Crenshaw's Books & Decks

The present moment is informed by the past, driven by its imperatives, its prescriptions and proscriptions. Either we are repeating it by serving its message, or trying to escape it, or we have evolved our unconscious treatment plan for it. Either way, the past calls the shots, at least until it is flushed out into the full light of consciousness.  (Loc. 148-151). The past is not dead; it is not even past. And what we resist will persist— as haunting.(Loc. 201-202)

This is the first book I read by Hollis, a reputed Jungian psychoanalyst, and I am most impressed with his literary writing, his erudition, his wisdom, his humanity, his compassion a with the way he touches the readers' soul, or at least mine. 

Hauntings is not a book about mediums or ghosts, is a book about those psychological ghosts (by absence and by presence) that make our lives more mechanical and more untrue to who we really are (our soul and inner self). Those ghosts direct our behaviour, our feelings, and our lives in two major ways: by replicating them without being aware we are doing so, or by being aware of them and trying to compensate to avoid them.

THE HAUNTING GHOSTS

> Our genes. Of course, they aren't discussed in this book.

> Our parent's unlived lives and conditioning. Everything we learn about the world is first filtered through them. From them we receive our culture, religion, values and even their neurosis and behaviours. The mother figure is vital until we are 6-7y.o.a, but the father figure becomes increasingly so from then onwards, if any of those fail not to be there or to be too much, or be in the wrong way, those patterns of being, behaving and feeling will be passed on to us.   
> Synchronicity. This the only positive haunting in the book. It is presented as a mysterious non-causal energy of the Universe that follows us to let us know whatever we need to know or notice, and puts us in direct connection with the Universe without the need of any mediator (the state, gurus, evangelists, priests, or whomever else, all of them with their own agenda). 

> Our "complexes" or subconscious patterns of behaviour emotionally triggered. Hollis does a great job at explaining what a complex is, how it works and how it manifest, and the power that they have over us all. We need to bring them into consciousness, but even we do, they are the hardest thing to handle. They are the ghostly aspect most widely discussed in the book:  "We do not rise in the morning, look in the mirror while brushing our teeth, and say to ourselves, “Today I will do the same stupid things, the reflexive things, the regressive things which I have been doing for years!” But more often than not we indeed do the same stupid, reflexive, regressive things, and why? (Loc. 857-860).

> Our shadow, projections and transferences, who present aspects of us as part of somebody else's, an unconscious lens that alters reality and the perception of who the others are, bringing a distorted picture of their self, that we only notice is a lens when the projection crumbles and we tell ourselves s/he wasn't what looked like or the person thought s/he was. 
> Our sense of guilt (personal or social it might be). Guilt is the result of something we have done or failed to do. It shows in our lives in three different ways: patterns of avoidance, patterns of overcompensation, and patterns of self-sabotage. Perhaps the most evident sense of guilt comes from the expectations of society that favours niceness over authenticity and adaptation over assertiveness, so we end giving too much weight to what others expect from us or think of us any failure or lack of fitting is transformed into guilt.  
> Our sense of shame, or the belief that we are wrong or flawed somewhat because we have to meet some criteria, respond to somebody's else expectations, or serve a given agenda, no matter is self-imposed or more commonly imposed by cultural codes, religious institutions, or the internalisation of agendas or assignments (even unspoken) of parents, family or other people who matter to us.
> Psychological social projections, the same as personal projections but at a big scale. They are the base of racism, sexism, xenophobia, prejudice, religious intolerance, dogmatism and the view of anything and anybody who is different as a threat. The more insecure the ego the less it tolerates differences. The reverse side is contagious social ideas, fashions and fears that expand like a plague. Hollis states that no religious, civil, educational or social institution has not, in some degree, constricted us and prevent us from fulfilling  our potential.

> Betrayal from others and from ourselves. Betrayal is a kind of loss that is internalised and leads us to inner conclusions that result in paranoia, obsession, and projective identification. Hollies says that usually transfer to the Universe, the State, the Company, the marriage the role of good parent or caretaker and when they fail to serve us we have a tantrum and disappointment will be seen as betrayal.
> Magical thinking or the failure to differentiate interior reality from external reality.
> Modernism, or the loss of a spiritual core and myths of the 'tribe', which creates an inner void and anxiety. The loss is appeased by compensation: materialism, self-absorption, obsession, compulsion, addiction,  and any sort of "-holism', whatever fills up that void. When reading chapter 9, which deals with this matter, I thought of how the collapse of the Dream Culture among Aboriginal Australians has led the last two generations to being lost, angry, raging, and to consuming much into alcohol and drugs so as to numb their lack of spiritual void and the guidance of the elders.
>  The lost of our connection with our soul.

THE MAJOR TAKINGS FROM THE BOOK TO ME

>> One of the major takings of the book is a clear idea of what complexes are and how they work in our psyche, and how they direct our behaviour. Most importantly, how much power have over us, how much inner energy they summon, and how difficult is to loose them up, because beating them is out of the question. This is a bit terrifying,  especially if you are aware of your own complexes and want to beat them.

.>> The second major taking is how dreams and feelings are relevant for our inner world and psyche. Dreams speak in a symbolic language to tell us what our soul grievances and hopes are. They don't rise from the ego, nor have an ego agenda, so they bring the unconscious to the conscious better than anything else. They are a window to your soul, you have just to poke you nose in to see. In the same way our feelings, the way we feel, are expressions of the psyche and the soul and not of the ego, so we should pay more attention to them.

>>  We need to live more consciously and more thoughtfully. We need to bring the unconscious to our conscious as if our life depended on it because, in a way, it does.

>> We need to be faithful to our core and authentic self.  Betraying our soul is the worst betrayal one will ever suffer. This demands paying less attention to what society and other people expect from us, and doing and being more what our soul is and longs for. This demands learning what you truly want and living according to it. We all fear to change, to grow, to be lonely, to get the disapproval of others, to be weird, not to fit, but that cannot be a deterrent to be who we truly are. Fear is normal, living in fear is not.

>>  There is a need for grace and forgiveness with others and ourselves. Let's accept our humanity and imperfection.  The need to trust even when our trust has been abused. Easier said than done!

>> We need to choose life over victimhood. "It is always easier to blame the other than recognize at how many stages of the process we betrayed ourselves, sustained denial, and perpetuated what was already outlived. Betraying our own souls has been with us so long that we often forget we have a soul and that it is asking to be served even more urgently than our dependencies and our infantilities." Most difficult!


>> Let's individuate! Becoming a person is actually a very difficult project. (Loc. 2598-2599), just worth the effort.

