Historical Psychology At Its Best: Manners, Self-Control and the Unconscious
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Bruce Lerro Author:  Forging Promethean Psychology: From the Middle Ages To The End of the 19th century

In modern society, in public situations, having foresight about what is likely to happen as well as hindsight is something that comes so naturally to us that the processes are barely conscious. Yet Norbert Elias contends that in the Middle Ages people thought less strategically about these things. Unlike Freud, Elias contends that the unconscious has a history and it grows in depth the closer we come to the present. How much control are people expected to have over when, where and how they relieve themselves? Following Huizinga, Elias argues there is a qualitative change in social psychological and psychological processes between the Middle Ages and the 17th century. But unlike psycho historians, Elias does not suggest that psychological processes inside individuals are instrumental in creating political or economic structures. Rather Elias explains how psychological processes are a reaction to changes in politics, economics and city life.

Norbert Elias, like Phillipe Aries was a great historical psychologist. However as Stephen Mennell points out in his book Norbert Elias and Introduction, the organization of Elias body of work can be confusing for the beginner. After a substantive introduction to Eliass life Mennell covers many of the dimensions of Elias work. From the history of manners, to the place of sports in psychogenesis, to the great process of how people become civilized, Mennells book is very well written and accessible to the educated lay person with an extensive bibliography. If you like Weber, Marx and Durkheim but you wish they brought more psychology into their work, Norbert Elias provides the missing link.
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In Confidence Men and Painted Women, USC historian Karen Halttunen examines the social norms of middle class Americans from the years 1830-1870.  She shows that for much of the nineteenth century, Americans viewed hypocrisy as a direct threat to the democratic process.  They considered insincerity a "symbolic expression of moral and political decay in America."  The possibility of upward or downward social mobility prompted this identity crisis for many middle class Americans.  In their desire to appear sincere, urban Americans looked to identify themselves in opposition to confidence men and painted women.  Confidence men were familiar figures in 19th century literature; these outwardly friendly men often corrupted young city newcomers.  Painted women resided in parlor rooms; their use of makeup disguised the proof of insincere lifestyle.  Both figures represented insincerity in domestic and social spheres. There was a fine line between proper attire and the insincere looks of fashion.

Both men and women strove for sincerity in their appearance.  In doing so, there arose an inherent contradiction to the ideals of 19th century behavior manuals: namely, that by focusing on the correct attire and etiquette to appear sincere renders the participant insincere.  The rest of Halttunen's book looks at society's recognition of this contradiction, the practice of sincere outward appearances in parlor rooms, on the street, and even at funerals.  She concludes that ultimately public appearance reconciled with personal insincerity.  In short, by the Gilded Age, Americans had not only made peace with the division between ostensible outward appearance and supposed internal sincerity, but had learned to accept this contradiction as a social norm.
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Following on from Tom Butler-Bowdon's previous volumes in the "50 Classics" series, this first class collection of summaries of key psychology books and authors continues in the same broad, accessible, but also in-depth, style.

As the sub-title says, psychology is all about who we are, how we think, what we do. In other words, what it means to be human. Topics covered include the unconscious mind, happiness and mental health, the study of personality, motivation, love, creativity and relationships.

With key "in a nutshell" comments, the author cuts to the essential message of each writer, while addressing more complex subtleties in the accompanying text. As with Tom's other books, there is a very wide range of carefully chosen authors. I had come across several here in an academic context, but in general the emphasis is on popular psychology, "Psychology for nonpsychologists" as the jacket puts it. The range includes RD Laing, Oliver Sacks, Fritz Perls, Ivan Pavlov, Eric Berne, to pick a few random names. The founding fathers such as William James and Sigmund Freud are covered, alongside over a century's worth of contributions right up to Malcolm Gladwell with his 2005 bestseller on the importance of first impressions and split-second judgment.

