends. Psychoanalysis is not and never was a science, he argues, but rather a tool intended to help ordinary people achieve greater self-understanding; its significance can be found largely in popular culture. And while it has scientific elements, it also is almost unique in that its ``meaning'' can't be captured academically; the most subjective of the human sciences, psychoanalysis must be experienced before it can be judged. The great merit of Forrester's book is that it takes both Freud and his critics seriously. The author is both rigorous about classical psychoanalysis's limitations and deeply respectful of its enormous contributions to our culture and specifically our understanding of the self. He has made a profound, sometimes scintillating, contribution to the history of this most multifaceted science and craft.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-674-53960-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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