New Books In Psychology

In his second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are intimately intertwined with the treatment of psychosis, the ways in which this early exposure colors all of his clinical thinking becomes apparent. Indeed, in psychoanalysis we could say that there are two kinds of clinicians–those who treat psychosis and those who don’t. Bollas is clearly in the former camp. One wonders, given the centrality of psychosis in his theoretical work, if he would have been drawn to analytic work had he not started with the most primitive of human experiences? We meet him as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, studying history, working at a program for autistic and psychotic children presumably to pay the bills. We follow him to SUNY-Buffalo where, while pursuing his PhD in literature, he encounters psychotic students in a class he is teaching, walks across the campus to the clinic,

To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growing elasticity of bipolar disorders. For about the last twenty years, argues Leader, the bipolar spectrum has been tailored to a pharmaceutical industry eager to shift attention away from ineffective antidepressants and toward newly developed mood stabilizers. A household word since the mid-1990s, “bipolar” is now widely considered to be biological and hereditary. Its loosened parameters have saddled large swaths of the population with a chronic illness requiring life-long medication. Strictly Bipolar (Penguin, 2013) is a trenchant case for the reexamination of the “bipolar revolution” and for a return to the older diagnosis of manic depression. Leader points out that while bipolarity is at the center of modern capitalist subjectivity – the principal feature of twenty-first-century workli

Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is morally wrong, even unacceptable. In such cases, morality requires what is impossible: no matter what one does, one acts as one ought not to act. In Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lisa Tessman proposes an original account of impossible moral demands, and forcefully argues for an approach to moral theory that can recognize their normative authority.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English language learners. Whatever our opinions are, they are founded on the perceived immediate impact on students in school. But how might the way we use language with children years before they enter school affect their academic potential? Does it have the ability to improve more than their vocabulary? Can it foster creativity, empathy, and perserverence? In Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain (Dutton, 2015), Dr. Dana Suskind outlines research on the critical language period and connects it to an early-childhood curriculum and a series of public policy solutions. Suskind joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with the Thirty Million Words Initiative on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with heron Twitter at @DrDanaSuskin

Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, and exchange. In editorial departments such as “In the Journals” and “Web Roundup,” authors distill recent scholarly contributions across disciplines and spaces. More recently, the editors have incubated creative digital endeavors such as Commonplaces, a “collaborative cabinet” that itemizes the technological present, with entries devoted to topics such as the petri dish, the brain, and the waiting room. Book Forum invites commentary from a range of authors, repres

What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic in

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choo

What are the multiple meanings, ambivalences, possible risks, and potentials for transformation that arise from interrogating empathy on a transnational scale? Carolyn Pedwell (University of Kent) thinks through these complex questions in her new book, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The book ambitiously traverses multiple disciplinary and intellectual boundaries, drawing together feminist and anti-racist social theory, media and cultural studies, international development texts and practices, scientific studies of empathy, the political rhetoric of Barack Obama, business books on empathy, and more. In doing so, Pedwell queries empathy as a social and political relation that cannot be separated from power, conflict, oppression, and inequality. This book explores the ways that empathy is a contested term employed transnationally in various ways and on behalf of various political and social interests, traces the ways that empathy might be translated and fel

Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, critically investigates this question. The book offers skepticism towardsthe demand that economy and society be happy, skepticism founded in an interrogation of the practices of contemporary government and businesses. A whole range of our everyday experiences, including ‘nudges’ for citizens and staff, the perverse incentives of metrics, through tothe consequences of how psychiatry classifies depression, are subject to critical scrutiny.Moreover, the book acts as a primer on economics, psychology and organizational theory, clearly articulating the roots and the consequences of our current economic and social settlement. The book concludes with the possibility of a more democratic way of organizing the world, in contrast to our impersonal, oppressive, and data driven present. Dr Davies is a

How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015).  Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on historical and contemporary figures and continental and analytical traditions, he defends an embodied view of ostension in which we directly perceive intentions in ostension rather than infer to them, and gives an account of how we are able to disambiguate gestures through the joint presence of objects in a shared environment.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also consider whether theism provides a good reason for the pervasiveness of religious belief across human societies across time, and argue that the seemingly obvious conclusion that a naturalistic explanation of religious beliefs debunks these beliefs is not at all obvious.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we should consider happiness when determining the best ways to effectuate law. In this podcast Buccafusco, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College, shares some of the following aspects of the book: * How hedonic psychology measures human happiness and some of the things these studies have revealed * The author’s new approach to evaluating laws called “well-being analysis” * Ways the new data on happiness has revealed a need to rethink criminal punishment * What the future holds for happiness research Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and practice during the decolonization of European empires in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The decolonization of psychiatry, Heaton argues, had an “intensely cross-cultural, transnational, and international character that cannot be separated from local, regional, and national developments” (5). Heaton shows how, amid these contexts and changes, Nigerian psychiatrists actively participated in negotiating postcolonial modernity and the place of global psychiatry within it. The book begins by tracing the larger story from colonialism to postcolonialism: the first chapter offers an essential, incisive account

The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try to text and drive at the same time, and our attention is captured when we suddenly hear our name pop out from the conversational hubbub of a noisy party. But what is attention? How seriously should we take this or other metaphors as giving us insight into the nature of attention? In Attention (Routledge, 2014) Wayne Wu argues for the view that attention is selection for action and is distinct from consciousness. This controversial position pits him against more common views that attention is in some sense essentially connected to consciousness – for example, that it is a kind of gatekeeper for consciousness. Wu, an Associate Professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, draws on empirical literature from psychology and neuroscience to develop his view while acknowledging how difficult it is to interpre

DMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Rick Strassman‘s first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, showcases his research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, during which he injected several volunteers with DMT as part of a government-sanctioned research project. During the trials, volunteers experienced a number of similar phenomena, such as communication with other-than-human beings, out-of-body experiences, and geometrically complex closed-eye visuals. DMT and the Soul of Prophecy complements Strassman&

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s scientific approach. The book examines his career and method of gathering vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and interpretation that was critical to his most influential works Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Beginning with Kinsey’s study of the animal world, Drucker examines how he transferred natural science methods to sex education in his Marriage Course at Indiana University, and ultimately to the massive study of human sexual behavior. He brought into the interdisciplinary science of sexology a thoroughly naturalist approach and believed that taxonomy – collecting, classifying and describing patterns, revealed truths about the natural world and worked against what he consider

The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions, in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014), Evan Thompson draws on neuroscience and these meditative traditions to illuminate consciousness and the nature of the self while avoiding both neuro-reductionist and spiritualist agendas. Thompson, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, develops a view of our sense of self as an emergent process of “I-making” that is constructed in relation to our environment and the body on which it depends.Learn more about your ad choic

Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2014) Joelle Proust considers the nature of metacognition from a naturalistic perspective, drawing on recent psychological research as well as a range of philosophical work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. In this erudite and comprehensive volume, Proust – a director of research at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris – defends an evaluative or procedural account of metacognition over a metarepresentational account. The former is the most general kind of metacognition, available to at least some non-human animals as well as humans, while the latter mind-reading view is a distinct, more sophisticated capacity that humans also possess. Proust also articulates an intriguing view of mental agency and the epistemic norms

Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Science of the Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Anne Jaap Jacobson, Professor of Philosophy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, argues that what is needed is a different kind of theory of what mental representations are, one that reflects the way the notion of representation is actually used in cognitive neuroscience. On her view, mental items do not stand in intentional relations to the world, as standard theories of mental representation hold. Instead, they are samples or instances of the same kinds, as captured by common mathematical descriptions. This sampling model has its roots in Aristotle and Hume, but is found in contemporary neuroscience, such as when seeing a particular action causes the neural pattern for doing that action to be activated. In this intervie

The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different ways, but in some form it remains a core idea of the cognitive sciences today. In Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, 2013), Marcin Milkowski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind of the Polish Academy of Sciences, defends a minimalist view of computationalism as information processing, with the intention of providing a general view of computational explanation that covers all the forms in which information-processing explanations appear. On Milkowski’s view, Jerry Fodor’s slogan that there is no computation without representation should be replaced with the claim that there is no representation without computation, and David Marr’s computational, algorithmic, and implementation levels for desc