There is a huge amount of psychological and self-development literature available these days. It can be difficult to know where to begin but each volume in the "50 Classics" is an excellent starting point. "50 Psychology Classics" is another winner in the series and I wholeheartedly recommend it!
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Mary Watkins' thoroughly researched treatise examines the phenomenon of active imagination, one of the less understood of Jung's contributions to Western depth psychology.  She takes us through the concepts of active imagination, explores its history both pre and post Jung, and offers considerable practical advice on using active imagination and working with the images it produces.  Despite it being an uneven book in need of a second edition and a good edit (the author admits this), it is one of the few books I've read that actually makes sense of this esoteric but essential practice, which is what made me glad to have read it.
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Polly Young-Eisendrath and Florence Wiedemann examine the process of how women in the American culture develop autonomy.  The authors, as Jungian analysts, explore the female path of individuation using characters derived from Greek Mythology and contemporary case studies.  The path involves a  successive integration of the unconscious animus complexes throughout the  woman's life-span.  In Jungian psychology the animus appears to be the  source inside the female unconscious which provides male representations  within women's dreams.  The authors outline a five stage model for  animus development by providing a path through psychotherapy.  The model  for ego development for women includes moving away from a symbiotic  relationship with one's mother characterized by Demeter and Persephone and  overcoming dependencies and stereotypes exemplified by Pandora and Zeus.  Finally, the process evolves through a series of tasks involved within her  relationship with her mate as seen in the Amor-Psyche myth.  The work  is brilliantly creative as it addresses the quest of many American women  regarding finding one's Self on a depth psychological level  The book  offers a path by interweaving a series of mythological models with case  study examples.  This book is destined to be a classic in the psychology of  women.
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A thought provoking, informative, and engaging approach to cross-cultural psychology.
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The autonomous individual will find this book an essential ingredient in understanding the various expressions of man. A more efficient use of both sides of the brain will proceed to a more open flexible,rational way of thinking.  The book shows that the evolution of consciousness unfettered by tradition, religion or capitalism is essential for behaving effectively as citizens of the world.
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I have another work by Stephen Johnson, entitled "Humanizing the Narcissistic Style" and I find them both to be of a high academic standard.
Although published in 1985, there is nothing much new coming out of the field of "Object Relations/Ego Psychology", but this remains a seminal work in that area.  What I found most useful was his  typographical setting out of "Character Analysis" against the backdrop of Object Relations/Character Analytic Perspective/Ego Psychology  and Conflict Versus Deficits in Explaining Human Pathology (all sub-titles) re-visiting, if not re-defining core terminology.  Brilliant!
 He manages to integrate a number of major schools of therapeutic thinking - choosing techniques from a broad base to work on strengthening ego functioning.  According to the Jacket Sleeve of the book- "Each intervention fits within behavioral, affective or cognitive domain, change in all three domains being necessary for lasting chacterological change".
 Ambitious? yes!  Well researched? Indeed!
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Hans Jrgen Eysenck (1916-1997) was a British psychologist of German origin, known for his work on intelligence testing&nbsp;] and personality; he wrote many books such as the trilogy:&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Uses-And-Abuses-of-Psychology/dp/B0000CINRY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Uses And Abuses of Psychology</a>,<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Sense-and-Nonsense-in-Psychology/dp/0140203850/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Sense and Nonsense in Psychology</a>, and&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Fact-and-Fiction-in-Psychology/dp/0140206965/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Fact and Fiction in Psychology</a>, as well as his autobiography,&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Rebel-with-a-Cause/dp/1560009381/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Rebel with a Cause</a>. He wrote in the first chapter of this 1985 book, "This book assesses the present day status of Freud's theories in general, and evaluates his claims concerning the scientific status of these theories, and the value of his therapeutic methods." (Pg. 19)

He notes "the sudden and unexpected change that took place in Freud at the beginning of the 1890s... He was a nonconformist member of the bourgeoisie, conservative and orthodox. All of this changed abruptly... where previously he had been extremely straight-laced and Victorian in his sexual attitudes, he was now advocating the complete overthrow of all conventional sexual morality... his [writing] style now became extraordinarily speculative and theoretical... Other symptoms of a personality change ... were the Messianic conviction of a mission... and the general dictatorial tendency to rule over his followers and expel them for any slight doubts about the complete and general truth of his theories... Thornton [in&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Freudian-fallacy-Freud-and-cocaine/dp/0586085335/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Freudian fallacy: Freud and cocaine</a>]... has put forward a very clear-cut hypothesis which would explain all of these sudden changes in terms of an addiction Freud developed to cocaine." (Pg. 37-38)

