| Books I've found interesting and/or useful. |
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| Jonathan Dancy |
| This is very much a textbook where as
the book on truth below by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, below, is
more of a popular story. In this book Dancy introduces the main topics and
where they stand. The ideas are discussed and argued quite fully. He discusses
theories of knowledge, theories of justification and then talks about how we
perceive our surroundings. He ends by questioning the whole concepts of
epistemology - can we ever know. A bit of a heavy read. |
| Blackwell ISBN 0-631-13622-3 |
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| Phillip K Dick |
| This is a good fun story with
accessible descriptions of various other maps, also known as psychopathologies.
The story falls into the Science Fiction category and one of the plots concerns
a psychiatric hospital that has been left to disintegrate as the political
situation around it dissolves into war. The result of the disintegration is
that the patients not only take over the asylum - as it were - but they
establish a whole structure for themselves on the planet that once house just
the hospital. I found it a fun tale with useful if stereotypical characters. Dick was also responsible for the story "Do androids dream of electric sheep ?" which was made in to the film Bladerunner. |
| HarperCollins - Voyager: ISBN 0-00 648248-1 |
| |
| Edited by Windy Dryden |
| This is a very useful compendium of
some 12 schools of psychotherapy. NLP is not amongst them. Each chapter is
written by a different author which makes it bit of a curates egg - good and
bad in parts. I found the Freud chapter very good but the following chapter on
Klein difficult to follow. The CBT chapter was informative. If, like me, you've not had the time or desire to find out about all the other schools then this I found to be a very useful tool. More than simply a "bluffers guide" it has some very deep concepts and some quite outstanding detail. |
| Sage ISBN 0 8039 7843 X |
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| Felipe Fernandez-Armesto |
| It was the first sentence that drew me
to this book as I have not read any other work by this author. It reads
"Most western parents feel guilty about Santa Claus." He then goes on
to relate how parents break the news to their children that Santa Claus is a
myth. I found this book an enthralling and fun guide. Further I agreed with most of his analysis until about page 166. Its at this point that Mr. Armesto lays into subjectivity - its a belief that he does not hold. Mr. Armesto lies firmly with what I call the Right-wing view of life. There are things in life that Mr. Armesto wants, perhaps needs, to be certain, concrete and unarguable. One of the quotes in the blurb is from Roger Scruton - a philosopher who appears on BBC Radio 4's the Moral Maze, at least that's where I have heard him. A true believer in True Blue i.e. Conservative Party philosophy. Those who are born to lead really have a God-given right to subjugate others. But its a good romp through seeking truth via feelings, then what we are told, then truth through reasoning, next the truth we perceive through our senses. He finishes with the death of Conviction and ends with a chapter called Life after Doubt. He is not a happy man. I think that he is still looking for the real Santa Claus. |
| Interesting quotes from the
book: "Our decline into doubt has been obvious for about a hundred years - the period in which all our traditional certainties have been dethroned; but its prehistory, if not its beginnings, can be traced back to the era of the equivocators. Subjectivism - by which I mean in this context the doctrine that self-discovery is the first step to constructing knowledge - started the rot; the self-aware subject tends to be like the one-dimensional dot in Flatland, so enraptured by self-contemplation that it 'thinks itself the universe' and remains incapable of discerning any other reality." He's not happy about linguistics either "We are left with dumbstruck tongues and hands too numb to write, despairing of ever saying anything true because language is trapped in self-reference, unable to reach reality, never expressing truth and, at best, only able to 'represent' it." |
| A Black Swan Book - ISBN 0 552 99729 3 |
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| Gaie Houston |
| This is a kind of work book for groups
that tells the major concepts of Gestalt in easy to use exercises and stories.
There are some fun doodles in it as well. Gaie takes the position that in order
to understand the ideas of Gestalt you have to experience them and so she had
organised the book into a series of group exercises. I found the concepts well laid out and defined although I did have to re-read one or two a few times to fully understand them. Mind you I was reading this on my own and Gaie points out that it is best to have a group of people or a facilitator to act as a guide. It is a useful book to dip in and out of when you need to remind yourself of a particualr defintion. |
| Gaie Houston ISBN 0 9510323 6 4 |
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| Bradford P. Keeney |
| This is a real textbook on
"cybernetic epistemology". I read it and my head hurt. Its a boom
about understanding understanding and relates this to family therapy. I found
it a fascinating description of making distinctions and defining therapy. The book is dedicated to Gregory Bateson and focuses on the ideas of the therapist in the therapy, recursion and defining how and what we know. I've only read the once but I know that I go back to it again and again. |
| The Guildford Press ISBN 0-89862-043-0 |
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| Joseph O'Connor & Ian McDermott |
| If, like me, you are coming to systems
thinking anew then this is a great place to start. I found it a clear and
simple explanation of systems and how they work. They take you through What is
a system ? and then discuss Thinking in Circles. Next there is a discussion
about Mental Maps, Cause & Effect and a chapter called Beyond Logic - in
this chapter Self-Reference and Recursion are discussed. The next step is abut
Learning and Perspectives and finally Mapping and how to Make Connections. They
also add a useful chapter on the history of systems thinking. In true NLP fashion they also lay out their outcomes for readers of the book. |
| Thorsons ISBN 0 7225 3442 6 |
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| William Hudson O'Hanlon |
| This is a great little
book that provides a large chunk view of Erickson's background and work. Its
also chock full of stories about how Erickson worked and the strategies that he
employed. O'Hanlon describes the various patterns that Erickson employed such
as; Intervening, Splitting & Linking, Parallel Communication, Implication,
Framing and Ambiguity. He goes on to describe the different phases and elements
of the work and ends up with a description of some of the research. Its a very readable book that covers quite a wide range of issues. |
| I think that the best quote is
made by Erickson himself: "In psychotherapy you change no one. People change themselves. You create circumstances under which an individual can respond spontaneously and change. And thats all you do. The rest is up to them." (Erickson, in Ritterman, 1985, p.69) |
| W.W. Norton ISBN 0 393 70031 3 |