New Books in Psychology

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Flanagan sets out to clarify the landscape of moral possibility for actual human beings. He defends a perspective on human morality that he describes as an “oughtology” based in naturalism, gleaned from comparing Western, Chinese, and Indian moral traditions. Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, considers how diverse moral traditions converge on some features basic to moral psychology, such as compassion, yet differ in other ways, such as whether anger is a justified and beneficial moral emotion or whether it should be extirpated. He also examines different views of the self, including the Buddhist view in which there is no self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Psychology and spirituality have a complicated relationship. Dating back to ancient times, we see them treated as sister disciplines which inform and enhance one another. But at some point in the last century, Western psychology decided to divorce itself from Eastern philosophy and spirituality, leaving us with an incomplete way of understanding human experience. Author Margot Esther Borden takes up this story in her new book, Psychology in the Light of the East (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and in our interview, we discuss her conviction that our understanding of human nature is best served by attending to the soul as well as the psyche, and be utilizing wisdom from Eastern as well as Western traditions and worldviews. Margot Esther Borden, M.A., is a psychotherapist, international public speaker, and adjunct professor at Antioch University Midwest. She completed her training in breathwork in Paris and her master of arts in person-centered counseling/humanistic psychology at the University of Durham. She works in India, Europe, and the United States and is coeditor of Spirituality and Business: Exploring Possibilities for a New Management Paradigm. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be innate? Is skepticism a threat, and if so, how should it be countered? And: Is it possible to know something simply on the basis of another person’s say-so? In the background of all of these traditional questions is a broad concern thats not often explicitly addressed—the concern is with ignorance. We study the nature of knowledge so that we might better overcome ignorance. And yet ignorance is not often an explicit object of examination. In Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know (The MIT Press, 2017), Daniel DeNicola makes the case for placing ignorance at the center of epistemology. He argues that ignorance is not univocal; it comes in many forms, and the different forms need to be addressed in different ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In her new book, Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), Mindy Fried shares her experiences with providing care for her father at the end of his life. With rich stories and memories of her father, the book introduces the reader to Manny “Red” Fried, in addition to Mindy as a daughter as caregiver. The book really focuses on how families can preserve the dignity of older family members as they age, as well as how we can keep older family members active and engaged into their later years. Red’s personal history is important throughout the book—he was a labor organizer and once pursued by the government during the McCarthy era. This historical time influences not only Red’s life and experiences but also that of his family. By combining “activism with acting,” he led a rich life and was interested in being engaged until the end. With friends and family having “Mondays with Manny,” his community was able to provide support and continue to keep his tie to the theatre community. In this book, Fried also provides important insights into her role as a caregiving adult child, a common role for many Americans as their parents age. Fried takes a wide view of her father’s care and provides insights and stories into the assisted living facility in which he lived, as well as the role of a hired caregiver in their lives. Although this book is labeled a memoir, Fried is a sociologist and ties in many important ideas and theories into the book, including activity theory and continuity theory. This book will be of interest to sociologists in general, but especially those in the area of aging and family caregiving. In addition, adult children currently providing care for a parent may find the book insightful and interesting, along with practitioners in the caregiving sector. The use of theory and a sociological lens throughout the book makes it accessible in many ways, and would be good for a graduate level Sociology class on Aging or Death and Dying. Sarah E. Patterson is a Sociology post-doc at The University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child. And we all recognize that many of these decisions are impactful. More specifically, we know that the choices parents make often deeply impact the lives of others, including especially the life of the child. Given the sheer number of impactful and other-regarding choices involved, one might expect parenthood to be a major site of philosophical attention. But it isn’t really. In The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jean Kazez philosophically engages with a broad sample of the questions that parents must confront. Her analyses are philosophically nuanced but also accessible to non-academic readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Immigrant experiences are complex and varied. People who leave their home countries for a new one often feel torn between two identities and struggle to feel at home