He argues, "the few cases extensively discussed by Freud must be regarded not as outstanding successes but as therapeutic and probably diagnostic failures." (Pg. 59) He summarizes a 1965 paper he wrote, which reached conclusions such as: "When untreated neutoric control groups are compared to experimental groups of neurotic patients treated by means of psychotherapy, both groups recover to approximately the same extent..." (Pg. 69)

He concludes, "Freud and psychoanalysis must be regarded as a failure... This legacy has had many extremely bad consequences for psychiatry and psychology... [such as] the effect on the patients. Their hopes of cure and rescue have been dashed time and time again, and in some cases they have actually been made worse by psychoanalysis... the failure of psychology and psychiatry to develop into properly scientific studies of normal and abnormal behavior. It is probably true to say that Freud has set back the study of these disciplines by something like fifty years or more... Freud's teachings have undermined the values on which western civilization is based... his influence on the whole has been malignant." (Pg. 201-203) He adds, "psychoanalysis is on the way down... it has lost any academic credibility, and ... as a method of treatment it is being used less widely... [Freud] was, without doubt, a genius, but of propaganda... [and] of literary art... This may be a harsh judgment, but I think the future will support it." (Pg. 207-208)

Eysenck's critique is admittedly "harsh," but whether one accepts it or not, his is a very useful critique (although a lot of it is taken from secondary sources, such as Thornton), that both supporters and critics of Freud and psychoanalysis can learn from.
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I've read several of Dr. Murphy's books and it is clear that he was one of the great authorities on the power of the subconscious mind.  My personal favorite is "Telepsychics," but this book is a nice introduction to the benefits of controlling your own thought patterns.  In today's society, everyone has ample opportunity to consider themselves victimized in some way.  If you are tired of these types of defeatist thought patterns, read this book to learn a new way.  Although the author utilizes many Biblical references, this is not a book that is exclusively for Christians.  This philosophy is extremely inclusive.  My only complaint is that some of the material is naturally a bit dated, since the book was originally published 40 years ago.
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No one ever went broke underestimating their own inherent rudeness, and over-estimating that of others with little knowledge of them. We may live in a rude society, but there are deep reasons for this. And Ockham's Razor would indicate quickly that the simplest answer is lack of presumed privacy. Privacy means not only giving other's their own space, but also not presuming on their psychological space or, worse metaphysical space, as it were. This lady Amy Alkon seems to be the avatar of precisely tis sort of deep rudeness. Dipping into her writings as much as I can stand, one instantly sees a mind in love with its own insights, and with nary an historical notion that could gainsay whatever instant cure she has cooked up. They range from the true but trivial solutions like doing things that are nice for people in your neighborhood (wow-thanks for that sage insight) to instantly being able to diagnose  the inner rationale for the rudeness of people in Volvos with yoga mats. (She thinks she has Jane Austen's insights as she bops around LA apparently)  The essential quality in courtesy day-to-day has always been the existential space given to others in not laying easy judgments on them in a serious way. We do not know the content of other people's thinking really, all we can diagnose is their behavior or expresion. But Amy Alkon believes otherwise. She is sure she knows, and in that lies a kind of fatuous rudeness that is entertaining only to idiots, or to people sitting on toilets, which is where most of the papers she writes for get read. Or while drunk.

