A careful, uplifting primer on recognizing and countering psychological manipulation.
A breakdown of the types of emotional manipulation and tactics to counter them.
“We have been socialized to believe emotional abuse is not serious,” psychoanalyst Mucha writes at the start of his latest book. “Emotional abuse teaches us to blame ourselves for being hurt.” It’s this type of inwardly directed blame that leads Mucha to assert that emotional abuse might be even more damaging than physical or sexual abuse. Society has taught people to accept emotional abuse as both inevitable and partially self-inflicted. “We try to be perfect,” Mucha writes, “and when we cannot, we decide we are failures.” In a series of chapters examining such headings as anxiety, manipulation, guilt, and shame, the book touches on both the inner sources of emotional vulnerability and the most common patterns of the people who exploit it. One of the book’s core concepts is the powerful idea of reciprocity, which Mucha views as the reflex of expecting to get out of an emotional relationship what we put into it—and how abusers tend to twist that idea to make their victims expect unequal terms: “Emotional abuse incorporates that lack of reciprocity, creating an expectation for the victim that they deserve less than others.” Our culture “accepts and promotes” such abuses of power, he writes. In a series of discussions and scenarios, he seeks to explain how emotional abuse works and how to address it—for instance, recognizing that even if the abusers are family members, the solution, as difficult as it is, may be to walk away. He recommends recognizing and combatting a lack of empathy by conducting a thorough “self-referencing” check of one’s own feelings. Throughout, Mucha maintains a deeply empathetic, supportive manner informed by extensive experience and research (the book ends with a two-page bibliography). And although his tone is caring, he’s cleareyed when it comes to his subject, always returning to what he refers to as “the ultimatum of emotional abuse”: “If you don’t do as I demand or change yourself to fit my needs, then you are not nice.” Anyone who’s ever dealt with abuse of this kind will find this book invaluable.
A careful, uplifting primer on recognizing and countering psychological manipulation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798992792508
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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