New Books In Psychology

Why are humans alone capable of invention? This question is relevant to every human invention, from music to mathematics, sculpture and science, dating back to the beginnings of civilization. In The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention, Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, presents a new theory of human invention. His unexpected claim is that understanding autistic people — specifically their unstoppable drive to seek patterns, a characteristic of the condition — is the key to understanding both the ancient origins and the modern flowering of human creativity. In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen’s goal is two-fold: to provide an answer to the long-standing question about human invention and to understand the role that autistic people played in the evolution of human invention. His higher message is to change the way our society views and treats autistic people. “Among the new generation of hypersystemizers will be some of the great inventors

Political scientist Lara Brown’s new book, Amateur Hour, is a complex and important multi-method study of the presidency, starting from the original conception of the office at the constitutional convention and George Washington’s role as the first occupant of the office. The centerpiece of Amateur Hour: Presidential Character and the Question of Leadership (Routledge, 2020) is the focus on our understanding—from the time of Washington, through Lincoln, to the contemporary period—of the role that character should play, but often has not, of late, in terms of the person elected to the White House and how they conduct themselves in the office and as a leader. Brown’s analysis interrogates the scholarship around the concept of presidential psychology and leadership, while unpacking the connections between leadership in this complicated elected office and how we have, more recently, elected presidents who are often lacking in experience, and why this is problematic.Amateur Hour integrates historical analysis of A

In Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better (BenBella, 2020), eminent neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields surveys the history and current state of scientific understanding about the brain as an electrical organ, and how the electrical activity of the brain relates to cognitive functioning and various clinical conditions. The book begins by documenting some of the fascinating and obscure history of the discovery and early science of electrical brain activity measurements, or ‘brainwaves’. It then goes on to summarize the latest cutting edge research on brainwaves in a wide variety of basic and applied areas of science and medicine - including neuroimaging, neuroplasticity, brain-machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurofeedback, brain stimulation therapies, and many others. Electric Brain is a highly accessible, but fact-filled and up-to-date, treatment of one of the most central - and yet still so enigmatic - topics in all o

We’ve all been there – the family dinners turned full-fledged political debates, the awkward chat in the kitchen at work, the difficulty of discussing politics on a first date or even at dinner with a long-time partner. Today’s divisive climate – and the seemingly neverending circus of Brexit – has made discussion of current events uncomfortable and often uncivil. So, how exactly do we find ways to reach across the aisle to those whose views we find unpalatable? Psychotherapist and lifetime liberal Jeanne Safer hopes to shed some light on the situation. Combining her professional expertise with personal experience gleaned from over forty years of happy marriage to her stalwart conservative husband Richard Brookhiser, as well as a wealth of interviews with politically mixed couples, Safer offers frank advice for salvaging and strengthening relationships strained by political differences. Part relationship guide, part anthropological study, I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Rela

Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis: A Guide to Practice, Study, and Research (Routledge, 2018) provides a concise and clearly presented handbook for graduate students, experienced clinicians, supervisors, and professors, presenting analytic technique with as clear a frame and purpose as evidence-based models, and a gateway into further study in Relational Psychoanalysis. Barsness offers his own research on technique, and grounds these methods with superb contributions from several master clinicians, expanding the seven core competencies: therapeutic intent; therapeutic stance; analytic listening; relational dynamics; patterning and linking; conflict and courageous speech through disciplined spontaneity. Each of these skills are presented in a straightforward and useable format. Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis is inspired by Barsness’ students where he was motivated to create a text to better understand the complexities of working with the relational psychoanalytic relationship. Phil

When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies have tried to treat something which lies on the border between the natural and the pathological. Jonathan Sadowsky's book The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity, 2020) explores the various medical treatments for depression, classed as a modern illness with definite (but changing) symptoms from the 20th century onwards, in relation to a longer history of treatments for ‘melancholia’ and related states considered either as biological or social sicknesses or as a natural part of some people’s constitution. He also compares the western history of medicalising depression with the experiences of both sadness and clinical depression in non-western cultures, such as Nigeria and Japan. He asks, what have we lost as a consequence of the hegemony of the western clinical model, and how can we reclaim the patient experie

Everyone ages, and just about everyone uses language, making Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging (MIT Press, 2019) a book with practically universal relevance. The authors, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts, show readers what cognitive science can tell us—and what it can’t—about the relationship between aging and language. Through accounts of research written for a general audience, Kreuz and Roberts explain how underlying cognitive functions, such as memory and perception, are responsible for much of the changes that people associate with aging, and that linguistic capabilities are more resilient than many may think. They explore a range of changes that occur as people age, focusing on speaking, listening, reading, and writing. While they are clear that the jury may be out on some of the phenomena they explore—such as whether older people have greater difficulty interpreting figurative language—they note that other correlations are more robust, such as the relationship bet

Today I interview Tanya Lurhmann about her new book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton University Press, 2020). Lurhmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches psychology and anthropology. And her work is fascinating. She’s interested in what seems like an impossible question: how it is that people from vastly different religious and spiritual traditions experience their gods and their spirits as real? She goes about answering this question in a very straightforward way. Well, asks Lurhmann, what do their believers do and what do they learn to do such that they might turn to you and say, “Oh yes, God is real. I just had coffee with God this morning.” Lurhmann’s book is keenly argued and lucidly written, which is to say Lurhmann is not just a brilliant scholar but also an engaging writer and speaker, which makes her book and Lurhmann herself all the more of a pleasure to encounter. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at O

Today I talked to Daniel Lieberman about his book Exercised: How We Did Not Evolve to Exercise and What to Do about It (Pantheon, 2021). In the book Lieberman explodes 12 different myths, chief among them we’re supposed to want to exercise. Much of the conversation explores differences between Westerners and their lifestyles, including of course exercise, versus the daily energy expenditures of non-Westerners and especially people in Africa. It provides insights to show how aging and senescence are not necessarily linked, and offers some ways in which we might enjoy exercise more. Daniel E. Lieberman is the Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He received degrees from Harvard and Cambridge Universities. Lieberman studies and teaches how and why the human body is the way it is, and how our evolutionary history affects health and disease.  Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.