In addition, she tries to ape the natural rudeness of the young herself, for entertainment purposes. The young are naturally rude in some way because they do not understand yet the difficulty of being old or even just middle-aged, and all the physical compromise that goes a long with it. But this lady, knows  and tries to rudely capitalize  her young  audience's time-sensitive lack of compassion, reading articles  in throw- away papers (with lots of hot chicks' pictures in the back ; no doubt some being trafficked!-- great place to be doling out advice!). She assures them in this book that "granny" is more rude than they. Yet Amy Alkon is not exactly young, and yet anachronistically apes the insouciance of those in their salad days. Similarly, in an article in (gulp!) Psychology Today she involves herself in a wan defense of the standards of the hot, as she sees it. I am sure this goes over real well for someone who writes advice where they are turning tricks on the back page of the paper too. She is rude to so many women, but the rudeness works precisely because she mirrored the natural rudeness of those much younger than she. It is pardonable in the young; but not for a woman in her late forties.  But someone her age (born in '64, like myself  as well) should be well beyond such personal anachronisms. That she is not, and gets any sort of audience, is one of the best proofs of the untold rudeness of this society. That rudeness consists  ultimately of the half-baked who preach.  Thus, I think this lady does as much for the  dark crevices of rudeness in this society  as the TSA does for safety.
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When traveling in Europe and the U.S. in the late 1800s, westerners were shocked to learn that religion was not taught in Japanese schools.  They asked Nitobe how the Japanese learned moral behavior.  He concluded that stories of Bushido, the unwritten code of conduct for the samurai, served as the model for morality and behavior in Japan.  His book was published in 1905 and it does an excellent job of providing insights to Japanese logic that can be found in many values and behaviors today.  These include: humility, restraint, hierarchy, a focus on rule bound behavior, and avoidance of shameful acts that reflect on the whole family vs. just the individual.  Due to his knowledge of western culture, he is able to make extensive comparisons between Japan and the west to help westerners see that the Japanese are no so strange; they just analyze a situation differently.  For example, in a section that includes a discussion of giving gifts, he points out that while westerners would praise the gift they give to someone because we want to give the very best to the people we care about, the Japanese downplay the value of the gift because no gift could equal the value of the person it is given to.  In each culture, we value the person who is receiving the gift.  We differ in what we say and how we give the gift.  Thus, if you are interested in the roots of Japanese values - or in stories of samurai - this provides excellent food for thought.  Note: until recently Nitobe was on the 50,000 yen note in Japan.
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Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick: a medieval illumination packed with obscure incidents; strange characters tucked away in unexpected places, the unraveling of things at the edges, byzantine hierarchies of caste and class, strange conventions. A glorious self-indulgent wordscape; also filled with allusions, gestures to things outside itself and beyond our ken: ghosts and shades crowd out the living, something in them struggles towards representation, shapes move beneath the ice, slippery intrigues against consciousness (Hardwicks obsessive-brilliant Billie Holiday  desirable and intimidating, always behind a closed door).

Hardwicks stories of an east coast parasitic bourgeois intellectualism and the larger social body which is its unconscious host is a study of how the weight of time crushes memory flat, compresses it into entangled strata that can only be picked apart with the patience and expertise of a highly skilled technician-writer like herself. There is a stretch of five pages or so in Sleepless Nights(from about 153 in my battered library copy)on homeless women and the false self-sufficiency of the rich that telescopes mid-20th century New York, ancient Rome, post-Napoleonic Germany, and pre-Achaemenid Egypt into a single conceptual space  not beside each other or like each other or analogous to each other in some sort of useful comparative exercise but as part of an ongoing human catastrophe that is reminiscent of Benjamins theses on history. Like in Benjamin, the way to understand history in Sleepless Nights is not as a sequential chain of events that leads to a particular consequence and which memory can reconstruct, but existentially or phenomenologically as a fusion of memory and action, a sort of eternal return I suppose. Hardwick is a much more interesting time traveler than the bland normalized do-gooder who wants to save JFK or kill Hitler, the point is not to go into the past so we can save the present, but to consume time as a drug, to eat it, to succumb to its poison and experience the distinctions we rely on in day-to-day life as fluid (then-now, here-there, me-you).

