Review of Desire, self, mind and the psychotherapies: Unifying psychological science and psychoanalysis.

Reviews the book, Desire, self, mind and the psychotherapies: Unifying psychological science and psychoanalysis by R. Coleman Curtis (see record 2008-14956-000). It seems that the current drumbeat of attack against psychoanalysis and its contributions has, as Paul Stepansky (2009) states, put psychoanalysis “at the margins.” It is this question that has become the sine qua non. And it is this question that R. Coleman Curtis attempts to answer in her new book. For many years, Curtis has dedicated her work to the integration of psychoanalysis with other disciplines within psychology and psychotherapy. In her book, Curtis hypothesizes that advances in psychoanalysis and in the broader field of psychology make it possible to achieve common ground between disciplines. The goal of integration is clearly a passion for her, and she infuses the book with a hope that there can be mutual recognition of the contributions of psychoanalysis with the rest of the field of psychology in a way not possible before two major trends: the “affective revolution” and the recognition across disciplines of unconscious processes. She argues that this is necessary for both disciplines. Curtis’ work is an elaborate and impressively researched volume that carefully lays out the argument that psychoanalysis must abandon dated ideas and instead must present relevant science to support key suppositions. For psychology in general, she argues that acknowledging seminal findings regarding unconscious motivation and emotional processing will make the field more dynamic and relevant to people’s lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Attachment, play, and authenticity: A Winnicott primer.

Reviews the book, Attachment, play, and authenticity: A Winnicott primer by Steven Tuber (see record 2008-04633-000). This book is a vibrant introduction and explication of one of the most important writers and thinkers in our field. The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott gave us many concepts that have become part of our therapeutic lexicon, such as the “transitional object”, “good enough mothering”, “holding”, “the true and false self”, and “the capacity to be alone.” However, reading Winnicott’s work often proves to be a difficult task; his writing is often idiosyncratic and dense. This is where Steven Tuber has given us a real gift. This clear and clinically relevant book spells out with great clarity and richness the main ideas and structure of Winnicott’s contribution and how to apply them to one’s clinical thinking and work. The reviewer provides details on his personal experience while reading this book and concludes that this book is essential reading for every psychotherapist, regardless of one’s orientation or of the clinical population with which one works. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of When AA doesn't work for you: Rational steps to quitting alcohol.

Reviews the book, When AA doesn't work for you: Rational steps to quitting alcohol by Albert Ellis and Emmett Velten (1992). Ellis and Velten have written a practical self-help guide for the problem drinker who wants to stop drinking. It will be of particular interest to the individual who rejects Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and is looking for an alternative approach to recovery. In this application of the principles of Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) to substance abuse problems, the authors provide a compendium of techniques that will be appreciated by clinicians and laypersons alike. The central idea presented here is that the primary cause of problem drinking lies in the individual's belief system; specifically, the authors state that addictions and other emotional disturbances occur when "you take your preferences and desires for healthy goals (such as success, approval, comfort, and pleasure) and you turn them into strong, rigid, shoulds, oughts, musts, and commands (p. 6)." Most professionals in the addictions field would probably argue for a more complex view of the etiology of alcoholism which includes consideration of biological, social, and a variety of psychological factors. However, it is possible to recognize this book's practical utility while disagreeing with some of the authors' theoretical assertions. This book is likely to be most palatable to those who share the authors' theoretical orientation and who accept the Ellisonian principle of "omnipotence of thought." Professionals with psychodynamic backgrounds will probably find the strong devaluation of the role of insight, lack of attention to unconscious processes, and minimization of the contribution of early childhood experiences to present-day difficulties objectionable. Strong advocates of Alcoholics Anonymous are also likely to have serious disagreements with the approach presented here. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Democracy’s discontent.