SOME CRITICISM

Hauntings is a wonderful book that has touched me deeply, bit it lacks something very important to me -- practicality. In that regard, I love Robert A. Johnson's books, which aren't as soulful, but more tool-full. Hollis advises us to bring our ghosts to our conscious life, to pay attention to our dreams and feelings, to be faithful and true to ourselves, to face the pain and adversity with some sort of stoicism by going through the pain instead of numbing it or ignoring it. Yet, how we all mortals do that without the assistance of a psychoanalyst?

A WISH

I found a ghost missing from the list. Well, I'm not sure if it is ghost properly speaking but a ghost of mine definitely -- the ghost of poverty. Not being able to have ends meet. I think individuation is just a wonderful thing, and will appeal to some individuals no matter their gender, age and social status, but to individuate we have first to have our belly full and some sort of economical surplus. Or perhaps not. It is definitely always a ghost for me perhaps because I was very poor for a long time and poverty and having nothing is always around the corner, even when I have a bit of money at hand. I would have loved Hollis, who knows what poverty is, to perhaps include it in his list and make some reflections about it. 

ON HOLLIS' WRITING

Hollis is an erudite, well-versed in English and World literature, Philosophy and Theology. He integrates in his books quotes from American and European authors. To me, they are so illustrative and so to the point of what Hollis is writing, that I didn't find them invasive most of the time. On the contrary, I found them illuminating of how artists are so in tune with the human soul and what what life is, and how  they can dig as deep as a psychoanalyst does. 

If you watch some of Hollis's videos online you will see that he is quite a direct speaker, very approachable and easy to understand. However, his writing is quite different, I think simply because he loves writing and does so in a very literary formal way. To me, that is simply wonderful. It is also challenging because he uses a rich English vocabulary that has quite pronounced Latin and German nuances. The way I see it is that his writing allows me to improve my English, not a flaw. I admire when authors do not betray themselves even when pushed by editors to downgrade their writing for the red-necks and bogans of the world, with all my respect. I think those same readers can grab a dictionary and improve their vocabulary. Yet, it sounds at times that those people consider that offensive! This is utterly shocking to me. I also find shocking readers commenting on Hollis' intention of proving how clever he is, which I think it is a clear projection of their inferiority complex because, to be realistic, they don't know this man at all!

Having said that, although I like Holli's style and choice of phrasing and vocabulary, I thought that sometimes he goes a bit too far using words that are archaic, rare or specialised. Not that there are many of those, but I think they aren't needed. E.g. 'anfractuosities.', in medias res' and some others.

Also,  at times there were too many quotes and they aren't always necessary. Here an approximate list of the authors quoted in the book: Robert Frost, Paul Eluard, Rilke, Longfellow, W. H. Auden, Sharon Olds, Delmore Schwartz, James Tate, Josef Breuer, Freud, Jung, Brothers Grimm, Christopher Marlowe, Milton, Nietzsche, Sartre, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Pascal, Emily Dickinson, Kant, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, B, Scott Momaday, St Augustine, Matthew Arnold, Chritopher Fry, Alicia Ostriker, Walt Whitman, Paul Tillich, Kierkegaard, Aldo Carotenuto, Horace Walpole, Thomas Wolfe, Dabuek Wakoski, Adam Zagajewski, Paul Hoover, Homer, Gunnar Ekelof, Joyce, Shakespeare, Yeats, Ibsen, Mann, Hesse, Machado, Wittgenstein, and Dante!

The book is a bit repetitive and loopy at times, and unnecessarily so, and I found the use of rhetorical questions excessive in number, as the same could have been said straight forward in  non-interrogative form without losing any emphasis. In other cases, the rhetoric works great, but not always.

MIND

If you are a reader looking for a simple book to read, this might not be for you. It is written in  a very formal literary way, it is very deep, and it is very Jungian.  So this is not pop-psychology nor a self-help book.

RENDERING FOR KINDLE

The book has no pages, just the usual locations, but there are some cross references (unlinked) in the book that refer to specific page numbers not locations. That shouldn't be so in an e-book. I noticed:
> Location 1037 (p. 49), but the book has no pages on Kindle.
> Location 1851, (p. 000) What What What?!

At mid-life we come face to face with our failures and losses. As we age, each of us is confronted by limitations, threats to our capacity to control outcomes, and deflations of our presumptions of omnipotence. (p. 49). "we are called upon to examine the 'truths' by which we live and even to acknowledge that their opposite also contains truth." (p. 15) "The reluctance to face our own shit is very strong." (p. 217-218).

Living Your Unlived Life is a short Jungian book that synthesises and develops many of Johnson's previous books on shadow work, dreamwork and active imagination, and mixes them with some reflections on archetypes, complexes, and Depth Psychology from Rhul. The narrators use the first person, so one cannot distinguish what comes from whom. However, the book feels whole and coherent. Johnson's impromptu is clear, especially if you have read others of his works. Like in most of Johnson's books, a Greek myth is used as conductor of the study, in this case the story of Castor and Pollux. You might ask why myths are still relevant for our Western Culture, and the answer is: 

"Mythic stories tell us holistic, timeless truths, as they are a special kind of literature, not written or created by a single individual but produced by the imagination and experience of an entire culture. (...) Mythic stories, therefore, portray a collective image— they tell us about things that are true for all people." (p. 8).

THE NUGGETS

The second part of life or middle age is a period of time when we seek authenticity, to be true to who we are and to express ourselves in ways that connect us with our inner truth. This is also a period of upheaval and reflection when, more than ever, we start seeking for meaning to get a sense of inner fulfilment. The main quest in the second part of life is the seek for wholeness, which means to be "hale, healthy and holy" and to honour our higher self, this understood as "the propensity of psyche to dynamically seek greater levels of integration, organisation, relationship, and creative expression" (note 2).

Johnson & Ruhl's advice to achieve wholeness and authenticity is not based on fluff, it is based on serious inner work:
1/ We have to 'be' more and 'do' less, or just to alternate 'being' and 'doing' more frequently.A Zen approach to life, basically.
2/ We need to make the unconscious conscious.
3/  We have to apply meta-consciousness to our thinking and behaviour so we aren't acting on autopilot and repeating behaviour patterns that are not good for us and are even harmful. The requires that we pause and reflect instead of doing what we usually do, i.e. leave our unconscious to run its hidden agenda. To disarm a complex you must learn to move your ego into a position of witness  (...) the goal is not to eliminate patterned thoughts and behaviour but rather to loosen them up sufficiently(p. 62).
4/ We need to learn to separate which parts of us are not really us but a by-product of our culture, country of birth, gender and social class or just a projection of our families.
5/ We must live our unlived lives (those parts of our character and psyche that we consciously or unconsciously repress, which are both luminous and dark) by doing shadow work, dream work and through active imagination We also need to start asking ourselves the right questions: instead of What should I do to get rid of this wrong thing in me?” we should ask “Why is the right thing in the wrong place?” (p. 103) instead of asking "What’s in it for me?” we should ask “What is needed at this moment for greater wholeness, integration, and creative expression? What serves the greater good?” (p. 179).
6/ We need to learn to look at the world with less polarity, with less duality, with less judgement, more through a coloured lens and less through a black and white one. There is no list of virtues that cannot be contradicted; this is a truth that can be liberating and frightening at the same time. We need to synthesise the opposites tempering one with the other and accept that both are valuable and necessary to live a balanced life.  