Hardwick gasses the bustling hive and picks it apart, showing the moving parts stilled, fixed in their functions, she illustrates not just the complexity of relations but, by extracting them from the social world in which they are produced and arranging and rearranging them as words on paper, reveals the utter failure of our imagination to capture things as they actually are. Her last page is the gasp of the patient waking after surgery, of everything starting back to life, of starting over again.
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This short, yet conceptually heavy, book explores the psychological difficulties that humans face in making predictive decisions about their future happiness. The books content, although heavily dependent on psychological studies, was uniformly readable, interesting, and illuminating. Gilberts explanation of how the human mind tricks us into making future predictions, based on the information available to us, often appeared to be counter-intuitive, yet always struck a note of truth upon reflection. If all books about psychology were this concise, interesting, and informative, they would become a regular part of my reading diet. Stumbling on Happiness made me not just see the world differently, more importantly it made me see myself differently.
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This incredible book describes the changes of  manners and cuisine - and with them, an entire socio-cultural transformation -  that the Enlightenment enabled in Europe. Camporesi, a Professor of Italian Lit. at  the University of Bologna, gives the reader the sights, smells, and tastes  of the tables of Europe, from the lowliest of the low classes, to the  pretentious dining rooms of the ruling classes. He traces food history, the  introduction of "new foods," such as spices, "unthinkable  meats," and "unpredictable fruits," whether by the  discoveries of trade and travel, or changes in popular attitudes. Flowers  became a commodity.  Food fads, foods as status symbols and tokens of  refinement - are described. The birth of orangeade and lemonade, popular  notions of the curative or restorative powers of one food or another, are  all detailed - in an organized and satisying fashion.  Camporesi covers a  fascinating and thrilling subject with clarity and erudition. The book is  organized into fourteen chapters, and each can be read as a separate and  complete essay. Some of their titles: "A Blissful and Drinkable  Eternity," "The Botany of the Palate," "Mad and  Startling Names." This book is really a must-read for any student of  European social history, culinary history, or popular culture.
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ma connaissance la 1re biographie de Gregory Bateson accessible en franais ainsi qu'une introduction  son oeuvre rpute difficile d'accs. des observations anthropologiques dbouchant sur une thorie sur la communication qui a chang le regard sur (entre autres) la schizophrnie...
Il y avait un "avant et un aprs" Freud en psychologie (ou Einstein en sciences),
il y a un "avant et un aprs" Bateson  mon avis en psychiatrie et psychologie.
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"Is it possible for a psychologist to hear just a few words from you and immediately know what makes you tick? Could this psychologist use cutting-edge science to detect your inner desires from subtle patterns in your use of language--beyond anything you were conscious of saying? The answer to both questions is Yes." --Daniel Wegner, Harvard Psychologist & author

Since we learn to speak very early in our lives, enjoying our interactive communication skills, that reflect the core of our human tradition and social intelligence, in talks and discussions. In recent years, we struggled to match the an unprecedented innovations and virtual speed due to the communication ingenuity advancement of cell phones to I-phones, and explosive use of text messages and tweets, generating a massive rush of words within each hour of the waking day. Utilizing computational analytic tools, Pennebaker exposes all sorts of writings from advertisements on E bay, to our writings, in quizzes, we can take to yield so many unexpected insights. What was hiding inside our unconscious mind, could now be identified in the deluge of language, and exposed with analytical insights into ourselves on how do we think, and make sense of our own feelings.

A preposition links nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence. It indicates the temporal, spatial or logical relationship of its object to the rest of the sentence. Our most forgettable words, pronouns and prepositions, can be revealing; their frequency and patterns are as distinctive as our fingerprints, and are capable of conveying our identity. In his book, "The Secret Life of Pronouns," eminent social psychologist, and philologist James Pennebaker, utilizes computer-aided information processing in his insightful original research, of intrinsic linguistic analysis, to identify, and count certain words recurrence. He employs such statistics to show, with certainty, that our language usage reveals few secrets about our unconscious feelings, and personal concept.

Social psychologist and linguistic philologist Pennebaker uses his analytical auto-research techniques of computational linguistics, to identify, and count the recurring frequency of some words, we habitually use. He demonstrates that our daily use of language hides personal secrets about ourselves, our feelings, and self-conception. Pennebaker, using penetrating psychological rays, on every writing from E-bay advertisements to our own, could normally reveal some unexpected personal secrets. What seemingly alike characters have in common, and how President Obama and King Lear appear among the figures who make brief appearances in this surprising tour of what our slipping words are disclosing, even if we do not mean them.

Dan McAdams, of N. W. University gave the book a fine review: In this entertaining and sharply illuminating book, James Pennebaker shows that the words you use in everyday talk reveal surprising insights into personality, social relationships, status, leadership, sex, and human nature. I suspect that he could decode the pronouns and the functions words I write now to describe him in such a way as to reveal deep secrets about me! But I will write them anyway, and here they are: He is one of the smartest, funniest, and most creative psychologists you will ever meet.

<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Language-Literature-and-the-Learner-Creative-Classroom-Practice-Applied-Linguistics-Language-Study/dp/0582293235/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Language, Literature, and the Learner: Creative Classroom Practice (Applied Linguistics & Language Study)</a>