Though not a definitive study of bulimia, it is sensitive, informative, and likely to be helpful to both client and...
Shame is the villain and persistence the heroine in this analysis of 13 women who recovered from bulimia nervosa.
Reindl (Psychology/Harvard Univ.), however, would probably prefer to speak of women who “are recovering” from bulimia, since, as with many addictions, a return to the eating disorder is always but a binge and a purge away. The author selected women who had been free from bulimic symptoms for at least a year and asked: What motivated them to begin changing their behavior? What helped? What set them back? Why did they develop the eating disorder? Bolstering the stories of her subjects with other research and writings as well as her own clinical experience, the author detects a pattern that resembles, but does not mimic, the patterns of other addictions. What she found was a sense of shame, of being “inadequate and bad.” In most cases the feelings of worthlessness arose not from childhood physical or sexual abuse, but from emotional deprivation. The decision to stop and seek help comes about because the person is “fed up” with her behavior, but it can take many false starts before symptoms are under control. Such therapeutic interventions (whether via a psychologist, a nutritionist, or Overeaters Anonymous) kick in to help bulimia sufferers rebuild a positive “sense of self.” Reindl cites the tale of “Beauty and the Beast” as an apt and rich metaphor for the struggle to also accept the ugly side of the self. There is also a section directed to therapists who treat those with eating disorders and specifics on what the recovering women found most useful in their therapeutic encounters. She lauds the importance of good nutrition and exercise as recovery proceeds, noting the terrible damage that years of an eating disorder can do to even a young body.
Though not a definitive study of bulimia, it is sensitive, informative, and likely to be helpful to both client and therapist.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00487-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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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