7/ We need to keep a balance between the archetype of the Eternal Youth and the archetype of the Wise Elder, by using an attitude of tinkering, discovery and play. Without the Eternal Youth we become morally rigid, dogmatic, judgemental, and authoritarian, but if we are too attached to the Eternal Youth we may exhibit immaturity, narcissism and an inability to grow and achieve psychological maturity.
8/ Let's  get a  new mindset, as the old solutions to our problems won't work and our automatic habits will work against us the older we become.  

9/ Let's have strong ethics and walk the talk. People who behave ethically are those who make an honest effort to conform their behaviour to their values. When your conduct is at odds with your essential character, it reflects a fragmentation of the personality. Shirking of ethical responsibility deprives us of wholeness. (p. 125). Amen!
10/ We need to do some work to improve our capacity of response to the challenges we face, so we do so with more flexibility, passionately and in a powerful way.

This book is full of wisdom, with some philosophical and spiritual reflections that are wonderful to ponder on,  no matter the stage you are in life. I actually think that this sort of book should be read by people older than 25 so that  they can start doing  something with their lives to have less neurosis and more fulfilling lives when they are, say, in their mid 30s.

My favourite chapter is number 10, Returning Home and Knowing It for the First Time. This chapter is very thought provoking, very touching and lyrically spiritual, and also very confronting in a way. This won't be an easy read if you are a hardcore Christian or very attached to any established creed; however, the chapter will be like a fragrant breeze for those of us who are more spiritual than religious. In a way, this chapter is a call to arms, to  the true spirit that lives in all of us, to break free from the chains that constrict and restrict our soul even if those are part of a set of religious beliefs and structures. Besides, this is the only chapter where old age and death are considered. The chapter is a call to the return to the divine, to walk into oneness, and to reclaim our personal paradise, as heaven lives within us:

"Paradise exists, but as a level of consciousness, and it is available to you when you are ready to receive it. (...) The very idea that the material world is separate from some other “higher” existence is itself an error of duality. Reality is not dual, though our current level of awareness perceives it that way. (pp. 225-227).

If you have never read a book by Johnson, this might intrigue you enough to read more detailed approaches to shadow work, dreamwork and active imagination. If you are into Jungian and Depth Psychology, you will find wonderful applications of Jung's teachings to the challenges that your psyche  and life face, no matter your age.

THE SHORTCOMINGS

~~ Although the book has great wisdom and is well written, it might  disappoint the general public, who will come to this book because "the second part of life" in its title. They might expect precise concise answers on how to solve or face mid-age issues, but they won't find but challenging inner work.  

~~ The structure of the book  makes the message confusing or not clear enough. To me, they should have started explaining what an unlived life is, specifically, and how it affects our life. "To live our unlived lives" is repeated ad nauseam, but "unlived life" is never clearly defined. I would have explained how to access that unlived lives (shadow work, dreamwork, active imagination, archetypes in this precise order) and how to deal with our oldest years if we get there alive.  I think in this way the whole book would have conveyed the same message in a more clear way. Just my opinion, of course.

~~ Except for some parts, this book is not specific for people in the second part of life. The bits about old age are truly so, but most of the book focuses on doing things that are beneficial for people of all ages and are interested in inner work. 

~~ I have a problem with vague talking, in this case with the expression "the second part of life". What is that supposed to mean? My grandmother died old and wretched in her 40s, so her second part of life was in her 20s. Depending on the country or area of the world we live in, we have a longer or shorter life expectancy and we marry and settle sooner or later. So I would like to know, exactly, how do we know we are in that second part of life as we don't know how long we are going to live. Is it an age? I is a state of mind? Is it having a job and a routine life? Is a state of the soul?  Is being settled in life? What exactly?  

MIND

>>  Although the language is accessible, the book reads better if you already have an understanding of basic Jungian concepts, like ego, shadow, projection and archetypes.  The authors have a specific reader as a target, so if you aren't one of those, you  might get lost without the help of a teacher or mentor.

>> Although Jungian Psychology is very much Christian and spiritual, there is a good deal of elements that could conflict with orthodox Christian beliefs because, beyond the concept of psychological soul, the book is infused in Zen, Eastern philosophies and Antiquity Greek religion. Therefore, the book might not be for readers who have a set of values deeply ingrained in established churches and religions, and believe in the value and importance of right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark. 

EXERCISES IN THE BOOK

 > Unlived lived inventory (adapted from the Roland Evans' model, quite interesting and surprising.)
> What are you stuck at? (good)
> The Doing/ Being Shuffle (good)
> Who am I? (good, needs of partner or conductor).
> The living symbol (not practical, need of partner or conductor who knows what s/he is doing.)
> Talking it over with yourself  (interesting but it would be great if an expert did it with you the first time so  we learn.)
> Dream tending (excellent.)
> Follow what you love (OK.)
> Dissolving the split perspective  (truly interesting and fun!)

 Some of the exercises are great if you happen to have a guide, a psychoanalyst or mentor who has a mastery on those,;otherwise, they might  lead you nowhere. Also, some of the exercises were somewhat odd, like asking yourself about the unlived lives of your parents. Some things came to mind for my parents about things they said they wanted to do and couldn't because of poverty or their specific circumstances. Yet, I am not my parents' psychoanalyst, so there must be many things inside them that they are never expressed, of which they don't want or can't talk about, or simply don't know they exist.

RENDERING FOR KINDLE

I find upsetting paying for a short digital book to find that the notes are not linked to the text they relate, that the index is not linked either, and that some of the links do not work either. It doesn't cost much fixing that in the e-book, so I always wonder why editors don't give a damn.

WHAT?!

As a tool to remember and note down your dreams, the authors recommend a "voice-activated tape recorder also can be handy (p. 142)." Time to wake-up, most people would have a smart-phone with a voice recording app included, tape recorders died, like a few decades ago, no? Tape recorders are an obsolete technology, no longer in use, unless you happen to have one of those. In year 2016 you can still find voice recorders, digital, but they are expensive, and one needs more a mobile than a VR, so using an app, free or paid, or just the VR feature that comes included in some smartphones is the easiest cheapest way to do that in year 2016.

