50 Psychology Classics (3 page)

Thinking better, feeling better:
Happiness and mental health

Nathaniel Branden,
The Psychology of Self-Esteem

David D. Burns,
Feeling Good

Albert Ellis & Robert Harper,
A Guide to Rational Living

Daniel Gilbert,
Stumbling on Happiness

Fritz Perls,
Gestalt Therapy

Barry Schwartz,
The Paradox of Choice

Martin Seligman,
Authentic Happiness

William Styron,
Darkness Visible

Robert E. Thayer,
The Origin of Everyday Moods

For many years, psychology was surprisingly little interested in happiness. Martin Seligman has helped to raise the subject to serious study and observation, and his “positive psychology” is revealing through science the sometimes unexpected recipes for mental wellbeing. Barry Schwartz's distinction between maximizers and satisficers has given us the counterintuitive insight that restricting our choices in life can actually lead to greater happiness and satisfaction, and Daniel Gilbert's book points out the surprising fact that, although humans are the only animals who can look into the future, we often make mistakes in terms of what we think will lead to happiness. Turning from the macro to the micro, Robert Thayer's work into the physiological causes of daily moods has helped thousands of people gain better control over how they feel hour by hour. The fascinating insights of each of these books show that the achievement of happiness is never as simple a matter as we would like.

The cognitive psychology revolution has had a dramatic impact on mental health, and two of its major names are David D. Burns and Albert Ellis. Their mantra that thoughts create feelings, not the other way around, has helped many people to get back in control of their lives because it applies logic and reason to the murky pool of emotions. Yet their work has many implications for achieving happiness generally, in that most of us can literally “choose” to be happy, if we understand the mind's thought–emotion mechanism.

The concept of self-esteem has been criticized in recent years, but Nathaniel Branden's seminal work on the subject remains convincing in its argument that personal esteem arises from having our own set of principles and acting on them. When we fail to do this, it is easy to descend into selfhatred and depression. Yet as William Styron's classic account of his own battle with depression indicates, the causes of the condition are often mysterious and can strike anyone. He notes that it remains the cancer of the mental health world: We are close to finding a cure, but not close enough for those who do not respond quickly to drugs or therapy.

Why we are how we are:
The study of personality and the self

Isabel Briggs Myers,
Gifts Differing

Erik Erikson,
Young Man Luther

Hans Eysenck,
Dimensions of Personality

Anna Freud,
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence

Karen Horney,
Our Inner Conflicts

Melanie Klein,
Envy and Gratitude

R. D. Laing,
The Divided Self

Gail Sheehy,
Passages

The ancients commanded us to “know thyself,” but in psychology this quest takes on many aspects. Eysenck's work on the extraverted and neurotic dimensions of personality paved the way for many other models, with contemporary psychologists commonly assessing people according to the “Big Five” personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Today, we can take myriad tests to determine our “personality type,” and while it is wise to be skeptical of their validity, some can provide genuine insights. The best known of the modern forms is the inventory originally created by Isabel Briggs Myers.

Of course, who we are at one point in our life may be different from who we are at another. Erik Erikson coined the term “identity crisis,” and in his compelling psychobiography of religious reformer Martin Luther, he conveys both the pain of uncertain identity and the power that comes when we finally know who we are. As Gail Sheehy pointed out in her 1970s hit
Passages
, we go through many crises during adult life, and not only are they somewhat predictable, we should welcome them as an opportunity for growth.

Human beings sometimes have to cope with what seem like competing selves. Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses. Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood
experiences resulted in our creation of a self that “moved toward people” or “moved away from people.” These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a “wholehearted,” or real, person.

Melanie Klein focused on how a “schizoid” personality could develop as the result of an infant's relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world. Most of us do have a strong sense of self, but as R. D. Laing showed in his landmark work on schizophrenia, some people lack this basic security and attempt to replace the vacuum with false selves. Most of the time we take it for granted, but it is only when it is lost that we can fully appreciate our brain's ability to create the feeling of selfpossession, or be comfortable with who we are.

Why we do what we do:
Great thinkers on human motivation

Alfred Adler,
Understanding Human Nature

Viktor Frankl,
The Will to Meaning

Eric Hoffer,
The True Believer

Abraham Maslow,
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Stanley Milgram,
Obedience to Authority

Ivan Pavlov,
Conditioned Reflexes

B. F. Skinner,
Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Alfred Adler was a member of Freud's original inner circle, but broke away because he disagreed that sex was the prime mover behind human behavior. He was more interested in how our early environments shape us, believing that we all seek greater power by trying to make up for what we perceive we lacked in childhood—his famous theory of “compensation.”

If Adler's theory of human action relates to power, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl's brand of existential psychology, “logotherapy,” posits that the human species is uniquely made to seek meaning. It is our responsibility to look for meaning in life, even in the darkest times, and whatever the circumstances we always have a vestige of free will.

Yet as amateur psychologist Eric Hoffer wrote in
The True Believer
, people allow themselves to be swept up in larger causes in order to be freed of responsibility for their lives, and to escape the banality or misery of the present. And Stanley Milgram's famous experiments showed that, given the right conditions, human beings exhibit a frightening willingness to put others through pain in order to be seen kindly by those in authority. Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society
but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.

While poets, writers, and philosophers have long celebrated the inner motive that guides autonomous human behavior, B. F. Skinner defined the self simply as “a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.” There was no such thing as human nature, and conscience or morality could be boiled down to environments that induced us to behave in moral ways. Skinner's ideas built on the work of Ivan Pavlov, whose success in conditioning dogs' behavior also brought into question the freedom of human action.

Despite these vast differences in understanding motivation, together these books provide remarkable insights into why we do what we do, or at least what we are capable of doing—both good and bad.

Why we love the way we do:
The dynamics of relationships

Eric Berne,
Games People Play

Susan Forward,
Emotional Blackmail

John M. Gottman,
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Harry Harlow,
The Nature of Love

Thomas A. Harris,
I'm OK—You're OK

Carl Rogers,
On Becoming a Person

Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists. In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow's legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. Remarkably, this sort of touching went against the child-rearing views of the time.

More recently, marriage researcher John M. Gottman looked at another aspect of relationship dynamics and found that the conventional wisdom on what makes long-term romantic partnerships work is often wrong. The most valuable information on how to maintain or save relationships comes from scientific observation of couples in action, right down to the microexpressions and apparently inane comments seen in everyday conversations. Similarly, in the past we may have looked to literature to be enlightened about a subject as intensely personal as emotional blackmail, but psychologists such as Susan Forward are now providing better answers on how we can protect ourselves against this corrosive element in relationships.

Pop psychology pioneers Eric Berne and Thomas Harris understood our close personal encounters as “transactions” that could be analyzed according
to the three selves of Adult, Child, and Parent. Berne's observation that we are always playing games with each other is perhaps a cynical view of humanity, but by becoming aware of those games we have the chance to move beyond them.

The contribution of humanistic psychology to better relationships is recognized by the inclusion of Carl Rogers, whose influential book reminds us that relationships cannot flower if they don't have a climate of listening and nonjudgmental acceptance, and that empathy is the mark of a genuine person.

Working at our peak:
Creative power and communication skills

Robert Bolton,
People Skills

Edward de Bono,
Lateral Thinking

Robert Cialdini,
Influence

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Creativity

Howard Gardner,
Frames of Mind

Daniel Goleman,
Working with Emotional Intelligence

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen,
Difficult Conversations

Debates rage in the academic world over the true nature of intelligence, but in working life we are interested in its application. Two of the outstanding titles in this area, by Daniel Goleman and Howard Gardner, both suggest that intelligence involves much more than straight IQ. There are an array of “intelligences” of an emotional or social nature that can together be a decisive factor in how well a person does in life.

Unlike IQ, one's ability to communicate well can be improved relatively easily, as Robert Bolton's perennially popular book shows. And in
Difficult Conversations
, a product of extensive Harvard research, Douglas Stone and his colleagues give excellent advice on how to deal with some of the most challenging workplace encounters. As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone's dignity intact.

One of the decisive factors in success in business is the ability to persuade. Robert Cialdini's landmark work on the psychology of persuasion is a must-read if you are involved in marketing, but also of interest to anyone who wishes to understand how we are made to do things we would not normally choose to do.

Another component of work success is creativity. Edward de Bono's term “lateral thinking” seemed very new in the 1960s when he coined it, but in today's entrepreneurial culture we are all expected to think outside the box. At a broader level, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's
Creativity
, based on a systematic
study, shows why creativity is central to a rich, meaningful life, and why many people do not achieve their full flowering until their later years. Most importantly, the book provides many features of the creative person that we can emulate.

“The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.”

Alfred Adler

“Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.”

Steven Pinker

William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature. Some 80 years after Alfred Adler made the remark above, we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology.

In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick. To survive and thrive, we have to know who and what we are, and to be canny about the motivations of others. The common route to this knowledge is life experience, but we can advance our appreciation of the subject more quickly through reading. Some people gain insights from fiction, others from philosophy. But psychology is the only science exclusively devoted to the study of human nature, and its popular literature—surveyed in this collection—aims to convey this vital wisdom.