in either place. Dr. Julia Beltsiou, my guest for this episode, has put together an anthology addressing the various dimensions of the immigration experience entitled, Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves (Routledge, 2016). In our interview, we discuss her own immigrant experience as it shapes her sense of self and her clinical work with fellow foreigners, as well as topics such as language, name changes, and public perception of immigrants. We also hear her thoughts on the current moment in immigration, which is fraught with struggles over power, identity, and acceptance. Julia Beltsiou, Psy.D. grew up in Germany as the daughter of recent Greek immigrants and came to live in the U.S. as a young adult. She is a graduate of New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She has presented nationally and internationally on the topic of immigration and identity. In 2013, she received the Patrick Lane Award of the Psychoanalytic Society of the Postdoctoral Program for her work on immigration in psychoanalysis. She is also adjunct supervisor at the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City University of New York and maintains a private practice in New York City. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

For many people who binge eat, strong emotions can be a cue that leads to a pattern of maladaptive eating behaviors. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based psychotherapy approach to treating binge eating (and other disorders), which works simultaneously on both acceptance and change processes. Traditional DBT techniques like mindfulness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance, are a promising approach to the treatment of binge eating and underlying emotional processes. In this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Debra Safer, MD on the application of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for Binge Eating Disorder. Dr. Safer discusses use of strategies from DBT that are helpful for people who tend to binge eat in response to strong emotions. Dr. Safer is an expert on DBT for binge eating and bulimia and is the Co-Director of the Stanford Adult Eating and Weight Disorders Clinic. She obtained her MD from the University of California, San Francisco and completed her residency, as well as a post-doctoral fellowship in eating disorder intervention research, within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Debra Safer is an author to many peer reviewed research articles, chapters and books on Dialectical Behavior Therapy including Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world, such as race and gender. Social constructionists argue that these categories are not biological or natural and that alleviating social injustice begins with recognizing they are not. At the same time, the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman born of white parents who considers herself black, makes clear that even if race is not biological, it doesn’t follow that race is a matter of personal choice. So how should we understand what social construction involves? In The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford University Press, 2016), Ron Mallon articulates a view of social construction that draws on philosophy, psychology, and social theory. He identifies an element of essentialist thinking in some human kind concepts, and elaborates the mechanisms by which human categories and our representations of those categories form a constructivist loop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, explores the history of repatriation and return of WWI soldiers to Western Australia. The soldiers’ physical and mental scars, including tuberculosis and what we today call PTSD, did not end with the armistice, as soldiers and their families struggled with the consequences of wartime trauma well into the 1920s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle. Whether that’s true or not, it is hard to keep up with what’s going on in the White House, and each new uproar makes it difficult to remember what’s already happened. Take Trump’s first cabinet meeting, way back on June 12, 2017. Remember that? It began with Trump proclaiming, “Never has there been a president….with few exceptions…who’s passed more legislation, who’s done more things than I have.” This, despite the fact that he had yet to pass any major legislation through Congress. Then it got odder. Trump listened as members of his Cabinet took turns praising him. Mike Pence started it off, saying, “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” Alexander Acosta, the Secretary of Labor, said, “I am privileged to be here–deeply honored–and I want to thank you for your commitment to the American workers.” And Reince (Rein-ze) Priebus, still then the President’s Chief of Staff, said, “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda.” As all of the praise rained down on him, Trump just looked on, smiled, and nodded approvingly. Whats going on? Not only here but in the endless praise disguised as press releases that’s coming from the White House and Trump’s own Twitter account? Is this just good old fashioned ass-kissing or is there something more sinister happening? In their new book, Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy (University of Virginia Press, 2017), Mark and Deborah Parker explore this phenomenon of excessive flattery–why people do it and how it alters the social world that we all must share. The Parkers look at examples from literature, politics, and other disciplines to give us a portrait of this false-faced, slickly tongued, morally odious character, the sycophant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology