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
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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