Review of Retraining memory: Techniques and applications.

Reviews the book, Retraining memory: Techniques and applications by Rick Parenté and Janet K. Anderson-Parenté (1991). This book, by rehabilitation neuropsychologist Rick Parenté and his wife, psychologist Janet Anderson-Parenté, was written as a practical manual of memory improvement strategies and approaches that anyone with difficulty remembering can use. The book was meant to serve a widely divergent audience: It was written to provide practical tips on improving memory and allied processes for cognitive rehabilitation therapists, psychologists, persons with head injury, or family members "anyone who feels that his or her memory is not what it used to be" (p. vii). While the book may not be the complete practical resource for "everyone" that was desired, it represents a valuable contribution to the cognitive rehabilitation literature by blending clinical and research aspects of memory retraining into a practical manual for psychologists and other professionals providing this form of training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Memory in mind and culture.

Reviews the book, Memory in mind and culture edited by Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (see record 2010-05180-000). This book rides the waves of two recent trends: interdisciplinarity and the effect of mind on culture. First, its psychologist and anthropologist editors deliberately chose an interdisciplinary panel of experts on memory, inviting highly respected psychologists, anthropologists, and historians to review cutting-edge memory research in their area of expertise. For psychologists, the resulting collection not only provides readable reviews of current psychology research in memory but also introduces concepts and issues from other disciplines that may open new avenues for research. Second, the book emphasizes the coconstitution of mind and culture, especially seeking evidence for how our minds structure culture. This unusual perspective is especially well developed in the last chapters of the book (Boyer; Rubin) but shows its influence throughout the book, with some authors exploring new ideas about how basic research on memory processes can connect to the study of culture. In summary, this book provides excellent reviews of up-to-date memory research in psychology—from brain structures to blogs—and also innovatively connects this research to larger questions about human culture. Though the coverage of eminent cognitive psychologists is admirable, I wish the book had included some of the new work by cultural and evolutionary psychologists on the topic. Nevertheless, the book advances the field in important ways, pointing the way to new research and theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

William A. Hunt (1903–1986).

William A. Hunt was one of our country's early scientist-clinicians. He began his career with study of a psychology that was a meld of Titchener's structuralism and Harvard's functionalism and completed it 50 years later in the field of health psychology. Hunt spent all but a few of those 50 years as a full-time teacher, at schools that included Dartmouth College, Connecticut College for Women, and Northwestern University. While doing his dissertation, he had mastered and used the structuralist's experimental method of introspection, applying it to the study of human emotion, specifically the James-Lange theory. In 1941, Hunt entered the Navy. He discerned that the screening for military duty of some 15 million women and men required an approach suited to the rapid, albeit individual, screening of large numbers of such personnel. His teaming up with a psychiatrist, Cecil Wittson, led to their joint development of a screening interview lasting one to two minutes that, with continued refinement, proved remarkably effective. Their goals as the mental health specialists participating in the medical examination conducted at this intake station were twofold: (a) to improve the efficiency of the Navy by removing those neuropsychiatric high-risk recruits who were potential psychiatric casualties if they continued in the Navy and (b) by such removal, to save these recruits the disastrous personal experience of subsequent breakdown during military duty. In his own still active research in the 1960s and 1970s Hunt continued to apply the same methods he earlier had used (in his Navy research) to the judgmental processes clinical psychologists used to identify psychological test responses that were pathognomonic of schizophrenia, mental retardation, and related forms of psychopathology. Hunt remained, until his death at age 82, an active scientist-clinician. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Memory and abuse: Remembering and healing the effects of trauma.

Reviews the book, Memory and abuse: Remembering and healing the effects of trauma by Charles L. Whitfield (see record 1995-98063-000). This book is a most informative, well-written, and thoughtful examination of the relationship between memory and abuse. Dr. Whitfield focuses on the clinical psychology of memory and trauma, and in doing so, deals successfully with the politics of the controversy surrounding delayed or "recovered" memories. In addition, he provides clinical information regarding the treatment of adult survivors of abuse. His book's intended readership includes both helping professionals and survivors. While many technical terms are used, the author's down-to-earth, personal style and use of anecdotes and case illustrations, as well as figures and tables, help to make this book both readable and enjoyable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique.

Reviews the book "Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique," by Trygve Braat?y (see record 1955-00974-000). Braat?y, a slightly off-beat psychoanalyst, writes as a facile essayist, drawing on a vast fund of intriguingly patterned knowledge, often careless with words in his first approximations, but showing profound thoughtfulness and meticulous patience in setting forth his material. The material itself will be of variable interest to most psychologists. His book is a fascinating development in the gradually emerging rapprochement between those analysts who are completely unconscious and those psychologists who permit themselves to think only with the 10 per cent of their iceberg minds that maintains a bobbling existence above sea level. While much of the book lacks the authority of firmly established evidence, its purpose is more to consider implications that go beyond the evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Thematic test analysis.

Reviews the book, Thematic test analysis edited by Edwin S. Shneidman (see record 1952-03422-000). Everyone does something different with the Thematic Apperception Test. In this book, interpretations of the same person's TAT and MAPS tests are gathered, under blind conditions, from fifteen psychologists or teams of psychologists. Many ways of using TAT material are exemplified: the editor distinguishes normative, intuitive, hero-oriented, interpersonal, and perceptual approaches. Both during his analysis of the data and in a supplementary chapter, each psychologist introspects about what he is doing, at times offering interesting vignettes of the "feel" of the process of clinical inference. This is especially valuable, since most major contributors to TAT methods are represented, though in one notable instance we do not hear from the master but only from his eminent pupils. Introduction and syntheses by the editor hold the book together, though so much discussion from so many views is, in its nature, disjunctive. The editorial conclusions offered are well taken, if understandably tactful. One can find no ground for criticizing an editor who began his book with such an interesting plan and carried out his plan with so much care for every detail. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Memory, consciousness, and the brain: The Tallinn conference; and The Oxford handbook of memory.

Reviews the books, Memory, consciousness, and the brain: The Tallinn conference edited by Endel Tulving (see record 2000-07362-000) and The Oxford handbook of memory edited by Endel Tulving and Fergus M. Craik (see record 2000-00111-000). Memory, consciousness, and the brain (MCB) is an outgrowth of a conference organized by the editor and his wife, and held in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. The organization of the book, accurately described by the editor as "largely illusory" (p. xv), blocks the 25 topic chapters into sections labeled Memory (11 chapters), Consciousness (7 chapters), and The Brain (7 chapters). The editor's hope is that the book will be useful as an introduction to representative research currently being conducted at the boundaries of memory, consciousness, and the brain. To what extent has this objective been achieved? The book certainly serves up a broad menu of topics. The reader looking for something intriguing in the way of research on memory and consciousness in the brain is likely to find it in this volume. What are MCB's weaknesses? The main sin is something that comes with the territory of all conference volumes: uneveness in quality, readability, and organizations, and uncertainty about the audience to be reached by each of the chapters. Regarding The Oxford handbook of memory (OHM), this book describes the growth of memory research from its nadir in the 1950s to the present, and presents summaries of contemporary scientific knowledge about a variety of memory topics. The focus is human memory (although the discussion of brain-memory relations is sometimes based on research with nonhuman primates) as studied from the perspectives of experimental cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, theory and modeling, and the ecology of memory. Within this compass, the editors have attempted to ensure coverage of the current major theories, findings, and methods of memory. In the editors' words, the volume is intended to be "a major reference source for people who want to get started in the field, or who wish to check things outside their own regional area" (p. vii). Not only does the book hit its target, we expect that even specialists will benefit from the coverage of subjects in which they have expertise. For now, the OHM is the gold standard and all memory professionals are in the debt of the editors and authors for its existence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neuropsychology evolving.

Reviews the book, From neuropsychology to mental structure by Tim Shallice (see record 1989-97122-000). The basic question that the book addresses is "what can be learned about normal function from impaired behaviour?" The author approaches this question in two ways. First, he assumes that cognitive processing is organized into basic processing elements, much like Fodor's modules. The goal is to determine how the modules function together to underlie cognitive processes. Second, Shallice asks how neuropsychological data provide inferences about the nature of the modules. Overall, I liked this book, even if I cannot easily identify with the top-down approach to studying brain function. Nonetheless, this is a volume that will force psychologists of all stripes to think about questions surrounding the study of cognition and brain function. Indeed, one can seriously ask the question of whether cognitive neuropsychology is a natural evolution of Hebb's neuropsychology as opposed to a new and divergent species that will fill a different niche. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychologists Caught: A Psychologic of Psychology.