"SYBPS" is a compassionate X-ray of shaming, shamers and shamees. Although the main focus is online and media shaming, other areas of life are also mentioned. SYBPS is Ronson's quest to learn how shaming works: why, who, and how, and how affects people. Ronson poses poignant questions to the reader and try to answer them by talking to people who experienced shaming first-hand. The questions are really good, intriguing and the answers worth pursuing:
~ Is modern shaming similar, better or worse than shaming in the 18th and 19th centuries?
~ How do we explain the shaming frenzy in our time?
~ Who is doing the shaming these days?
~ Who are those shamed and why?
~ Is shaming justified any time?
~ Does the online mob needs of constant drama?
~ What rush overpower us at times to turn us into a lynching mob?
~ What do we get out of vitriolic shaming?
~ Why do we dehumanise the people we hurt and shame?
~ Why is modern shaming so hardly and clearly misogynistic?
~ Did any of the shamees escaped unscathed?
~ If so, how do they did it? Was something they did? The way they behaved? The way they felt? Good luck? 
~ Does shaming only work if the shamee feels ashamed?
~ Is shamelessness something that some people just have or can be taught?
~ How long does it take for a shamee to be forgotten online?
~ Does shaming works outside the online world?

***

Shamed tells us the stories of shamed people (those who were destroyed by the shaming and those who weren't) and of some shamers: 
> (Publicly shamed and destroyed) Johah Lehrer, a young pop-science journalist and celebrity author who was exposed by a modest hard-working unknown Michael Moynihan for making up things in his books. After being exposed he apologised publicly in front of a giant screen with real-time twits to be further vilified, shamed and destroyed.
> (Publicly shamed  and destroyed) Justine Sacco who made a stupid joke on AIDS on Twitter before catching a holiday flight to South Africa. The joke went viral and she was vilified, abused and had received death and rape threats before landing. She lost her job.
> (Professional shamer) Ted Poe worked as a judge for 30 years in Houston (Texas) and was renowned for publicly shaming defendants and also for giving sentences in which public shaming was part of the redemption.
> (Publicly shamed and destroyed) Hank, a tech developer who made a sexist joke to his friend Alex when attending a national tech conference in Santa Clara in 2013. A female tech overheard him, took a photo of them, twitted it with their comment and complained about their conduct. Hank was fired and vilified by  women's right groups.
> (Public shamer and publicly shamed and destroyed) Adria Richards, the tech developer who exposed Hank, suffered a backlash to her exposé and received death and rape threats, verbal abuse and personal stalking as a result. She was also fired.
> (Publicly shamed and unscathed) Oswald Mosley, a formula-1 chief was filmed in a sadomasochist session with several hookers, which was labelled "nazi orgy" and exposed to the public by News of the World. A trial followed and he was cleared, compensated for defamation, and became  more popular than ever.
>  (Publicly exposed and forgiven, almost)  Andrew Ferreira, a pastor of the Church of the Nazarene, and six other people were videotaped having sex in a covered-up brothel located in a Zumba studio. The Police investigation exposed the place, exposed them and brought them to Court, with the cameras looking at them. The exposé had repercussions in their private lives, but shaming was never part of it except for the only woman in the group. 
> (Publicly shamed and unscathed) Mike Daisey was caught lying by journo Rob Schmitz in a story about a trip to China where he had supposedly met some workers in a factory making Apple products. He was interviewed for This American Life, one of America’s most popular radio shows, and although he tried to divert the questions he ended the interview admitting his lies and saying sorry. After the shaming began he reacted strongly against his critics until those stopped bothering him and disappeared.
> (Publicly shamed and destroyed) Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie were used to getting silly photos in front of public signs, one of them happened to be taken in front of a Silence and Respect sign in the Arlington Cemetery and posted on Facebook. The viral reaction got Lindsey, abused, threatened, fired from work, and into a deep depression.  

***

This is my favourite book by Ronson, purely because for the most part Ronson is able to transcend his doppelganger self, the one that looks like a character in his books, to focus way deeper this time into a subject that seems close to his heart.What is more, unlike other works of his, Ronson is not interviewing weirdos, extremists or people who live on the edge but normal people, and what matters the most if not even them, it is shaming. I admire Ronson's compassion and empathy and his ability to dig beyond the surface to show us people as human beings and individuals, not as objects. We see him the most compassionate in SYBPS and also the most openly honest about some issues and shamees. Yet, Ronson's dare devil is still here, like other times, his quest takes him to dangerous territories: the set of a porn movie for example (hilarious!) and  he joins a group go get to know information about shaming in the judicial system. 

***

 SYBPS is really an enjoyable, intriguing and fascinating read overall. There are a few parts that I found really interesting. Some of them are: 

1/ The historical antecedents on shaming used to contextualise the research on modern shaming.
2/ The discussion on the validity and limitations of the Philip Zimbardo's social experiment in Standford in 1971, which is endlessly mentioned in pop-psychology books, without further questioning, to explain group psychology.  

2/ I loved Ronson's reflections on the long-life effects of shaming on shamees, even when everybody has forgotten about them. Google will get them out on the front page of certain searches. The Right to Be Forgotten Law issued by the European Court, the work of online reputation management companies and, how important is to trick Google's algorithm  to get the job done show how much collateral damage brutal shaming does to  shamees.

3/ The hints about how shaming is an integral part of the judicial system. That stupefies me even more than online shaming, to be honest.
4/ The references to the psychiatrist James Gilligan work with dangerous killers and how shame is an intrinsicate part of the mutation of their personality into monsters.
5/ The epilogue, in which Ronson mentions the backlash he suffered because some of the things he says in the book were decontextualised and manipulated before it was published. 

***

"...The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or . . .’ Mike looked at me, ‘. . . you write a third story. You react to the narrative that’s been forced upon you.’ He paused. ‘You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative,’ he said. ‘If you believe it, it will crush you.’ (Kindle Locations 2226-2231).

NOTES
>  Jonah Lehrer, Justine Sacco, Lindsey Stone, Hank, Adria Richards, and Raquel had never  before spoken to a journalist about what had happened to them before this book.
> Ronson's interviews with Troy and Mercedes Haefer from 4chan appared published before in a column for the Guardian Weekend magazine as well as his story of how his son forced him  to re-enact being thrown into a lake.

TYPOS
Barely any. I noticed just two, which are the result of the conversion from printing format to digital format
> loc. 550 pointed outto me
> loc. 942 dehumaniz-ing them
 
COVER
Another great cover for the Kindle edition of the book! 