Reviews the book, Democracy’s discontent: America in search of a public philosophy by Michael Sandel (1996). This book has been widely read by academics, politicians and others in public life, and interested citizens, giving him the stature of a leading public intellectual in contemporary America. Even though it is a work of political philosophy, I believe that Sandel’s writings have a special relevance for theoretical and philosophical psychology. At the outset of this book Sandel delivers his often-quoted observation that the “anxiety of the age” is the “fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives” and that “from family to neighborhood to nation...the moral fabric of community is unraveling around us” (p. 3). He then describes how this loss of a sense of personal efficacy and meaningful human ties might derive from the dominance in our society of the “public philosophy of contemporary liberalism.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Hypnosis--questions and answers.

Reviews the book, Hypnosis--questions and answers edited by Bernie Zilbergeld, M. Gerald Edelstien, and Daniel L. Araoz (1987). The editors of this "friendly reference" have carefully collected and thought out a compendium of questions about hypnosis "that you always wanted to know about but didn't know whom to ask." The answers are presented in an easily readable format. In 489 pages the reader is given cogent replies by outstanding experts. This is a fine book insofar as outstanding experts give sound and succinct answers to some of the most frequently asked questions on hypnosis. Psychotherapists and other health professionals who use hypnosis will find this book very useful as a reference source for authoritative and scientific answers to the 84 questions that are addressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

You don't know me, but I know you: The illusion of asymmetric insight.

People, it is hypothesized, show an asymmetry in assessing their own interpersonal and intrapersonal knowledge relative to that of their peers. Six studies suggested that people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them. Several of the studies explored sources of this perceived asymmetry, especially the conviction that while observable behaviors (e.g., interpersonal revelations or idiosyncratic word completions) are more revealing of others than self, private thoughts and feelings are more revealing of self than others. Study 2 also found that college roommates believe they know themselves better than their peers know themselves. Study 6 showed that group members display a similar bias—they believe their groups know and understand relevant out-groups better than vice versa. The relevance of such illusions of asymmetric insight for interpersonal interaction and our understanding of "naive realism" is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections.

Reviews the book, Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections by Robert Stolorow (see record 2007-07947-000). The author discribes his book as a “project (that) has occupied (him) now for more than 16 years” (p. 45) starting six months after the tragic death to metastatic cancer of his 34-year-old wife Daphne (“Dede”) Stolorow, on February 23, 1991. His book exemplifies a value, deeply shared by the author and his late wife, that of “staying rooted in one’s own genuine painful emotional experiences” (p. 46). The volume is very dense (50 pages of text, total), the product of 16 years of intense and sensitive reflection. It condenses in very short order the history of his intersubjective perspective on developmental trauma, (the outcome of invalidating malattunement in the “parent–child mutual regulation system” lending to unbearable affect states in search of a “relational home”), his theory of the phenomenology of trauma (the shattering of “absolutisms of everyday life”), trauma’s temporality (trauma freeze frames the past and the future into an eternal present), and, finally an analysis of the ontological or universally constitutive aspect of trauma in our lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Disgust and its disorders: Theory, assessment, and treatment implications.

Reviews the book, Disgust and its disorders: Theory, assessment, and treatment implications by edited Bunmi O. Olantunji and Dean McKay (see record 2008-14016-000). The fairly recent shift toward a focus on disgust is nicely reflected in the title of this book. The goal of Disgust and its disorders is to assess the current state of disgust-based research and to highlight future suggested research directions to enhance our understanding, and thereby treatment of problems associated with the emotion disgust. Accordingly, this book contains 14 chapters and is divided into three separate but related sections: 1) Theory and Assessment; 2) Response Patterns; and 3) Disorders of Disgust. For the most part there is good flow and continuity across chapters relative to other edited volumes in which disjointedness may be an unwelcomed feature. A consistent theme in the chapters of this book is the call for more and more rigorous research involving the emotion disgust in a context of psychological disorders. Given recent increases in researchers’ interest and understanding of disgust, it seems likely that disgust-based research will continue to grow and foster the proliferation of This volume will certainly have a positive impact in this regard, and future volumes will ideally continue to explore issues raised here within as well as further examine different disgust domains (e.g., moral disgust). In sum, Disgust and its disorders is a delightful read—despite its “disgusting” content. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repression, suppression, and conscious awareness.

