Fifty Psychology Classics

• Author: Tom Butler-Bowdon
• Fiction / non: Non-fiction
• Primary Category: Psychology
• Additional categories: Psychology

This book would appeal to you if

You probably wouldn't like this book if

you only enjoy reading an author’s work in its original, unabridged form.

The key themes of this book are

The key findings by each of the fifty authors in their field of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy or behavioural science
Summaries of each author’s major principals
Quotes by each author
References to other books that explore similar themes

The writing style is

clear and direct, incorporating an analytical tone and occasionally some witty commentary.

This book is recommended as therapy because

it introduces fifty highly influential books of psychology, or more often, entire schools of psychological discourse. It provides a perfect springboard to discovering which works of psychology you may be interested in perusing in further depth, including mentioning whether they’re enjoyable, easy reads or whether, though influential, they are nonetheless dry and arduous.

Quotes

‘In the first few pages [of The Divided Self], Laing expressed a view common in the 1960s and 1970s that it is not the people locked up in the asylums who are truly mad, but the politicians and generals who are ready to destroy the human race at the push of a button. He felt it was somewhat arrogant of psychiatry to class some people as “psychotic,” as if they’d ceased to be part of the human race. For Laing, the psychiatrist’s labels said more about the profession of psychiatry than they did about anyone’s real state of mind.’ Page 213