I was finishing this book when one of my brothers played one of the tricks mentioned in the book without he knowing that it would not work on me. He had bought an antique book written by a distant relative of ours, and he thought it expensive, because it is expensive in the part of the world where he lives and because his partner wouldn't be happy about him expending so much money on this sort of thing. When I asked him about the price he told me something relatively high but after talking for another five minutes or so he told me that the price he had mentioned before wasn't real, it was quite cheaper. He added that he had done so the second figure would appear lower than it is in this way. The contrast principle. It made me giggle.

Cialdini's "Influence" is a classic of Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Behavioural Economics, and of Marketing and Business. It is, above all, a serious book of Psychology by a reputed psychologist. Originally published in the 1980s, this review is about the revised edition.  

This is a book about compliance and manipulation  in general. The book offers detailed answers to two main questions 1/ what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And 2/ which techniques most effectively use these factors to generate compliance?  Besides, there are many interesting, every-day sort of questions, that are posed and answered in the book. Just to mention a few:

• Why should the voting of a Jury member be secret while the Jury is discussing a case?
• Why does a commitment made in public or by writing have such a powerful effect on the person who makes it?
• Why do we need to shout help and ask for specifics when we really need help? 
• Why people commit more suicides after listening about suicides or disasters in the media?
• Which factors cause a person to like another person? 
• Why do some people associate themselves so closely to their sport team that if their team is consistently losing they feel as losers as well?
• Which tricks do car sellers play to trick us to buy something right here right now? 
• Why a TV commercial with a renowned actor playing a doctor selling pills has the same power as if he was a real doctor?

After studying all the tactics used by sales people, and the myriad techniques they use to manipulate, Cialdini came with six basic weapons of influence, each one governed by a psychological anchor or shortcut in human behaviour: 1/Consistency, 2/ reciprocation, 3/ social proof, 4/ authority, 5/ liking, and 6/ scarcity. Each of them is analysed in an individual chapter, where we are shown the psychological shortcut that produces automatic auto-pilot reactions that are used by manipulators, why these anchors sit comfortably in the human psyche from an Evolutionary Psychology and Sociology point of view, and in which precise ways they work, work better and can be enhanced or downplayed.  Examples from many lab tests, natural psychology tests, scientific bibliography and Cialdini's own personal life are used to explain these mechanisms with simplicity.

Cialdini wants normal people, no matter we are a seller or not, to understand how our psyche works, because the trickster can be tricked and our psyche works using mechanisms that can be exploited and manipulated easily against us by anybody, for good and for evil. This is not a book on how to use or manipulate people and isn't directed to marketers or sellers specifically. A good part of Cialdini's work was done by infiltrating training programs from sales people and Cialdini mostly address the majority of people who don't use compliance techniques. However, he doesn't hold a grudge, nor want us to, against "compliance practioners" as he calls them (sales operators, fund-raisers, charities street workers, recruiters, advertisers, real-estate and travel agents, among others) are just people using the knowledge of our psyche without lying or masquerading anything. When they do, Cialdini advices war:

 "I would urge forceful counterassault. There is an important qualification, however. Compliance professionals who play fairly by the rules of shortcut response are not to be considered the enemy; on the contrary, they are our allies in an efficient and adaptive process of exchange. The proper targets for counteraggression are only those individuals who falsify, counterfeit, or misrepresent the evidence that naturally cues our shortcut responses (...) The real treachery, and the thing we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make their profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts."

Sadly enough, the same sort of people and behaviours that Cialdini wanted us to counterassault are using the book as a 'Bible', so much so that "Influence" is, to this day, the number one business and marketing book out there. 

"Influence" is an useful book,  not only to be learn and be aware of the tricks that compliance professionals play on us, but also of the ways people use them in our private lives to get something from us even if it is just approval, lack of a reprimand, or just sex. Most importantly the section "How to say no" in each chapter tell us, exactly, what to do or how to recognise the manipulators, the psychological anchors discussed in the chapter, and how to respond and react so our decision is o-u-r decision.

The book reads well, in simple English and is very entertaining and easy to understand.You will certainly get a few aha! moments as you can put into perspective what happened while booking a time with your hairdresser, your beauty salon, dealing with a charity worker that stops you in the street with a compliment, while a shop attendant shows you different stuff, dealing with a travel agent, dealing with your Real Estate agent, or while certain TV ads that do not make sense rationally but do make sense, totally, to your subconscious.

My favourite chapters in the books are those on Consistency and Direct Deference, purely because I was way more aware of reciprocation, liking, authority and scarcity; however, many of the specifics on how and why they work are still fascinating. I also love Cialdini's comparison between tribal practices and hell-week practices in University fraternities and the military, and the Readers's Report section at the end of each chapter, which includes letters from readers describing how some of the things mentioned in the book were applied to them.

There are too many people including quotes in their books, but the ones Cialdini uses at the beginning of each chapter are spot on, as they summarise each chapter to perfection.
  

SOME CRITIQUE
>>>  Cialdini is a bit reiterative at times, goes for pages unnecessarily, and although I loved most of the examples that Cialdini  mentions, there are too many and he could have cut a few without the book losing interest or quality.  
>>> Probably because the book was written in the 1980s, some stuff is really well-known nowadays and doesn't need of long explanations, or won't surprise anybody. I would say that people with a basic degree of education would not be saying what what what?! when reading about the bystander factor, the halo effect and the good cop-bad cop dynamics, or that our titles are something that can be used to trick people and that people who don't have them will attach to those to get a bit of the spark.  

>>> The book has not aged well with regards to a few points:
1/ Some contextual facts that were common in the 80s are are no longer in use, or even legal in some parts of the world, like door-to-door sales. We live in the world of the Internet, online stores, publicity everywhere we look at, constant spam and marketing on networking sites, and the use of our private meta-data by corporations to sell us things or know what we want to buy. I would have loved seeing an analysis on how the shortcuts presented in this book have morphed to adjust to the needs of the online world and market, if some of these shortcuts are now more prominent than others, and if new shortcuts have been added to the six mentioned here. 
2/ The bibliography used and referenced is still mostly from  the 70s and 80s, with a few additions from the 90s. It would have been great adding a modern bibliography in a "further reading" sort of chapter when the book was revised.  
3/ The use of some vocabulary is no longer OK. Referring to primitive cultures is no longer acceptable or accepted without discussion and calling animals infrahumans it is  an anthropocentric adjective that doesn't connect with the reality of the environment and the planet we live in. I would call a shark or alligator a suprahuman!
4/ Some social practices have changed dramatically in the last decades, even though Cialdini thought that they would not as they have a function in the human psyche. Well, it seems no longer. For example the hell-week practices in Universities, which were in decline in my University before I entered mine and banned when I was in. They might be alive in the American Fraternity Societies, but there is something called Open University that works quite well, is everywhere and expanding, and people don't need to be part of a group or enter any building that often. The world is quite different nowadays more than people in the 80s would have imagined.  