Reviews the book, Psychologists Caught: A Psychologic of Psychology by Lewis Wolfgang Brandt (1982). This book is about metapsychology, the psychology or psycho-logic, of psychologies. Its basic question is: What determines the particular psychology, theory and method, that a psychologist advocates and practices? Consistent with his emphasis on individual psychohistory, Brandt begins his book with an autobiographical chapter explaining how he personally came to reject American behaviourism and to embrace a phenomenological-Gestalt form of psychoanalysis. This work will be found most interesting and liked best by those, who, like Brandt, have a relativistic bent of mind, who are persuaded that Hume and Kant discovered the natural limits of philosophical thought, who read Hayek and Feyerabend with approbation, or who just enjoy vigorous intellectual discussion for its own sake. Behaviourists and other "technical" psychologists will probably not like it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Recollections of trauma: Scientific evidence and clinical practice.

Reviews the book, Recollections of trauma: Scientific evidence and clinical practice edited by J. Donald Read and D. Stephen Lindsay (1997). This book is a serious and ambitious attempt to bring various forms of professional expertise to bear on the vexed issue of psychotherapeutically recovered versus false memories of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. The volume is the outcome of a NATO Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) that took place over an 11-day period at Les Jardins de l'Atlantique in France. It reflects the input of no fewer than 95 participants, most of them psychologists, with a minority of contributors from other relevant fields such as anthropology and the legal profession. The explicit aim of this collaborative undertaking was to promote productive dialogue among the various stakeholders in the recovered memory debate, especially among researchers and clinicians, whose views on these issues are often highly divergent. The final product bears witness to the successful achievement of this aim. This volume will stand as a definitive reference on the topic of recovered memory for the more serious researchers in this area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Molecular Basis of Memory.

Reviews the book, The Molecular Basis of Memory by E. Gurowitz (1969). Everyone would agree that there is a biochemistry of brain functioning. Not everyone would agree, however, that there is evidence to indicate that the physiological memory trace depends directly upon changes in either DNA, RNA or protein molecules. On the premise that the molecular approach is valid, the first part of this book is concerned with just what molecule is involved. Anyone looking for a summary of work in this area will find it in this book. Anyone looking for a penetrating discussion of the nature of memory and memory mechanisms will have to look elsewhere. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Realms of value: A critique of human civilization.

Reviews the book, Realms of value: A critique of human civilization by Ralph Barton Perry (1954). According to the reviewer, of all the many philosophical treatises on the subject, it is doubtful that any could possibly be more clarifying to the psychologist or more congenial to this author's taste. The author's pivotal concept is interest: "A thing--any thing--has value when it is the object of an interest--any interest" (p.3). Interest is anchored in the solid soil of motivation, cognition, and organization of personality, and conceptually is a close cousin of what most psychologists call attitude. The reviewer states that to a large degree, this author is forced to write his own psychology, since he finds relatively little illumination of "the architecture of interests" in current texts. He reviews what he calls "motoraffective psychology" (not a very happy label) in search of an adequate theory of interest, and finds the outcome mostly negative. The reviewer recommends this book for graduate instruction in psychology because the author's system lies close to the silent presuppositions with while psychologists ordinarily work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of A disturbance in the field: Essays in transference-countertransference engagement.

Reviews the book, A disturbance in the field: Essays in transference-countertransference engagement by Steven Cooper (see record 2010-09125-000). At the beginning of this book, Cooper states that he is interested in finding the common ground, clinically, between the relational approach and other schools such as the Kleinian, Freudian, Kohutian, and others. In the introduction, Cooper states he will be examining the moments of transition, change, and newness that occur in psychoanalytic treatment. He alerts us that although he is very interested in countertransference as a clinical tool and the analyst’s imagination as helpful in the therapeutic work, he warns us to not see these elements in any heroic or idealistic manner. Cooper promises to explore the areas of unconscious conflict, fantasy, and the interpersonal process and believes both patient and analyst try to hold these dimensions in mind and communicate with each other throughout the clinical process. Overall, the reviewer enjoyed reading the book but was disappointed in that Cooper’s outline of what the reader can expect does not unfold. What is offered in this book is interesting, and at times illuminating, but overall runs somewhat flat. There were numerous places where Cooper could have taken his discussion points and tried to build a new fusion of relational, Freudian, Kleinian, and Kohutian approaches but he did not. The reviewer found it interesting that his case material seems to be a standard yet very skilled and natural combination of such views, but he does not elaborate on any theoretical matters or examine his case material as being predominantly a combination of such views. Therefore, the reviewer thinks there are many helpful and insightful points made in this book, but he was never really moved in any particular manner by the text. When reading his case material closely, the reviewer was struck by it being solid analytic work that seemed mostly of a Freudian and object relational mode, but again not anything unique or anything showing a new method of consolidating different theoretical approaches, which is what we were promised early on. The reviewer's overall reaction to this new book is that he is very appreciative of many individual chapters, and many sections of certain chapters, but they never all came together as a whole or jelled as a unifying theme that felt new and transformative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Human Subject in the Psychological Laboratory.

