New Books In Psychology

Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world, such as race and gender. Social constructionists argue that these categories are not biological or natural and that alleviating social injustice begins with recognizing they are not. At the same time, the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman born of white parents who considers herself black, makes clear that even if race is not biological, it doesn’t follow that race is a matter of personal choice. So how should we understand what social construction involves? In The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford University Press, 2016), Ron Mallon articulates a view of social construction that draws on philosophy, psychology, and social theory. He identifies an element of essentialist thinking in some human kind concepts, and elaborates the mechanisms by which human categories and our repre

In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, explores the history of repatriation and return of WWI soldiers to Western Australia. The soldiers’ physical and mental scars, including tuberculosis and what we today call PTSD, did not end with the armistice, as soldiers and their families struggled with the consequences of wartime trauma well into the 1920s.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle. Whether that’s true or not, it is hard to keep up with what’s going on in the White House, and each new uproar makes it difficult to remember what’s already happened. Take Trump’s first cabinet meeting, way back on June 12, 2017. Remember that? It began with Trump proclaiming, “Never has there been a president….with few exceptions…who’s passed more legislation, who’s done more things than I have.” This, despite the fact that he had yet to pass any major legislation through Congress. Then it got odder. Trump listened as members of his Cabinet took turns praising him. Mike Pence started it off, saying, “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.̶

The psychology of eating disorders is poorly understood. Recent trends in research and treatment focus near-exclusively on behaviors around food and weight without sufficiently attending to their psychic undercurrents. Yet evidence shows that, when patients start putting words to the pain their eating disorders express, they start gaining freedom from these vexing patterns. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is well positioned to offer individuals such an opportunity, and the rationale for such an approach is well-described in Dr. Nina Savelle-Rocklin’s new book, Food for Thought: Perspectives on Eating Disorders (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). In her book, Dr. Nina–as she likes to be called–explains psychoanalysis’s unique perspective on eating problems: that they express relational needs and traumas when words cannot, and that treatment which focuses on “what’s eating at you” rather than “what you’re eating” offers deeper and longer-lasting healing. In o

All “true believers” believe their beliefs are true. This is particularly true of true religious believers: for Christians, Christianity is the true religion, for Jews, Judaism is the true religion, for for Muslims, Islam is the true religion. Few true believer, however, would make the claim that their religion is “scientifically true”; religion, after all, is a matter of faith, and faith and science are somewhat different things. But that’s the claim Robert Wright is making in his thought-provoking, well-reasoned, and thoroughly-researched book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (Simon and Schuster, 2017). Well, sort of. Wright makes clear that he’s talking about Buddhism as a spiritual practice, not a religious dogma. He purposefully leaves aside the supernatural aspects of Buddhist belief–gods, devils, miracles, unseen realms and such–and focuses on what Buddhist meditators believe and do to reach “enlighten

When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-conscious thought? We aren’t born with it, and while we may not be the only creatures that can think thoughts about ourselves, this ability does not seem to be very widespread. For starters, to be able to think of oneself, it seems one must first possess a concept of the self of what the “I” refers to. In Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self (MIT Press, 2015), Kristina Musholt provides a naturalistic account of how self-conscious thought develops: how we move from possessing implicitly self-referential information to having explicit self-representation. Musholt, who is professor of cognitive anthropology at Leipzig University, argues that this is a multistage process driven by social interaction and the recognition of other beings’ perspective

Psychoanalysis is transitioning. Its history of pathologizing deviant sexuality is giving way to curiosity about the universal complexities and contradictions inherent in sex and gender. Yet it could use some pushing along, and Patricia Gherovici’s new book, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017), does just that. In it, she draws inspiration and courage from her clinical work with transgender patients in order to challenge long-standing essentialist notions about sex and gender. She also introduces readers to Jacque Lacan’s still-revolutionary ethics on sexual difference. In our interview, we talk about her involvement in the recent wave of attention to transgender experience, how she applies Lacan’s ideas to her own clinical work, and the importance of putting further pressure on psychoanalysis and Western society, at large to let go of antiquated, discriminatory notions and embrace the infinite complexity in all human sexuality. Patricia G

In Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are (William Morrow Books, 2017), food writer and Culinary Institute of America program director Sophie Egan takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the American food psyche, examining the connections between the values that define our national character—work, freedom, and progress—and our eating habits, the good and the bad. Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable, and often unhealthy, food culture and, paradoxically, why they also make Americas cuisine so great. Egan raises a host of intriguing questions: Why does McDonalds have 107 items on its menu? Why are breakfast sandwiches, protein bars, and gluten-free anything so popular? Will bland, soulless meal replacements like Soylent revolutionize our definition of a meal? The search for answers takes her across the culinary landscape, from the prioritization of convenience over health to the unintended consequences of perks like free meals for employees; from the American obses

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates research in mechanistic and psychological explanation, computability theory, and other areas to provide a detailed account of the sense in which some, but not all, physical systems compute, and in which genuine computing systems need not be defined in terms of semantic or representational properties. Piccinini, a professor of philosophy at University of Missouri St. Louis, also argues that the mind is not strongly autonomous from its physical implementation but it is not thereby reduceable to physical mechanisms.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you steered yourself away from books about brain science because you were interested in something completely different–psychoanalysis–then this is the book for you! This book will renew your appreciation for the revolutionary discovery and urgent need for psychoanalysis, as argued by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Mark Solms invented the word “neuropsychoanalyis” twenty years ago because he believed that brain science at that time was still in a primitive state of learning about “wetware,” when in fact the brain gives rise to a mind which has critical things to teach us about the brain. Psychoanalysis is the science of the mental that challenges the arrogant self-sufficiency of a purely biological approach that excludes the subjective phenomena that characterizes the healthy brain. The brain is not just an object, it is also a subject. The Feeling Brain (Karnac, 2015) is a collection of previously published papers that were selected to provide an intro

Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to chronic anxiety than others, due in large part to experiences in utero and during the first year of life. My guest, psychologist Dr. Daniel Keating, explores these biological and genetic mechanisms in his new book, Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity–and How to Break the Cycle (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). His many years of research inform his ideas about the role of social inequality in elevated stress levels, and the impact of stress and adversity on gene expression and manifestations of anxiety. In our interview, we talk about the implications of these findings for understanding why some people perpetually feel tightly-wound and easily triggered. He also shares his suggestions for breaking this cycle and reducing our proneness to anxiety. Daniel P. Keating is a professor of psycholog

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such as “Mary”, or “that guy over there” – falls into this category, but is no longer just a matter for the philosophers; it’s complicated enough to require highly interdisciplinary explanation. In his book, Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2016) Kees van Deemter approaches the problem from a computational angle, asking how we can develop algorithms to produce referring expressions that are communicatively successful, efficient, and potentially even human-like in their performance. He draws on a broad range of work from across cognitive science to address this question, and in doing so, also gives us an excellent example of how computational thinking can inform linguistic theorising. In this interview, we dis

Despite the prominence of LGBTQ issues in our current social consciousness, many people still know little about the LGBTQ community, which means that teaching about this community and its issues is an important job. It’s also a difficult one that’s been handled with varying degrees of effectiveness and sensitivity over the past few decades. Many of us can recall during our undergrad or graduate training having a single class day devoted to the topic, or our instructors trying to squeeze it in alongside other material. Fortunately, the teaching of LGBTQ issues has advanced dramatically, thanks to the work of psychologists such as Theodore Burnes and Jeanne Stanley. Their new edited book, entitled Teaching LGBTQ Psychology: Queering Innovative Pedagogy and Practice (American Psychological Association, 2017), covers pedagogical concepts as well as practical suggestions for bringing the material to life and helping students feel at home with it. In our interview, we have a frank discussion about the c

Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, there is in addition a distinct, positive variety of moral shame a virtue that, as Bongrae Seok writes, “is not for losers but for self-reflective moral leaders”. In Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness (Rowman and Littlefield), Seok draws on textual evidence from Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, as well as contemporary moral psychology, anthropology, biology, linguistics, and ancient Greek philosophy, to illuminate one aspect of the rich Confucian tradition in moral psychology. Seok, who is associate professor of philosophy at Alvernia University, explains how moral shame involves the whole self’s sensitivity to moral ideals and supports the Confucian virtues of self-cultivation, self-reflection and learning.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho

Most psychology books are written by experts with knowledge deriving from professional experience–for which we are grateful. Occasionally, a psychologist ventures to write a book that draws from intimate personal experience to illuminate important psychological phenomena. Such is the case with our guest this week, Shelvy Haywood Keglar. In his book Underdog to Top Dog: An Improbable Rise (published in 2017 in association with IBJ Book Publishing), Dr. Keglar describes his journey from poverty and rural life, through racism and segregation, to the fulfillment and success he enjoys now. He talks with me about what inspired him to document his personal journey and the hard-earned lessons he imparts to young Black men in search of hope and guidance. To the extent that dreaming is a basic human enterprise, Dr. Keglar’s experiences and wisdom strike universal chords. Shelvy Haywood Keglar is a psychologist, and founder and president of Midwest Psychological Center, Inc. He also serves as staff member a

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the thought of calculus makes you nervous, don’t worry, you won’t need calculus to enjoy and appreciate this book. Its actually an intriguing way to introduce some of the precalculus topics that will later be needed in a calculus class, through the examination of some of the basic mathematical ideas that can be used to analyze the problems of how to attain relationship bliss, live long, and prosper and all without being a Vulcan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hatchette Books, 2017), Lotto explains the mechanisms underlying our difficulty apprehending the world accurately, their implications for our relationships with one another and the world, and the creative potential that is unleashed when we embrace uncertainty and doubt. These issues come to life in our interview, as we discuss his discoveries in and out of the lab and their application to everyday experiences. Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist specializing in the biology and psychology of perception with more than 25 years experience conducting research on human perception and behavior and over 60 publications. He is Professor at University of London (Goldsmiths) and visiting scholar at New York University, as well as founder and CEO of the Lab of Misfits, a creative agency grounded in principles of percep

There are many fronts in the argument against the existence of a god or gods and veracity of religious narratives. Some familiar approaches are to critique the philosophical underpinnings of religious ideology or to make a case from the perspective of scientific evidence and the physical laws of reality. Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (Routledge, 2016), written by Dr. Jon Mills, argues from the perspective of psychology and posits that god is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. In other words, He is the ultimate wish fulfillment, the forgiving all-powerful father you always wanted, the absolution of all your fears, the antidote to death. Mills writes that the conception of god is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation. He promotes secular humanism and a personal search for the numinous as a positive, life-affirming alternative. Dr. Jon Mills is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, active clinical psychologist, as w

For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different ways that are or at least seem to be incompatible in at least some respects. In Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models (MIT Press, 2014), David Danks proposes a version of this basic theory that links the mind closely with the computational framework used in machine learning: the idea that thinking involves manipulation of symbols encoded as graphical models. Danks, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that graphical models provide a unifying explanation of why we are able to move smoothly between different cognitive processes and why we are able to focus on features of situations that are relevant to our goals. While the book includes the mathematics behind graphical models, Dan

Psychoanalysis has a reputation for insularity, often limiting its interest and scope to events in the consulting room. But the origins of Freud’s notion of free speech bear meaningful similarities to the Founding Fathers’ conception of free speech, sparking curiosity about how psychoanalysis and democracy might speak to one another. In her recent book, Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac, 2016), author Jill Gentile starts up such a conversation and makes a cogent argument for how psychoanalysis might contribute to a truly free and robust democratic political system. In our interview, we discuss how she stumbled upon the ever-evolving journey of documenting these links and how the feminine body is the missing piece in understanding what free speech truly means. Jill Gentile, Ph.D. is faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and training and supervising analyst at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. Her essays, des