RENDERING FOR KINDLE
The book has a word index at the end, but it is not linked in the Kindle edition of the book. The author advises using the search tool to find them. Well, Kindle's search tool is not the most accurate sensitive sort of search tool. Kindle books should be sold cheaper if indexes or features that were in the hard-copies are not available in the electronic edition.

This is a great reading overall, informative, entertaining and useful for our daily life, to notice things to stop us from buying something we don't want to buy right now or  just not to act in a way that feels is not you but we are being pushed into and is not in our best interest. Entertaining and eye-opening this might be a bible for manipulators, but also a bible to counter-attack  those who want to bend our will for their own benefit. We should learn about how influence works because automated stereotyped behaviour works better now than in the 80s, as the pace of modern life is faster and more stressful, and we have less time and energy to pause and think for a second to ask ourselves what we really want. This being the case, we can be manipulated more easily today than 30 years ago.  

I have lived in different countries, and in areas within a given country, and I have always been the other, the alien, the non-native,  the foreign or the outsider. It has always shocked me to the core of my being that people would change their behaviour towards me, dramatically, depending on which country they think I come from, that they would treat me more or less or just as a different person for something that is not in me but in their eyes. 

 This is a short essay (not a book) on a subject dear to my heart: averse racism, cultural stereotyping, xenophobia, cultural imperialism, discrimination, and categorisation, the varieties of strong Prejudice we find (or at least I find) often in our daily life. This essay summarises well how Prejudice works, how to spot it and how to be aware of it in your own life, in other people, in the news, and, most importantly, in you. The essay uses well known studies and experiments about biases and heuristics to explain how Prejudice works and keeps alive, and provides ways of counterbalancing categorisation.

I like most of what Pollard has written, even though he has just written very little. He acknowledges that "the average person isn’t going to read a psychology textbook to learn these concepts, so I’m pleased to pack the ideas into a brief, concise book" (loc, 41-42) and that he is touching many subjects and is just scratching the surface. I always appreciate honesty and lack of BS.  

The essay is short and sweet, very well intentioned, and very didactic as it explains things in ways easy to apply to our daily lives, behaviour or what we hear or read in the news about "the others". Pollard uses simple analogies to explain things, leaving theories aside to present an essay on applied psychology that reads with gusto. I love works that remind the reader not to live on auto-pilot, not to relate to people as labels, and to see the beam in your eye instead of focusing on the speck in your neighbour's. That is always priceless and the path to high levels of consciousness. If you want a succinct, clear and useful first approach to the subject and you want to discover  your blind spot and see how you are prejudiced and a subtle racist, well, this essay will help you to do that easily.

If you are a Psychology student or just a connoisseur on the matter, this essay is not for you as it is simplistic, unoriginal, does not have a  proper academic referencing or even a recommended reading list, the bibliography mentioned is classic but outdated, and it reads more like a short seminar from University than anything else.

The most important message you get from this essay is this, 

By the time you finish reading, I sincerely hope you have a better understanding of people as a whole. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we all are. People. (loc. 66-67)

Now, who is the author James Pollard? No info in Amazon or Goodreads. Google the Ooragle knows it all. His Linkdlh. and  website show that Pollard is not a psychologist, he just has a basic three-year degree in Psychology & Business, and he is mostly a New Age money-making guru and financial advisor. This doesn't invalidate the contents of the book, just points to the fact that you have to go elsewhere to read something with more substance.  

Mind - 3 bucks for a 42-page essay that is not based on original research or own expertise is not really a bargain. But, I enjoyed it.

What a cool book

What is insight? How does it manifest? Which things favour insight? Which things prevent insight from happening? Which forms does insight takes? How can we increase insight in our private and work life? Klein does have the answers.

Klein departs from the analysis of the a classic work on insight, Graham Wallas's The Art of thought (1926), especially  the chapter "Stages of Control", which presents a four-stage model of insight: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. This model is still the most common explanation of how insight work. Klein acknowledges the good points that Wallas makes, but shows the deficiencies of this system  to provide an explanation to how many real cases of insight occur.

After doing his own research Klein proposes an alternative model, which allows researchers to explain all cases, major and minor, of insight. Klein calls it the Triple Path Model. In this model each pathway has its own means of altering the beliefs that anchor the way we understand things and restructure beliefs (that is, the story we use to understand events). Klein says that Wallas wasn’t wrong, he was addressing just one of the three paths.

Klein shows that there are five different strategies for gaining insights, although most insights are a combo of at least two: 1/connections, that is connecting the dots even when not all the dots are visible, which happens by being exposed to many different ideas. 2/ Coincidences, which are sparked by the question, what is going on here?. 3/ Curiosities, which comes for the realisation that there is something seriously wrong with the story we tell ourselves. That realisation can be achieved by having an open mind or just by having a critical sceptical mind to investigate paths that others have missed. 4/ Contradictions, which lead to paradigm shifts, and 5/ Creative desperation, which is the result of accidental unplanned events, of being in the right place at the right time. Point one four and five are the most common, while 56% of the cases were the 'aha!' type and 44% were gradual insights.

Klein digs in into his own research material and bibliography to try to understand the link among the five categories of connections. The second and third part of the book are devoted to an analysis of what interferes with insights and what promotes it. 

Among the elements that interfere with insight, beyond our daily moments of  stupidity fostered by  us being on autopilot, are 1/ flawed beliefs, 2/ lack of experience, 3/ a passive stance, and 4/ a concrete reasoning style, which is exacerbated by the constrictions that some software has in the work we do, the mere nature of the Internet, and organisational guidelines, procedures, filtering methods, and the zeal to reduce uncertainty and minimise errors with leads them to the  predictability trap and the perfection trap.
The ways unearthed by Klein to foster insights are 1/Critical thinking; 2/ opening up to contradictions and using other people's perspective and views; 3/ having encounters with different kinds of people, working in a variety of areas, peppering us with new ideas.; 4/ focusing on contradictions and 5/regarding organisations, it also involves not being so focused on the war on error, loosening the control filters, and increasing organisational willpower.

