Tagged: psychology
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, 5/5
Writing in a style that is almost preternaturally coherent, practical and unpretentious, Kahneman examines the workings of the human mind in terms of System 1 (fast, intuitive, automatic) and System 2 (slow, effortful, rational, analytical). He uses many entertaining examples and experiments to reveal inconsistencies, fallacies and irrationalities in human heuristics, such as:
~What You See Is All There Is (85): automatically assuming that whatever info you have immediate access to is all the relevant info there is.
~Law of Small Numbers (112): underestimating adequate sample sizes by relying on intuition.
~Bias of Confidence Over Doubt (113): a natural tendency towards overconfidence, not doubt.
~Cause and Chance (114): incorrectly identifying random sequences as causal patterns.
~Anchors (119): being unconsciously influenced by irrelevant numbers.
~Availability (129): being influenced by the ease with which specific instances/examples come to mind.
~Representativeness (149): ignoring base rates in favor of merely assessing how well something’s description fits a sterotype.
~Less is More (156): judging a more specific/complicated conjunction of events as more probable than a simpler event. For example, thinking it is more probable that Linda is a “feminist bank teller” than a “bank teller.”
~Regression to the Mean (175): extreme values are likely to be followed by less extreme values that are closer to the mean.
~Hindsight Bias (202): misremembering one’s past beliefs/thoughts in order to make them consistent with how events actually turned out.
~Illusion of Validity/Skill (209): believing in the validity of one’s faulty heuristics, despite proof of the opposite.
~Intuitions vs. Formulas (222): when uncertainty and unpredictability create “low-validity environments,” simple algorithms are more accurate than “expert” intuitions.
~Expert Intuition (240): intuitive judgment is reliable when it is the result of receiving immediate feedback during prolonged practice in a regular environment.
~Outside View (245): evaluating individual cases in light of existing statistics for similar cases.
^^^ …happened to me almost every chapter. Seriously, this book is like a manual for the human brain and should be handed out as required reading to all human users.
The Privacy of the Self
The Privacy of the Self: Papers on Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique by M. Masud R. Khan, 3/5
The amount of material in these papers that I didn’t understand could fill a book…and it did. Since I only had The Privacy of the Self for a one-week interlibrary loan, I didn’t have the luxury of pondering and re-reading any of it (though it is somewhat debatable to what degree more time would actually have helped my comprehension). At any rate, I could only gain the most cursory understanding of the main points, leaving behind many difficult sentences such as the following classic: “The dissociation of such a primitive ego-ideal system, with its primitive id cathexes and archaic object-relationships, precludes ‘the process of integration and generalization’ (ibid., 1962), that is essential for the formation of a healthy ego-ideal” (197).
Despite the difficulty of much of the material, there were bits I was able to understand at some level and the case studies were interesting. Perhaps the best thing I got out of the book (besides the meaning of the fantastic word “aetiology”) was a better understanding of Freud’s value in a historical sense. I have always been deeply repulsed by Freud’s theories and reading his The Ego and the Id made me think of him even more as a human-shaped pile of bullshit. This opinion contrasted with Khan’s evident respect and admiration for the man. It was interesting to learn that Freud invented the very framework of the analytic setting and to understand that his attempts at self-analysis (whether successful or not) were both intellectual and admirable.
My main complaint about this book is that Khan quotes excessively from previously published sources and seems to have little to contribute that is original. The Privacy of the Self comes across as a sort of vain, self-published affair, that does not fit in the categories of scholarly writing or academic research. Perhaps this is an inevitable reflection of the controversial scientific standing of the whole theory of psychoanalysis.
The Empty Core
The Empty Core: An Object Relations Approach to Psychotherapy of the Schizoid Personality by Jeffrey Seinfeld, Ph.D., 4/5
At first, the opacity of many sections of this book tempted me to take back my criticisms of the much simpler Split Self/ Split Object. The first chapter of this work, a short overview of object relations theory, could be the basis for an entire college course. Fortunately, the case examples made the technical material bearable and I find myself understanding much more as I look back over the content. Since this book is both difficult to understand and difficult to obtain (I had to get it through a two-week inter-library loan), I am writing a longer, more detailed review in order to help myself process and remember certain aspects of the book.
The title references a concept that I did not find easy to grasp at first, but later resonated with completely – the “empty core.” Seinfeld describes the schizoid experience of the empty core as “the uncrossable divide between the external and internal object worlds” (10). Since “instinctual drives are not complete in themselves but create, in the individual, a need for something external; they embody a sense of incompletion and lack” (8). One strategy schizoids use to cope with this feeling is “the effort to eliminate all need by maintaining himself as aloof, self-sufficient, isolated. Emptiness becomes an ideal. The individual strives toward extinguishing all need” (14). This sounds like someone I know and love…
Another concept in this book that I found fascinating and insightful is the idea that, as infants, we only experience ourselves through other people – seeing our reflection in them, which explains the human need for privacy:
“In existential phenomenological terms, the infant discovers its true self, which includes biological temperament, cognitive capacity, appearance, through the response of the other. The infant therefore discovers itself in the mode-of-being for others (Sartre 1943). The conception of being-for-others is analogous to the Kleinian idea of the infant becoming incorporated by the other and gives rise to comparable anxieties. In being for the other, the infant becomes aware of a lack of being-for-itself. It sees itself in its otherness, as object to the other’s subjectivity and endeavors to wrest back its subjectivity by the desire to flee from the sight of the other. To become invisible, to be unseen, is to annihilate one’s reflection in the eye of the other. This is the origin of the need for solitude and privacy, to make oneself into something more than what others perceive one to be” (37).
Reading this book did not consist entirely of “aha” moments of insight and clarity. For every compelling idea offered, there were paragraphs positively reeking of B.S., especially much of the content related to infant psychology and the mother/father as objects. I am aware that Seinfeld’s main purpose was to outline, not defend object relations theory, but many of the quotes and ideas he used came across outlandish, unscientific and unsupported. I was unsurprised to find Freud’s name and that of his followers connected to many of these theories.
Overall, though there was much that I disagreed with or didn’t understand in this book, it did reward my mental effort with some thought-provoking ideas and insights.
Split Self/ Split Object
Split Self/ Split Object: Understanding and Treating Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Disorders by Philip Manfield, Ph.D., 3/5
Knowing nothing about clinical psychology at the outset, I was surprised by how accessible this book, geared towards an audience of professional therapists, turned out to be. The language was not technical and the concepts seemed simplistic. Because of this, I have split feelings (haha) about it; on one hand, it was enjoyable to gain an understanding of general psychology concepts, but on the other hand, I was shocked that any practicing clinician would need a book this basic.
No matter what Manfield’s approach might suggest about the competency levels of some therapists, I read this in an attempt to gain the tools to understand myself a little better and it was a successful experience. Until now, my understanding of psychotherapy consisted of something vague about people who think they’re smart, generally wear glasses on the tips of their noses, scribble meaningfully on notepads while muttering tut tut and claim couches as business expenses. Now, I understand better that a therapist’s job is more to direct their client’s self-analysis than to intervene. My conclusion? Making people think is cool. Making yourself think is cooler. Challenge accepted.
The Parents’ Guide to Psychological First Aid
The Parents’ Guide to Psychological First Aid, eds. Gerald P. Koocher and Annette M. La Greca, 3/5
This book does a good job of appealing to a wide spectrum of parenting/life styles without alienating anyone. Most of its contents are commonsense, but I guess commonsense isn’t that common, to judge from my observations of modern parenting.
The Ego and the Id
The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud, 1/5
While it is true that a greater knowledge of psychoanalysis and its specialised vocabulary, resulting from a familiarity with the rest of Freud’s writings, would no doubt increase my comprehension of his ideas, the pervasive odour of bullshit which oozes from between the pages of this eminently unscientific work encourage me rather to avoid all other products of Freud.
OmniRambles 