blink (cognitive psychology)
emotional intelligence (social psychology)
the bilingual edge… if you like linguistics and cognition which most people do not.
I’ve been spouting those books for a while. i have to read some new shit.
I’d propose an excellent starting point to be ‘The Essential Jung’, a selection of Carl Jung’s writings compiled by Anthony Storr. As far as I’m concerned Jung is the psychologist of psychologists. Freud was important historically, but grossly biased. That’s just my opinion.
The Adapted Mind
The Most Dangerous Animal
In God’s We Trust
Folk biology
The blank slate
evolutionary cognitive neuroscience
The Stuff of thought
books on heuristics and biases; judgement under uncertainty
the MIT encyclopedia of cognitive science
human universals
theres a lot of great books on human psychology, be a bit more specific and i could make a pretty big list
From what I’ve read of his other posts, the guy is probably a relative beginner to this sort of thing, so you should probably go for slighter easier reads. Correct me if I’m wrong Maynard.
I think Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers I began with, and frankly even super-intellectuals will agree that he’s a bit of a bewildering read (back then I never understood a word). That’s probably intentional, seeing as how he shows his disgust regarding ‘scholars’ numerous times. I’d actually recommend starting with some ‘introduction to western philosophy’ type books. Also, two books which really got me into philosophy were Colin Wilson’s ‘The Outsider’, which might well appeal to you seeing as how you’ve talked about having depression - and the collection of four of Plato’s Socratic dialogues known as ‘The Last Days of Socrates’. I found that one extremely inspiring, and it’s not too complicated either. The primary thing that is useful about it is that it displays deductive reasoning very clearly, which I found very helpful in learning how to think like a philosopher.
Don’t be too daunted, I was pretty much a D student 5 or 6 years ago, now I’m writing a book on metaphysics. Take your time and try to get a nice broad spectrum of positions - idealism, materialism, theism, atheism, etc. It’s easy to become biased, but try to hold onto a pure desire to know the truth.
Yeah, I wasn’t talking about your recs, rather some of Cyrenes (‘evolutionary cognitive neuroscience’ for example). In what way is Jung silly? Do you mean a silly recommendation. Not really, that’s where I started. True, he takes a couple of reads before you can really grasp the depth of his thought, but it opened me up to lots of important psychological ideas.
I’m not a fan of the freudians or neo freudians. I think they are for the most part a waste of time. Unless you are reading them as philosophical books. Then they are more interesting but I don’t think of them as psychological more philosophical.
You have to incorporate Freud but take it with a grain or two of salt, I agree he was very biased. Any that swear by him are insecure in who they are. But, he did have some good insights. Find a curriculum list from a university, see what and who students are required to read. Then take the who and find a few more of their works to supplement what the Uni does not require or want students to read. Go to your local library make a list of authors then dissect it down to the areas that interest you. We all could give you names but, it all depends upon your inclinations so you just need to do some searching. A good university library is a great place to do that.
I don’t consider Jung either a Freudian or a neo-Freudian. Jung split off from Freud relatively early on. It’s true that they share a similar psychological framework, but usually their conclusions are wildly different.
I too would love some reading advise for an introduction to psychology. The closest I’ve been to actually learning anything is living with psychology grad students .
Specifically, what I’m looking for is discussions on human behaviour, decision making… How the mind can be effected by drugs (no, I’m not asking why the Mars Bar wrapper starts dancing when I smoke weed, more like how… say… large doses of testosterone can cause personality shifts; I’m looking for stuff on how stable the I we identify is)
FOr example, I remember reading a while ago about how, when we come to a decision, we start twisting the facts to fit our conceptions of ourselves into the decisions we’ve made. I can’t remember where I found it, but it was something I remember from a psychological study into the state of minds of the people who committed miscarriages of justice (police who arrested the wrong people and imprisoned them) and, even after the court had found them innocent, the cops still believed they were guilty
The only contact I’ve had with ‘psychology’ is reading William James and even then I’ve only read extracts, a few pages at most. But I picked up the idea that when man changes his opinion on something, he always does it in the most conservative way possible, anything that explores the truth of that issue would be helpful.
Essentially, I’m interested in psychology from an almost meta-philosophical angle.
Any reading tips would be greatly appreciated. If you could include any information on what you’re suggesting that would be perfect.
I’d still absolutely recommend ‘The Essential Jung’ compiled and introduced by Anthony Storr, as a starting place. It strikes me that it is very much what you are looking for.
But neither are scientific and both are psychoanalysts. It’s philosophical and though they may be good ideas I prefer to stay away from that type of “insight”. If you want to learn about how the brain works that is only good to a limited extent.
Definitely check out blink then. It’s a very broad discussion of cognition and touches on everything from how prejudice works to marketing to minute mental processes to judgements on dating. It sounds like you’re interested in more social psychology though. I would suggest buying a social psych text book. They’re not as boring as you would think. That will give you most of the interesting studies and some of the used ones are really pretty cheap on half.com or something. And texts cut down a 200 page book like blink to some 20 pages max because you don’t have to read all of the authors background information.
Yeah but he was flat out wrong about a lot of stuff. I don’t see why we should read his work. We’ve moved passed it. All universities cover him and psychoanalysis in intro and then unless you’re studying clinical psych they move on to better psychologists. I feel like the only reason we read him is because he started talk therapy. Other than that… I mean he has good insightful knowledge of the world but anything that says “This is why we behave this way” is useless.
That depends what you mean by scientific. Jung builds conclusions through both experience and logic. Inevitably it’s not so simple as the other sciences, because we are not dealing with something that we can examine with machines. I suspect that you are talking of ‘scientific’ in terms of physiology, that is, in terms of the brain. As an Idealist, I believe that truth is not purely material, but psychological and conceptual, though I agree that the material is real, and certain materialistic notions are perfectly valid so long as they don’t become absolute.