Both “repression” and “suppression” are said to involve removing mental content from awareness. However, repression is generally said to be unconscious, whereas suppression is said to be conscious. The meanings of the terms “unconscious” and “conscious,” though, are open to a variety of interpretations and so the validity of this distinction is uncertain. This paper discusses the relationship between repression and suppression and whether conscious awareness distinguishes these processes. Consciousness and unconsciousness are discussed in terms of a relational account of cognition where “knowing” is understood as a relation between a cognizing subject and a cognized object term. On this view, problems arise from confusing consciousness and unconsciousness with properties or qualities of mental processes. Examined in this light, the present analysis reveals that repression can become conscious and that suppression can occur unconsciously. The role of “resistance” and the recognition of a series of defenses are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Between father and child: How to become the kind of father you want to be.

Reviews the book, Between father and child: How to become the kind of father you want to be by R. Levant and J. Kelly (1989). This book is one of the most recent books on parenting that focuses on the father's unique relationship with his son and/or daughter. It is the result of the Boston University Fatherhood Project, a skills training and group interaction/discussion support group for fathers. Written for fathers (and according to the authors, for mothers as well), it is a nontechnical, readable approach to improving communications and relationships between fathers and their children. It is an outstanding contribution to the growing list of volumes dedicated to parenting 'in the next century,' and contributes a sensitive, practical approach to relationship enhancement as well as directly confronting such issues as sexism, male socialization processes and gender role strain and conflict issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The unconscious reconsidered.

Reviews the book, The unconscious reconsidered edited by Kenneth S. Bowers and Donald Meichenbaum (1986). A discussion of the unconscious from the clinical perspective is joined by discussions from cognitive, psychobiological, and behavioural perspectives in this book. The major contribution of the book is to provide intelligent discussions of the unconscious. The chapters are informative, and include points that are controversial enough to spur useful further discussion of the roles played by the unconscious. Discussion of the unconscious is a pleasurable pursuit, and is likely to make an important contribution to psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Comprendre et soigner la crise suicidaire.

Reviews the book, Comprendre et soigner la crise suicidaire by Laurent Morasz et Fran?ois Danet (2008).This work examines a psychodynamic theoretical approach focused on the suicide crisis clinic and the “caregiver/cared for” relationship by illustrating different clinical examples representing individuals at various stages of the suicide process. The value and strength of this book lie in the rich and interesting clinical experience it brings forward; there is no attempt to distinguish between “objective” and “more subjective psychodynamic” approaches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowing that you don't know: Metamemory and discourse processing.

In 6 experiments, the authors used a speeded question-answering task and a recognition task to examine how people know what they don't know. Extending work by S. Glucksberg and M. McCloskey (1981) to examine metamemory judgments about narratives, the authors asked participants to respond to 2 types of "don't know" questions. In certain conditions, readers were faster to respond "don't know" to implicit "don't know" questions (i.e., no information regarding the answers was provided) than to explicit "don't know" questions (i.e., narratives explicitly stated that something was unknown). The speed of responding to the implicit "don't know" questions was related to the familiarity of the question, which is consistent with claims that fast metacognitive judgments are based on a preliminary evaluation of the familiarity of a cue. This is a first step in integrating theories of metacognition and discourse processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spontaneous repetitive thoughts can be adaptive: Postscript on “mind wandering”.