Reviews the book, The Human Subject in the Psychological Laboratory by Irwin Silverman (see record 1978-20076-000). In this book, the author presents his assessment of the laboratory experiment following years of research on the social psychology of the psychological experiment. Silverman makes his views clear from the outset: the laboratory is "an excellent place to study laboratory behavior; but by virtue of this it is suited for little else", and he relentlessly pursues this thesis throughout the book. Through the seeming enormity of evidence and Silverman's constant attention to his thesis, the reader is brought to the precipice from which the laboratory experiment must surely fall. The uncritical reader will find Silverman's arguments well-written and effectively woven together in a relatively concise, easily readable manner. Any criticisms of the book must focus on errors of omission rather than problems of style or misrepresentation of fact. The important questions seem to concern a need to better understand how an experimenter can conduct meaningful research with human subjects. This understanding will not come about from proclaiming that other methods are better or from research which has only the objective of documenting the inadequacies of current methods. More than anything else Silverman's book suggests the need for a new direction for increased research on the social psychology of the psychological experiment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Understanding depression: Feminist social constructionist approaches.

Reviews the book, Understanding depression: Feminist social constructionist approaches by Janet M. Stoppard (see record 1999-04422-000). Dr. Stoppard has written an excellent overview that brings together mainstream psychological and feminist research and writing about women and depression. The author, a feminist psychologist, brings a balanced view to this area, which has typically seen feminists and mainstream psychologists either avoiding or dismissing each other's work. Thus this book presents a unique and important integration that both feminists and psychologists should find useful. This is an excellent book that will be of interest to a wide range of readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Meeting Movies.

Reviews the book, Meeting Movies by Norman N. Holland (see record 2006-11509-000). Meeting Movies is a very personal book in which Holland discusses eight films that have been personally meaningful to him. These films are Casablanca, Vertigo, The Seventh Seal, Freud, Persona, Children of Paradise, Shakespeare in Love, and 8 1/2. Holland describes what he was doing with his life when he saw each of these films, and he discusses how each film affected his life and his career. Some of the movies were seen relatively recently, and some were first viewed over half a century ago. In reading the book, it becomes apparent that Holland loves films. Whenever text is in Roman type, Holland is operating in his reader-response critic mode, and the discussion reads much like any other film criticism. However, the most interesting parts of the book occur when Holland is in free association mode, writing about whatever thoughts the movie being discussed brings to mind. These instances are set off from the regular text by use of italicized text. In summary, Meeting Movies is a good read. Holland is well versed in psychology and especially psychoanalytic approaches, and his criticism of these eight films is consistently interesting. His willingness to self-disclose makes this book all the more fascinating. The book will be rewarding for anyone genuinely interested in the interface of psychology and film. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume I. The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900.

Reviews the book, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Volume I. The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856-1900 by Ernest Jones (see record 1954-03633-000). According to the reviewer, the first volume of the trilogy Dr. Jones promises is a book of unparalleled interest and importance for psychologists of all schools and theoretical persuasions. It presents an absorbing story which will never be more fully nor better told. The historical importance of Freud and his ideas hardly needs to be labored, and it is perhaps enough to say that this book is, in the reviewer's opinion, the best available introduction to an understanding of the man and of psychoanalysis as he developed it. For it presents the work as well as the life of Freud, and carefully traces the development of psychoanalytic ideas up to their first great climax in The Interpretation of Dreams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A return to the source: Rereading Freud in the midst of contemporary trauma theory.

In the current, often contentious, climate that surrounds childhood sexual trauma and its relation to adult forms of psychopathology, Freud's theorizing has received a great deal of attention. There has been much discussion and speculation about the role sexual trauma played in his thinking about psychopathology. While some theorists suggest that Freud overlooked and even suppressed his patients' reports of sexual trauma when he moved from his "seduction" theory to his "fantasy" theory, others suggest that his revision was an extension, rather than a reversal, of his early theorizing. This article will review in detail the development and revisions of Freud's thinking. It will also suggest areas of agreement between Freud's thinking and some contemporary trauma theory, as well as point to areas of divergence. The therapeutic implications of adopting some versions of contemporary trauma theory will also be developed. The aim is to stimulate further discussion about this issue in terms of its theoretical and therapeutic implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)