“She is seated in her chair, quietly anticipative. She is in no hurry. There is nothing that has to be achieved. She does not charge the situation with her temper. On the contrary, she is turned towards the other, listening attentively – present in the contact, though with no traces of intimacy or fervency. She is fairly softly spoken, yet clear and factual. A benevolent, lightly questioning tone characterizes her voice. No gestures, no jargon, no implicit jokiness, no sideward glances, no hidden implications. She upholds simplicity of words and expressions.” This impressionistic image of the analyst at work is a condensed starting point for the journey that Siri Erika Gullestad and Bjørn Killingmo take us on with their recently published The Theory and Practice of Psychoanalytic Therapy: Listening for the Subtext (Routledge, 2019). They draw from decades of experience as analysts and university professors of clinical psychology at the University of Oslo to give a theoretically grounded account of their flavo

The synthesizing mind is one that identifies a program or asks a question, pulls together information from across disciplines or creates new data through experimentation, and integrates everything into a novel solution or answer. Some of history’s most revolutionary thinkers – like Aristotle or Darwin – were synthesizers. But what do synthesizing minds actually do? Howard Gardner, the Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Senior Director of Harvard’s Zero Project, and author of over thirty books joins New Books in Education to talk about his latest book: A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory (MIT Press, 2021). In this unique memoir, Dr. Gardner analyzes clues from his own life that helped him realize his mind worked in unique ways that are vital in today’s rapidly changing world. In this wide-ranging discussion, Gardner talks about his work creating Multiple Intelligence Theory and more recent work in ethics, as

Psychotherapy offices are typically thought of as existing in the background of treatment, but they are brought to the foreground in Mark Gerald’s new book In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Office (Routledge, 2020). In this beautifully written book, illustrated with pictures of psychoanalysts in their offices from around the world, psychoanalyst and photographer Mark Gerald explores the stories offices tell about their holders and their role in the transformations experienced by patients. In our interview, we discuss why he became involved in this decades-long photography project and what he learned along the way about the powerful interface of psyche and physical space. Mark Gerald is a practicing psychoanalyst and trained photographer based in the USA who has written, presented, and taught widely about the visual dimension of psychoanalysis. He is a faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Stephen Mitchell Cent

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph.D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing. Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as

In this episode I talked to Russell T. Warne about his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (Cambridge UP, 2020). Warne  takes on the “nature versus nurture” debate regarding the source of intelligence. It also looks at a host of other angles related to IQ: from the failures of the No Child Left Behind act to what are the disadvantages to society are of an emerging intellectual meritocracy. Along the way it explores differences in scores based on ethnic/racial origins, plus how well EQ holds up as a separate form of intelligence. Russell T. Warne is an associate professor of psychology at Utah Valley University. He earned his PhD in education psychology from Texas A&M University in 2011. Dr. Warne has published two books and nearly 60 scholarly articles. He teaches classes on statistics, psychology, research methods, psychological testing, and intelligence. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his relate

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Stanford UP, 2020) brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study

Today I talked to Steven W. Webster about his book American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020). We discuss the behavioral implications of anger in American politics, from increased intolerance, blame, and aggression, to an ever-deepening lack of trust in government’s efficacy. Among the topics addressed was the role of the media and internet in stoking anger, and how democratic norms are threatened by partisan taunting and the way anger invites narrow loyalty to party over country. Steven W. Webster is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research and writings focus on the role of anger in American politics, including the growth of “negative partisanship” in our country, and the ever greater polarization separating Democrats and Republicans. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood. Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aph

My guest today, author Mithu Sanyal, describes the topic of rape as a ‘cultural sore spot,’ one that requires yet eludes wide conversation. Her latest book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (Verso, 2019), bravely starts this conversation. It covers the history of rape as well as of our divergent and misguided conceptions for it, and it addresses the topic’s intersection with matters of gender stereotypes and racism. We unpack these topics in our interview, along with the psychological phenomena undergirding conflicts over consent and body sovereignty. This episode will be of interest for anyone interested in the problems of sexual violence and gender bias. Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning broadcaster, academic, and author based in Dusseldorf. Her prior book, Vulva, has been translated into five languages. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issue

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and literature came together to both reinforce and challenge racial boundaries.  While each central chapter of Sensory Experiments deals with the recognized five senses, Fretwell also writes short intervals, or what she calls intervals, on the synthesis of particular senses (for instance, color and sound or mouthfeel). The synthesia assumed in these intervals challenge the hierarchy of senses often assumed by scientists during this time period. Through examining these scientific models of sense and sensitivity, Fretwell provid

Our relationships enrich our lives. Strong bonds with family, friends, and colleagues make our lives full and vibrant, but they can also be a source of distress or even trauma. Few relationships are perfect, and we often find ourselves let down by even the people we count on most; learning to navigate the challenges is vital to protecting our health and wellbeing. In this book the author presents a model for forgiveness that addresses how we either repair relationships when someone has harmed us, or how we move forward when relationships are beyond repair. Repairing a relationship is not always practical. The model presented in this book can be helpful to promote self-healing and to either re-establish relationships with others or move forward when reconciliation is harmful or not possible. Practicing Forgiveness: A Path Toward Healing (Oxford UP, 2020) draws on the perspectives of counseling professionals from across the country to explore contextual and cultural aspects of forgiveness with stories, humor, c