Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement, by Harriet Brown. Da Capo Press, 2018Harriet Brown admits she led a pretty good childhood; she was not physically abused (much), she had food and clothing, hers was not a broken home. But her mother was emotionally abusive, tearing Harriet down constantly. No one could praise Harriet without her mother ( Read more... )

Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice From the Silence of Autism, by Naoki Higashida. Translated by KA Yoshida & David Mitchell. Random House, 2017 Higashida is on the spectrum; he was nonverbal for a long time and even today he struggles with expressing himself verbally; he has what he calls restricted speech. He finds it easier many ( Read more... )

On Being Human: Why Mind Matters, by Jerome Kagan. Yale University Press, 2016 ‘On Being Human’ is a collection of essays by retired professor of psychology Jerome Kagan. He goes over issues such as brain scans being relatively useless for finding out where thoughts come from, given that a scanner is not the kind of place a person is usually in ( Read more... )

Changing the Mind, Healing the Body: Eight Case Studies in Transformational Belief-Change Therapy, by Elly Roselle. Ugly Duckling Editions, 2005 The therapy used in these case studies is Core Belief Engineering, a system developed by the author. In it, the therapist speaks with different parts of the client’s psyche; not the Id, Ego, and Superego ( Read more... )

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life, by Colin Ellard. Bellevue Literary Press, 2015 Psychogeography is, in Ellard’s opinion, how our surroundings affect our moods and behavior. How plants make any place seem better- and make people less apt to destroy things. How featureless concrete expanses make a person nervous and ( Read more... )

The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts, by Lee Baer, Ph.D. Plume, 2002 When people think of OCD, they will most often think of people hoarding, washing their hands, and checking locks repeatedly- the visible signs of OCD. There is another side of OCD, though, that isn’t visible- obsessional thoughts. While it’s ( Read more... )

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, and Other Stories From a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook, by Bruce D. Perry, MD, Ph D, and Maia Szalavitz. Basic Books, 2006
Author Bruce Perry has a very difficult but very gratifying job. He’s a child psychiatrist who deals with children who have been horribly abused and traumatized at an early stage, helping them ( Read more... )

The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those without Conscience, by Kent Kiehl, PhD This book wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. The name is misleading; I picture a “whatever whisperer” as being someone who understands the mind of the subject in depth and who can easily and painlessly convince the subject to do what the whisperer wants. While ( Read more... )

In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, by Robert Kegan. Harvard University Press, 1994 I picked this book up after a psychologist said it was an incredible read, one that made her do a lot of thinking. She was right; Kegan presents some ideas that I’ve not encountered elsewhere. He proposed that there are stages of human development ( Read more... )

I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World, by James Geary. HarperCollins, 2011 I have always tended to think of metaphors as statements like “ran like the wind” or “raven haired”; statements that are obvious comparisons. Geary points out that metaphor goes far deeper in our language; stocks ‘climb’ ( Read more... )