This Book Has Issues: Adventures In Popular Psychology
The Age
Saturday November 29, 2008
This Book Has Issues: Adventures in Popular Psychology
Christian Jarrett and Joannah Ginsburg Allen & Unwin, $19.95 THIS book may have "issues" (ignore the silly pop title) but it also has ridiculously small print, which you can't ignore. This is unfortunate because it's a snappy handbook of psychological terms and theories, a sort of Baedeker of the familiar and foreign terrain of the mind. We go from the general - what is psychology? - to the specifics of the senses and how we see what we see, as well as the roles of emotions in the intellectual process, especially when making moral choices. Creativity, its myths and "types", and ongoing debates about the ability of the mind to understand concepts that it doesn't have words for (to what extent does language create thinking?) are also looked at. It's a pretty comprehensive guide, including accessible synoptic studies of key thinkers from Freud and Piaget to contemporaries such as Vilayanur S.Ramachandran - or Rama.
© 2008 The Age
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