A lucid reminder of the power of narrative and the magic of metaphor in our psychological lives.
Therapist and teacher Stout (Psychiatry/Harvard Medical School) gracefully explores the phenomenon of dissociation.
The author, who works with victims of severe psychological trauma, starts with a simple observation: “We are all a little crazy.” In an engaging volume free of jargon and cant, she argues that psychological dissociation (loosely defined as being AWOL from your own direct experience), though normal in just about all of us, can in extreme manifestations be destructive, even lethal. It is normal, she says, to lose oneself—to dissociate—while, say, watching a film. Or writing a sonnet. But in a series of riveting case studies (interrupted by a variety of useful digressions on such topics as mesmerism and hypnosis), Stout reveals both her narrative gifts and the dire dimensions of the disease that used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder but is now officially Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Among the many DID cases she discusses are those of Julia (whose parents physically and sexually abused her) and Garrett (who has a variety of distinct personalities, each with a name). Stout believes that nearly 40 percent of girls in the US are sexually abused before they are 18 (twice the number of boys)—the sort of trauma that causes the surviving adults to dissociate. She enters—but barely—the “false memory” debate: “Sometimes,” she says, “a recovered memory is factual” and sometimes it is not. And she does not explore thoroughly enough the theoretical foundations of her conviction that remembering initiates healing (though she observes wisely that merely remembering is insufficient). She also suggests that the sexual behavior of President Clinton (whose name does not appear) may be evidence of DID. The emotional impact of Stout’s narratives is attenuated somewhat by her concluding cookbooky recipes for dealing with DID.
A lucid reminder of the power of narrative and the magic of metaphor in our psychological lives.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89475-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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