Klein makes a detailed and clear exposition of how he approached this research and is honest about the sources and method he uses. He uses a naturalist approach, that is, he uses examples from people acting in the real world under natural conditions, and not from people subject to artificial lab psychological tests. I am sure the Academia, the establishment, will hit back and question his approach, but I love when people who are part of the same Academia question it and come up with new approaches and theories. Klein is a Ph.D. scientist, a respected psychologist, who has been there, done what he is supposed to do and seen that it does not always work. When he criticises lab experiments in the field of Insight, he is not using generalisations or is not saying that lab research is not good, he is saying that lab research is leading nowhere in the field and that models developed in the early 20th century are not good enough to explain how insight occurs. His critique is elegant, tamed and conciliatory. I love that true researchers are always non dogmatic. They are the ones giving us breakthroughs in Science not the others.

The examples he uses for his study come from the real world: the military, astronomy, medicine, fire fighting, scientific discoveries, the stock market, corporate world, sports, and from Klein's own personal and family life, and they are truly illustrative, and very interesting for the lay reader.

Some brilliant quotes by Klein in this book
 >> "I don’t believe insights are the same as “aha,” any more than conception is the same as orgasm."

>> Systems such as Google determine what we don’t want to see and either filter it out completely or bury it so deep, perhaps on page 25 of the search results, that we probably won’t find it. The personalised searches we get from Google, Yahoo, and others gauge our preferences and then screen out the items we’re likely to find irrelevant. Pariser argues that searches also need to show us items that are challenging and even uncomfortable. They need to expose us to other points of view. (p. 147).
>> Our insights transform us in several ways. They change how we understand, act, see, feel, and desire.
>> Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns (p. 27).
>> I don’t believe the purpose of science is to do “good” science. The purpose of science is to learn more about the world, including the world of insights. We don’t want to be sloppy about it. We want to use methods that yield results worth taking seriously. We shouldn’t, however, become so fixated on the methods that we lose sight of the object of our inquiry. We shouldn’t evolve a set of methods that don’t fully capture the phenomenon we want to understand. (p. 178)

The book has two main downsides. The first, is that Klein's considerations about his naturalistic approach are repetitive and redundant at times, split in two different parts of the book. A chapter on methodology would have sufficed and, honestly, I would have expected the editor to regroup Klein's considerations in whichever part was most convenient. Regarding content, many of the considerations that Klein makes regarding how to foster insight in the corporate world and organisations are a bit 'wouldn't be nice?', because although he solutions he proposes are great, they go against how the corporate world and organisations are structured and function internally. 

This is a book really easy to read, well structured, entertaining, and with substance, and some aha moments that make any reading always special.

I read this book after finishing this book on apocalyptic predictions. I missed in it some insight into what makes people want to predict the future, date the end of the world or make predictions, prophetic or not. Future Babble gives you the answers! So it has turned out a perfect companion to the other one. Actually, I would recommend reading this one and then the other.

Although based on economical, demographical, political and social predictions in the last century or so, Future Babble is a brilliant book with a great work of research, and a sound historical and psychological approach to prediction making and the power of the expert in Society in general, in the contemporary world in particular. In a way, Future Babble is an X-rayed view of the sugar-coated magic ball that experts' predictions are.

 The goal of this book is not to mock particular individuals. Nor is it to scorn the category known as “experts.” It is to better understand the human desire to know what will happen, why that desire will never be satisfied, and how we can better prepare ourselves for the unknowable future" (Locations 69-71)

The book replies with specific details to questions like these:
> Why do we want and need predictions on anything?
 > Is anything predictable and subject to future predictions?
> Why do we trust some experts and not others?
> What does make an expert an expert and trustworthy for prediction making?
> Why are tides and eclipses predictable when predictions about so much else can be blown away by the flap of a butterfly’s wings?
> Why can we calculate insurance premiums, but not the world markets in 10 years time?
> Why experts whose predictions failed miserably consider them successful even the evidence is undeniable?
> Why experts whose predictions failed are constantly called to make more predictions?

> Why experts who make real successful predictions are rarely believed and those who have no clue are listened to, and unquestionably so?
> Why do experts fail in their predictions?
> Are there patterns in the Economy, Demography, History, Politics or human relationships that can explain the future in those areas?
>  If the future is unpredictable, doesn’t that mean all our planning and forecasting is pointless?
> Are experts really so bad?
> What distinguishes the mass of delusional experts from the few impressive ones? 

The book is well structured and discussed, without being boring or pretentious. Yet, all the examples are historically and statistically backed, and explanations are given to every single point in which you might find yourself asking, "but why?". The whys are the most important and interesting part of the book, and they are explained by a psychological approach. Among others, some psychological biases and heuristic involved in prediction making, justifying the failed predictions and forgetting about the expert's constant failures are: :
< Optimism Bias.
< Confirmation Bias.
< Status Quo Bias.
< Negativity Bias.
< Hindsight Bias.
< Rationalization Bias.
< The bias bias.

< Anchoring-and-adjustment Heuristic.
< Availability Heuristic.
< Representativeness Heuristic.
< Confidence Heuristic.
 
The point of departure needed to be scientifically sound. And it is sound. Gardner needed of an academic and scientific study to figure out the rate of failure among experts and how accurate expert's predictions are, and which characteristics do successful and unsuccessful prediction experts display. Otherwise, the whole discourse could have crumbled before even starting. Lucky Gardner had a brilliant stand on the research on this very subject by Philip Tetlock.

The book has many specific study cases, cases of international experts who predicted and failed miserably, of predictions that sound utterly ridiculous today but sold millions of books and were listed as the most important books of the decade at the time, and many small cases that showcase how and why people make predictions, and why they are bound to fail, or not.

I thought, well, it is great that Gardner sees the speck in the neighbour's eye, but not the log in his. So, how does he do (or how do we do) to see our own log? Gardner knows that all the biases he mentions affects us all, so how do we do to balance them?  The last chapter, The End, comes with the answers. Gardner does not focus on himself, of course, he shows how that can be done by using Alan Barnes' system on dealing with the documentation and research for the Privy Council Office of the Canadian Government. There are three key elements to balance your own biases: metacognition, information aggregation and humility. Not easy. Especially meta-cognition. Most people out there are not even conscious. Now, how did Gardner do that with this book? Did he do it himself?  Or was his editor or anybody else? Did he stop to ask himself, hey gorgeous me I am being biased here by any chance?  I would love to know that from the author himself, the specific method he applied to this specific book. Out of academic interest. 

This is not only a good book, it is very engaging  and intriguing, that gives answer after answer after answer. Besides, the book is well written, researched and referenced and has an impressive bibliography. Barely any typo in sight, as well. And Gardner is able to explain complex things in ways that any lay person can understand them. Kudos to him.

The Kindle Edition is flawless. However, if you read the book on Kindle for PC, the Lateral Index of  Contents does not display in it, while display perfectly in android devices.

