New Books in Psychology

Cultivating Q Methodology is a collection of essays is in honor of Professor Steven R. Brown, the preeminent scholar of Q methodology. Q methodology, innovated by the British physicist/psychologist William Stephenson (1902-1989), Q methodology is a conceptual framework and set of procedures to systematically and scientifically study the subjective. Professor Brown has dedicated his academic life,...

How does creativity work? In Creativities: The What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process (Edward Elgar, 2022), Chris Bilton, a Reader at University of Warwick’s Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Stephen Cummings, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Victoria University Wellington, and dt ogilvie, Professor of Urban Entrepreneurship at the Rochester Institute of Technolog...

Jeffrey Carpenter and Andrea Robbett's book Game Theory and Behavior (MIT Press, 2022) is an introduction to game theory that offers not only theoretical tools but also the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations. This introductory text on game theory provides students with both the theoretical tools to analyze situations through the logic of game theory and...

Today I talked to Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Schiffman about his book Psyched for Torah (Kodesh Press, 2022). His writings on the weekly parsha exude complete fluency in both traditional Jewish sources like Talmud, Rishonim, and Acharonim, as well twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychological research. Most importantly, his writing presents a stunning and seamless integration between modern and tradi...

What needs are satisfied in digital gaming? And what does the shift of these need satisfactions into the digital space say about the social realities in which they are embedded? Harald Koberg lets gamers themselves have their say and follows their traces of the described fascinations and passions in his latest book Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness (Freies Spiel: Digitale...

Vincenzo Bonaminio, the Italian psychoanalyst and ambassador to the Winnicottian tradition offers us a clinical feast in his new publication, Playing at Work: Clinical Essays in a Contemporary Winnicottian Perspective on Technique (Routledge, 2022). At a moment when, as he argues, much writing in the field is driven by theory and theorizing, this book offers a veritable cornucopia of clinical desc...

Today I talked to Roger Blackwell about his new book Objective Prosperity: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Outcomes for You, Your Business, and Your Nation (Rothstein Publishing, 2022) Contrary to conventional wisdom, about 90% of billionaires are self-made as opposed to people who inherited their wealth. Why did they succeed? That’s the question this book explores at both the individual and...

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility.  In On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know (Duke UP, 2022), Cohen draws on fifty years...

Haruki Murakami, a global literary phenomenon, has said that he started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. What he has not discussed as much is what he needed self-therapy for. This book argues that by understanding more about why Murakami writes, and by linking this with the question of how he writes, readers can better understand what he writes. Murakami's fiction, in other words, can b...

Annie Reiner’s introduction to Wilfred Bion’s theories of mind presents Bion’s intricate ideas in an accessible, original way without compromising their complexity. Reiner uses comparisons to painting, literature and philosophy, and detailed clinical examples, to provide an experience of Bion’s work that can be felt as well as thought. The book explores many of Bion’s theoretical and clinical inno...

Christopher M. Palmer's book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health (Benbella Books, 2022) will forever change the way we understand and treat mental health. If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life. We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness...

In this episode of High Theory, Kim talks with Saronik about neurasthenia. A disease that no longer exists, neurasthenia was a nineteenth century American epidemic of energy depletion. Thinking about this diagnosis can help us understand the social functions of medical knowledge, and how that knowledge changes over time. In the episode Kim discusses two nineteenth-century medical texts: American N...

Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money? Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and...

A Study of Malignant Narcissism: Personal and Professional Insights (Routledge, 2022) offers a unique insight into malignant narcissism, exploring both its personal and professional aspects and constructing a theoretical framework that renders its origins and manifestations more accessible. With reference to his own family dynamic and to 45 years of professional experience, Richard Wood explores t...

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing a...

A pioneer of cultural psychology argues that emotions are not innate, but made as we live our lives together. We may think of emotions as universal responses, felt inside, but in Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022), acclaimed psychologist Dr. Batja Mesquita asks us to reconsider them through the lens of what they do in our relationships, both one-on-one and within larger social...

Why do we feel the need to belong, and what happens when we don’t? This episode explores: What it takes to belong. Why it physically hurts to be excluded. How perspective-gathering can help create more inclusion. A Discussion of the book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides. Today’s book is: Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, by Dr. Ge...

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a...

A clear and engaging call-to-arms to Freudians everywhere and a fresh diagnosis of the major problem confronting psychoanalysis today, Austin Ratner's book The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof (Ipbooks, 2018) presents exciting new ideas that could help psychoanalysis reclaim its eminent place among the mental sciences. By showing how and why Freudians have avoided proving their theories, The Psyc...

Sterlin L. Mosley's The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else: Recognizing the 27 Types of Narcissism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) introduces readers to the notion of narcissism as a spectrum-based model of increasing loss of empathy (due to a variety of factors including genetics, trauma, abuse, conditioning and environment) that can give way to a propensity toward narcissism. Through studies and e...

Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries between scientific theories and the world. But what do scientists do when they don’t yet have the models or the theories?  In Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science (MIT Press, 2022), Nancy Nersessian reveals the boots...

The term “mental illness” can itself be anxiety-inducing and depressing. There are words, though, that can counter the fears and stresses that mind-related conditions induce in most of us at some point in our lives. One of those bracing, comforting words is, “flourishing.” That welcome word abounds in the 2021 book From Survive to Thrive: Living Your Best Life with Mental Illness (Johns Hopkins UP...

Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems--the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Cur...

Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik: The Map and the Territory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is about Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, both Auschwitz survivors and central figures in the shaping of Holocaust memory, who dedicated their lives to bearing witness and writing about the concentration camps, seeking, in particular, to give voice to those who did not return. The two writers are generally treated as complet...

For as long as humans have existed, we have struggled when a loved one dies. Poets and playwrights have written about the dark cloak of grief, the deep yearning, how devastating heartache feels. But until now, we have had little scientific perspective on this universal experience. In The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (HarperOne, 2022), neuroscientist and...