Skip to main content

Introducing Psychology: a graphic guide – Nigel C. Benson ***

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.
Psychology is a difficult topic for this site because, to be honest, it’s not clear that it’s science. If this book is anything to go by, the reason it has a problematic image is that it is a mix of science and philosophy, and all too often the philosophy has too much weight.
Nigel Benson provides a useful summary of the different approaches to psychology (another indicator of its lack of modern scientific credentials – you certainly get disagreements about specific theories in physics, but you don’t get different ‘schools’, always an indicator you are drifting away from science and into philosophy). It was fascinating to see how much certain aspects of modern thinking are influenced by particular aspects of psychology – for example, how behaviourism seems to dominate education and particularly the sort of ‘Super Nanny’, how-to-deal-with-problem-children TV show. I was surprised how much content there was on Freud, all stated without any feeling this was arbitrary made-up rubbish with no scientific basis, with just a paragraph or so saying many don’t consider Freud useful anymore. Puzzling.
As a book it was quite approachable, but it was rather too bitty to get provide an ideal introduction. Now and again there would be some flow of the text, but often it seemed to be made up of a whole series of definitions. The illustrations were also a mix of useful and not. I really had no idea why the first part of the book is narrated by a figure wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask, but then he suddenly disappears. It’s not a particularly pleasant image and I really didn’t feel it helped. (There was extra confusion because the masked face used to be on the cover of the book, and is referred to as such inside, but it isn’t anymore.)
Overall, certainly not one of the best in the series, but will give a useful background on psychology if you want to get a quick fix on what the subject is about.
*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…
Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more