Best of
Psychology

1956

The Outsider


Colin Wilson - 1956
    First published over forty years ago, it made its youthful author England's most controversial intellectual. The Outsider is an individual engaged in an intense self-exploration-a person who lives at the edge, challenges cultural values & "stands for Truth." Born into a world without perspective, where others simply drift thru life, the Outsider creates his own set of rules & lives them in an unsympathetic environment. The relative handful of people who fulfilled Wilson's definition of the Outsider in the 1950s have now become a significant social force, making Wilson's vision more relevant today than ever. Thru the works & lives of various artists--including Kafka, Camus, Eliot, Hemingway, Hesse, Lawrence, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Shaw, Blake, Nietzsche & Dostoyevski--Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society & society's effect on him. Wilson illuminates the struggle of those who seek not only the transformation of Self but also the transformation of society as a whole. The book is essential for everyone who shares his conviction that "a new religion is needed".

The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing


Joost A.M. Meerloo - 1956
    Joost A. M. Meerloo has studied the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective "truth" on their victims' minds. The first two and one-half years of World War II, Dr. Meerloo spent under the pressure of Nazi-occupied Holland, witnessing at firsthand the Nazi methods of mental torture .on more than one occasion. During this time he was able to use his psychiatric and psychoanalytic knowledge to treat some of the victims. Then, after personal experiences with enforced interrogation, he escaped from a Nazi prison and certain death to England, where he was able, as Chief of the Psychological Department of the Netherlands Forces, to observe and study coercive methods officially. In this capacity he had to investigate not only traitors and collaborators, but also those members of the Resistance who had gone through the utmost of mental pressure. Later, as High Commissioner for Welfare, he came in closer contact with those who had gone through physical and mental torture. After the war, he came to the United States, where his war experiences would not permit him to concentrate solely on his psychiatric practice, but compelled him to go beyond purely medical aspects to the social aspects of the problem. As more and more cases of thought control, brainwashing, and mental coercion were disclosed - Cardinal Mindszenty, Colonel Schwable, Robert Vogeler, and others - his interest grew. It was Dr. Meerloo who coined the word menticide, the killing of the spirit, for this peculiar crime. His knowledge of these totalitarian procedures has been officially acknowledged; he served as an expert witness in the case of Colonel Schwable, the Marine Corps officer who, after months of subjection to physical and mental torture following his capture in Korea, was made to confess to having taken part in germ warfare. It is Dr. Meerloo's position that through pressure on the weak points in men's makeup, totalitarian methods can turn anyone into a "traitor." And in The Rape of the Mind he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized "rape of the mind." He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The Rape of the Mind is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. Contents: Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission. 1. You Too Would Confess. 2. Pavlov's Students as Circus Tamers. 3. Medication into Submission. 4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession. Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission. 5. The Cold War against the Mind. 6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship. 7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking. 8. Trial by Trial. 9. Fear as a Tool of Terror. Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion. 10. The Child is Father to the Man. 11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion. 12. Technology Invades Our Minds. 13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind. 14. The Turncoat in Each of Us. Part Four: In Search of Defenses. 15. Training Against Mental Torture. 16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale. 17. From Old to New Courage. 18. Freedom -- Our Mental Backbone

How to Develop Superpower Memory


Harry Lorayne - 1956
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The Art of Loving


Erich Fromm - 1956
    As with every art, love demands practice and concentration, as well as genuine insight and understanding.In his classic work, The Art of Loving, renowned psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm explores love in all its aspects—not only romantic love, steeped in false conceptions and lofty expectations, but also brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, the love of God, and the love of parents for their children.

The Meaning of Persons


Paul Tournier - 1956
    It reads, "Dr. Tournier fully accepts the important contributions of Freud, Jung, and the other psychiatrists and integrates them in his work as well as in theory, but he significantly and wisely illustrates through actual counseling situations that this alone is not enough to understand and to help, for 'only through living dialogue between man and man, and man and God' can the authentic person be relieved, reached, and helped."

The Stress of Life


Hans Selye - 1956
    Annotated references are also included.

The Child's Conception of Space


Jean Piaget - 1956
    This book deals with the development of the child’s notions about space.

A Study of Thinking


Jerome Bruner - 1956
    First published in 1956 and hailed at its appearance as a groundbreaking study, it is still read three decades later as a major contribution to our understanding of the mind. In their insightful new introduction, the authors relate the book to the cognitive revolution and its handmaiden, artificial intelligence.The central theme of the work is that the scientific study of human thinking must concentrate upon meaning and its achievement rather than upon the behaviorists' stimuli and responses and the presumed connections between them. The book's point of departure is how human beings group the world of particulars into ordered classes and categories-concepts-in order to impose a coherent and manageable order upon that world. But rather than relying principally on philosophical speculation to make its point, A Study of Thinking reports dozens of experiments to elucidate the strategies that people use in penetrating to the deep structure of the information they encounter.This seminal study was a major event in the cognitive revolution of the 1950s. Reviewing it at the time, J. Robert Oppenheimer said it "has in many ways the flavor of conviction which makes it point to the future."

The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans: Reflections on the Difference Between Conforming and Conserving


Peter Viereck - 1956
    In contrast to this voluntary thought control process is the unadjusted person. Cast in the mold of great individualists from Thomas More to Friedrich Nietzsche, such a person responds to fundamental values of conscience rather than conformity built exclusively on ego gratification and icon worship." Viereck's book is a critique of the liberal presumption of a monopoly in critical thought.

Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche


Toni Wolff - 1956