Our Minds, Our Selves

Subtitled 'a brief history of psychology', this book is both thematic and biographical in terms of people who have made significant breakthroughs in the field. The significant ideas of the first part include an understanding of the unconscious, emotions, individual differences and development. This leads on to a section on learning, language and thinking, including the work of Skinner and Chomsky as well as mental models and memory. The part on mind and brain explains mental and psychosomatic illness, the emergence of fMRI and its role in understanding the brain bases of experience, then feelings and empathy. The last two parts deal with community in terms of cooperation, love and culture, then our common humanity in imagination and stories, authority in relation to obedience and morality, creativity and grit; finally, a rather inconclusive section on consciousness and free will.

The book acknowledges the need for psychology to be integrated with other disciplines - not simply with neuroscience and biology, but also social sciences, psychiatry, linguistics, computer science and literary studies. The scope of the book is delimited by orthodox ways of thinking, so there is scarcely any mention of Jung and very little of William James. Transpersonal and humanistic psychology are completely absent – Grof, Tart, Wilber and Maslow are not even mentioned, nor is there any trace even of experimental parapsychology. However, some interesting themes are covered, including the work of Jane Goodall and experiments showing how easily an us-versus-them framework can be created, which can only be mitigated by subsequent cooperation – a lesson also for the psychology of politics.