Book recommendations: Psychology topics
Hi everyone :) I am pretty obsessed with consuming information as someone with ASD, and one of my preferred topics to really dive into is Psychology, Philosophy, and Business ethics that can relate to the other 2 topics. I generally read a lot of articles, journals, and studies, but I have found myself really wanting to dive back into the course topics that I was learning about in college before I dropped out, as I don't do well in structured school settings.
I have been re-visiting a lot of Freud's work and other basic course stuff, but I do love more advanced topics that make me connect the dots between my personal studies and my schooling, so honestly just drop some titles for anything nonfiction and not as self help directed and I will check it out.
Thanks guys :)
Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (explaining his at the time groundbreaking research)
Being Wrong Adventures on the Margin of Error (lots of small pieces of information that you can follow up to go deeper)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (neurologist tells stories about what can go wrong when people experience various brain disorders)
The Brain that Changes Itself (brain function and neuroplasticity)
Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl (psychology of surviving extreme hardship and oppression)
The last 3 titles you listed sound really interesting. Definitely going to give them a Google and check it out, thanks a bunch! :)
Along with those, I would also recommend "Phantoms in the Brain" by V.S. Ramachandran.
As someone with ASD, one of the things I didn't realize until much later is that an urge to collect information can work against us if combined with a lack of ability to reliable and trustworthy information. I'm not sure how confident you are in your ability to do this, and I'd be hesitatant in recommending you books to read. My speciality is in psychology, and the advice I give to anyone reading psychology publications is that there are inherent biases in any publication which are not necessarily obvious as with any academic discipline. Specifically, some of Freud's ideas have been overturned, and you are better off not spending so much time on what he had to say as much as some of the ideas that have more traction in modern psychology. It makes it difficult to recommend something unless I know more about what you are looking for.
But generally speaking, have you already looked into Devon Price's "Unmasking Autism" or Jenara Nerenberg's "Divergent Mind"?
I appreciate the sentiment of that, I tend to gravitate more towards textbook style reading and study reports vs books anyways. One of my biggest findings over time has been that information on the human mind is always in flux, and my interest in Freud is more so on him as a person and how he created some of the foundations for "Today's Psychology". I don't think he is at all a good person to use to learn about when it comes to current knowledge at all, he seemed a little out there himself.
I have been doing a lot of learning on cognitive bias and how to identify it as well and while I am not fully confident in my abilities to recognize them all, I am confident in my inquisitive nature and absolutely adore differing approaches and opinions as you can't really apply a singular logic to human emotions. I have seen a lot of articles that report results based on small sample sizes, or incredibly preliminary findings that really should be taken with a grain of salt until they are further verified.
I am actually a data analyst and I did 3.5yrs of a 4 year psych degree until I burned out and switched careers, but until that point I even liked reading the DSM-5 and learning about different kinds of mental illnesses, I never completed it though. I really like insights on the pathology and treatment of more complicated disorders such as personality disorders of all types, and I have a fascination with the history of treating mental health issues and have been reading about the Stanford prison experiment recently.
I have really wanted to find some books on ASD as someone recently diagnosed as high functioning autistic at 27yo, so I am going to look at the titles you listed. I really do appreciate the insight and thanks!
If you enjoyed Freud, you might want to read neo-Freudians, who were kind of building on Freud, but also challenged some of his theories, which I think is healthy - don't get me wrong, Freud was the founding father, but from today's point of view, some of his theories did not age well. I liked Erich Fromm and Karen Horney - I admit that I had a weak spot for them when I was at college.
I would also read Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning is a great book, although imagining being in that situation is hard), Rogers, Berne... I think it is useful to read the classics, see how they differ and what makes sense to you, and then you can dig deeper into that. I used to read everything, including the stuff I hated, like Carnegie.
TBH one of the things I remember vividly was the concept of penis envy... he seems a little bit crazy, but I don't think we would have better information if he didn't have some weird stuff for us to disprove. I appreciate the efforts he made in his life and I will for sure check out the Neo-Freudians, I might also be looking for a biography of his life and work just out of my interest for him.
I am working on trying to be less reliant on social media and reddit was a source of a lot of topics and things to dive into, I really miss reading so much so I am going back to books now that I have the free time. I have a really good base knowledge that I want to expand, and I find myself missing my textbooks but not the courses...
I can also heartily recommend The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (and, really, about anything by Oliver Sacks) and Devon Price's Unmasking Autism.
Another book about brain functioning and neuroplasticity that I really enjoyed was Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran.
I'm currently reading through Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's really helping me work through why I'm so impulsive when it comes to my ASD. It describes the main two "systems" of your brain and why you can't always trust your intuition. Every single page seems to contain multiple nuggets of wisdom.
I cannot recommend enough the works of psychologist-philosopher Irvin D. Yalom. Much of his work is meant to be an extension of his therapeutic practice, focusing heavily on existential issues, which Yalom feels underlie a great number of personality disorders, relationship issues, etc. Reading his works has given me a very helpful perspective on my own psyche - not that I have any serious mental health issues, but everyone can benefit from a mental tune-up!
A lot of his books amount to collections of case studies of his patients - a description of their problems, the approach he takes in their particular therapy, and how this benefits the patient (or sometimes, how it fails to benefit them). I would recommend Love's Executioner or Creatures of a Day as a good place to start.
If you're looking for something a little more detailed and academic, you could try his Existential Psychotherapy, which is a hefty tome which weaves together psychological theories, existential philosophy, case studies, scientific literature, and lots of discussion of therapeutic practice. The foundational elements of his existential approach are the conflict between the patient and their 'existential givens': the inevitability of death, the burden of freedom/responsibility, the intrinsic isolation or separateness of people, and the difficulty of finding meaning in a meaningless world. There are all kinds of really fascinating subtopics that appear in this work; for instance, the extent of death awareness that young children have, or the paradox of trying to inspire a person to make their own choice.
Yalom has also written quite a few works of fiction, which typically function a bit like his case studies, but with the benefit of being able to 'see inside the characters' heads'. A few of these works could also be characterized as historical fiction - for instance When Nietzsche Wept, which imagines a series of therapeutic encounters between Friedrich Nietzsche and Josef Breuer, who is considered one of the earliest psychoanalysts (he served as a mentor to the much better-known Sigmund Freud). I'm not usually one for historical fiction but I found this book in particular to be totally compelling.
Not quite as academic but relating to the interests you listed, one of my favorite books is
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson