Dreams can be those things you have in your sleep, or they can be hopes for the future. Either way, they are works of imagination.

When folk write that man cannot live by bread alone, dreams for the future are one of those other things people need. To be entrusted with someone’s dreams is an act of profound trust, because of the capacity to ( Read more... )

Sandy Hotchkiss’s Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism is a clear, well-set out, very readable examination of the nature, effects, provenance and prevalence of narcissism. Not the full clinical disorder, but those who are strongly narcissistic. ( concerning narcissism )

Ruthie O. Grant Ph.d. aka Amorah is a psychologist who lives in Los Angeles, a single mother divorced from a husband she labels as a toxic personality. Her I Thought I Was The Crazy One is a very California, LA-land book ( Read more... )

Maria Prendergast’s Understanding Depression is the best book for understanding the phenomenon of depression I have come across. She has previously written Understanding Asthma and Understanding Migraine, so I take it she has a formula for such books.

If so, it’s a good one. One of the great strengths of Understanding Depression is she lets ( Read more... )

One of the great debates of our time is how much genetics influences our behaviour. A strong critic of many claims for a genetic basis for our behaviour is psychoanalyst commentator Oliver James, whose book They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life argues strongly for the importance of early childhood experiences in moulding our aspirations, ( Read more... )

George Simon’s In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People is a clearly written analysis of covert-aggressive people and how to deal with them.

Like Albert Bernstein, author of Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry, Simon is a therapist and uses cases as illustrative examples, setting them up in the ( Read more... )

Between my upbringing and certain past events, I have some anger issues. Very much a case of private anger, but still very real.

mishymoocow recently lent me The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships by Harriet Lerner.

The Dance of Anger is very much focused on anger from a woman’s perspective. But it is good ( Read more... )

Albert J. Bernstein’s Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry which mishymoocow put me onto is the best extended use of an analytical metaphor I have come across ( Read more... )

I had already worked out that much of what people suffering depression do-no matter how destructive-can be understood as a rational response to managing pain. Dorothy Rowe in her challenging and insightful book Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison argues that it goes further than that. That the constructed prison of depression itself is a ( Read more... )

Here’s a bit of a paradox. I think Freudianism is largely bunk. That is, the anal, oedipal, oral etc theorising is false and distracting; the id, ego, superego structure either wrong or simplistic. But I have found material written by Freudians (such as the blogger Shrinkwrapped’s comments on therapeutic matters-as distinct from his other ( Read more... )