Of much substance, though of interest to a very small readership.
The second installment, of more narrow interest than her Hannah Arendt (p. 787), in postmodern pioneer Kristeva’s planned three-volume triptych on female geniuses.
After her provocative study of the endlessly conflicted German-Jewish philosopher, Kristeva (Linguistics/Univ. of Paris) turns to a psychoanalyst whose work, unlike Arendt’s, will be little known to nonspecialist readers. Austrian-born Melanie Klein (1882–1960) was an early acolyte of Sigmund Freud’s whose elaborate modifications of his theories provoked considerable irritation on the part of the master himself and many of his intellectual progeny. Whereas Freud’s elaboration of such matters as the Oedipus complex “oriented the psychic life of the subject around the castration ordeal and the function of the father,” Kristeva writes, Klein insisted on the primacy of the female, thus running the risk “of reducing the oedipal triangle into a dyad.” Non-Freudians will be somewhat bemused by Kristeva’s approving summaries of Klein’s ideas on anal fixation, “oral-sadistic and cannibalistic desires,” the equation of the penis with “bad and toxic excrement,” and other matters; of more interest to generalists is her account of the controversies such ideas aroused in orthodox circles, which involved, among other things, a long and heated war of attrition between Klein and Freud’s daughter Anna. Kristeva’s ideas, which in other works are surrounded by impenetrable thickets of specialized language, here are clearly expressed (credit for at least part of that must surely go to the translator), and she capably demonstrates why Klein, despite the “ambiguous, ambivalent” nature of her theories, should be regarded as an innovator and pioneer in psychoanalytic theory.
Of much substance, though of interest to a very small readership.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-231-12284-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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
IN THE NEWS
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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