When researchers use the term mind wandering for task-unrelated thoughts in signal detection tasks, we may fall into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. Similar negative connotations are attached to common terms like cognitive failures, resting state, rumination, distraction, attentional failures, absent-mindedness, repetitiveness, mind lapses, going AWOL in the brain, cortical idling, and the like. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that mathematicians and scientists often engage in spontaneous repetitive thoughts and that the results of those thoughts are by no means maladaptive. Yet that seems to be implied by the standard use of common terms in the research literature. As humans, we know that spontaneous ideation goes on during all of our waking hours, during dreams and even in slow-wave sleep. It is unlikely that such a great allocation of mental resources has no useful adaptive function. This view of the spontaneous stream is consistent with the perspective of global workspace theory on conscious contents, which suggests that conscious events are not like unconscious cognitive representations. Rather, conscious events trigger widespread adaptive changes in the brain, far beyond their cortical origins. The brain evidence for such “global broadcasting” triggered by conscious (but not matched unconscious) events throughout the cortex is now quite compelling. Spontaneous conscious thoughts, even if they appear to be arbitrary, irrelevant, unwanted, or intrusive, may still play an important adaptive role in life-relevant problem solving and learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's emerging ability to make false statements.

This study examined the origins of children's ability to make consciously false statements, a necessary component of lying. Children 2 to 5 years of age were rewarded for claiming that they saw a picture of a bird when viewing pictures of fish. They were asked outcome questions (“Do you win/lose?”), recognition questions (“Do you have a bird/fish?”), and recall questions (“What do you have?”), which were hypothesized to vary in difficulty depending on the need for consciousness of falsity (less for outcome questions) and self-generation of an appropriate response (more for recall questions). The youngest children (2? to 3? years old) were above chance on outcome questions, but it was not until age 3? that children performed above chance on recognition questions or were capable of maintaining false claims across question types. Findings have implications for understanding the emergence of deception in young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Handbook of Indian psychology.

Reviews the book, Handbook of Indian psychology, edited by K. Ramakrishna Rao, Anand C. Paranjpe, and Ajit K. Dalal (see record 2008-09634-000). The importance and development of indigenous perspectives in psychology are well-documented in recent years, and many volumes have appeared that focus on specific cultural regions. The present volume is a welcome addition to this line of work, particularly as it is just the inaugural volume in a series entitled the “Indian Psychology Book Project.” After an introductory chapter, the volume is organised into three general parts devoted to “Systems and Schools,” “Topics and Themes,” and “Applications and Implications”. The first part is largely concerned with broad cultural and theological influences on Indian psychology. The second part includes topics that are typical of western psychological approaches, including motivation, personality, cognition, emotion and consciousness, all cast within an Indian cultural perspective. In the third part, authors seek to apply specific knowledge from these domains of Indian psychology to areas of practise such as meditation and health, and organisational effectiveness. This volume presents an exceedingly rich set of materials. Those interested in comprehending human beings in all their diversity should be prepared to spend hours with this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Tests and assessment.

Reviews the book Tests and Assessment (1985) by Jacqueline Schakel. From its broad title, this book might be classified as a general textbook on assessment for anyone who is learning about testing procedures. Indeed, in the preface, the authors present their book as a text for undergraduate courses on testing in general psychology, and for graduate courses in counseling, vocational, educational, and industrial psychology as well as for "students in counselor education, guidance and counseling, educational administration and other disciplines." Although the book does have some useful general sections on tests and assessment, it is clear that the real audience for this book is less extensive than the authors state. The examples used, tests reviewed, and issues discussed are chiefly for students in personnel and guidance or vocational psychology. If you are such a student or teach assessment courses to students in these programs, read on. Parts of this book may interest you. If you are a school psychologist or teacher of school psychology, you will find this text limited. The overall organization of the book could have been improved by reviewing the theories of person-environment interaction (upon which the authors claim to base their treatment of assessment) before their discussion of specific assessment tools and integrating a discussion of this theoretical basis throughout the book. In summary, this book does not offer the broad treatment of assessment issues and the focus on the kinds of assessment required in schools which are necessary to school psychologists. It provides some useful reviews of tests for guidance and vocational decision making, some concise explanations of assessment concepts, and a well-written section on some specific testing controversies that may be useful to students in the counseling field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)