There are other books on randomness and market prediction but this is the first I read on the subject and it is flawless.

Number one in my list of best books of 2015 so far.

If you are a woman (sorry Barbie it is not you) you have told yourself one of these lies at a certain point in your life and, by doing so, you've self-sabotaged yourself successfully. Congratulations, you feel miserable. No prize for you, you just pay the price.

Written by a female coach,  Big Lies... offers a concise evaluation of fifty-nine self-lies, limiting beliefs and distorted views of your female self and your self in general. They deal with your worth, your body, self-care, success, money, love, relationships, authenticity, and your spirit. The message is, see them as lies, because they are, and do not use them to justify your situation, your misery or your empty life.

Examples of big fat lies are: I am old, I cannot do X, I have to please everybody to be liked, money is bad, it is OK living beyond your means, you have to fake who you are to get a man, love is sacrificing yourself, better be polite than authentic, grieving openly and strongly is wrong, and so on. 

Many of these beliefs could be applied to men, as well, but others are specifically female. Also, some of these big fat lies are obvious, but others are not, and are the ones that I like the most, because they are not socially popular or accepted and will help you to separate hay from grain. Having said this, even the obvious ones are important to be highlighted because the truth is that a ridiculous amount of women are spending tons of money to "improve" themselves and "gain confidence" by increasing the size of their boobs, cutting and modifying pieces of their body flesh, and faking what they are not, instead of focussing on inner, ethical or intellectual growth. 

I found some of the "lies" on spirituality redundant. Being not religious or not spiritual is perfectly OK, as long as you have ethics. The power and value of behaving ethically is overseen too often despite being more universal than any religion out there, and applying to any religion out there. I am a bit sick of religious spiritual people who say and preach that they have strong morals or look for people with strong morals and then disrespect me or treat me in ways I consider totally unethical. Spirituality is fine if you need it. It is fine to believe or practice any religion, but being agnostic or atheist with a good set of ethics is something to be proud of, not a macule on your soul, mind you.     

The book is easy to read, and a quick read as well, as every single big fat lie has a mini chapter devoted to it, so you can read them easily while commuting. 

This is a sound book, but this is not the book of a psychologist. See it for what it is.

An entertaining good-hearted read overall. 

Johnson is a Jungian classic, and there is a reason for that. He mixes with easiness, elegance and clarity depth psychology and Jungian Psychology, mythology and dream work. He makes of Jungian conundrums something fun. Johnson, like Campbell, knows inside-out Western Mythology, Eastern Mythology and Philosophy and Christian/Catholic Mysticism.

 "She" is a collection of lectures given by Johnson (first published in 1976  and reviewed in 1989) revolving about the analysis of the Myth of Eros and Psyche (aka Amor and Psyche). The book is very enjoyable to read. Even if you are not interested in Depth or Jugian Psychology, you will enjoy the reading, and the way Johnson de-constructs a myth and gives it psychological  meaning. It is like seeing an orange being squeezed through a macro lenses. Fascinating.

"She" is not only an exploration of the female psyche, but also an approach to "the feminine in all of us", and also a tale of exploration of inner expansion and a dive into the unconscious. As a woman, I could relate to many of the things Johnson unveils.

 Much of the turmoil for a modern woman is the collision between her Aphrodite nature and her Psyche nature. (p. 8)

Bingo!

There are  two distinct parts in the book and in the myth examined: the one before Psyche's tasks and the one after the tasks start. Johnson says of the second is the one that shows more clearly the patterns of development of the feminine principle. However, although I could relate to many of the things he mentions there, I thought that some of the comments could also apply to the male psyche or to humans in general.

Despite the book being so old, is still fresh. Johnson's reflection on the validity of mythology for the modern world is wonderful, as myths contains a distilled imprint of human psychological structure, which is universal and timeless. Johnson does even more, he links myth and dreamwork in a two-way path. He shows, for example, how the myth herewith analysed replicates itself in an apparently unrelated dream of a female patient of his. Most importantly, he points out that some dreams have a mythological structure which makes them perfect to delve into our inner self and psyche. 

A WHINE

I have to congratulate HarperCollins e-books for ripping-off customers. Being charged 11+ bucks for 99 pages of an old book on Kindle sucks.

I always find pearls of wisdom in anything Johnson writes, his approach to the world and our psychological humanity make me ponder, always. Besides, he is a kindred spirit, an humanist in the proper sense of the word,  always worth of my time, even though, too often, I end lamenting that he is keeping most of his secrets to himself.

This book is a collection of four small essays, one of them dealing with projection. Unfortunately, the common denominator of the articles is not projection, but rather inner work and the concept of Maya or illusion. That would had been a more honest title and descriptor. If you are looking for a in-depth book on psychological projection, or a basic approach to psychological projection, this is not your book.

1/ Inner Gold
Half memoir half  simple approach to  psychological projection, it is a lovely piece of writing, with a Memoir sort of tone that I love. 

We barely understand how much of what we perceive in others and the outside world are actually parts of ourselves. Please observe the energy investments you make. (p.30)

To understand what Johnson says, you need a basic understanding of what projection and shadow are. Johnson does not explain readers what projection is, how projection mechanisms work, why is formed, and how to do something he insistently tells readers to do: to reclaim our inner gold or to return it to somebody else. How do you do that? No answer. Most people have the level of consciousness of a thermostat, they do not know they project, nor recognise that they are projecting or that others are projecting on to them, nor know anything about it, so unless Johnson gives the "recipe", there is no way to go. You expect a recipe because Johnson was an active psychoanalyst, and he must have it! The beans must have been spilled in the Garden of Eden, not sure if my Animus can get there and bring me a few. 

2/ Loneliness
This is my favourite piece. Again, there is a nostalgic feeling and Johnson's memoir approach to it. I love the way he categorises loneliness in three varieties (loneliness for the past, loneliness for the future, and loneliness for being close to God). Johnson basically says that loneliness is a state of mind and the soul, an interior matter, if you feel lonely you have to do inner work to solve it, connect with your essence, restore your connection with your unconscious, ground yourself in the energy of the world, bear your pain and:

 If you can transform your loneliness into solitude, you’re one step away from the most precious of all experiences. This is the cure for loneliness.

Did you need of Jungian Psychology to learn this?  If I were feeling lonely, I would love to ponder on many of the things Johnson says, but I think that would not be enough to cure my soul. Perhaps therapy? 

3/ Love Story
This is a very short reflection of the figure of  Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy. Beatrice is presented as a  soul guide or psychopomp. There a few pages sketching some wonderful thoughts but, overall, they are superficial and uninspired. 

4/ The one and future King
This chapter is odd and intriguing at the same time. Johnson is deeply religious (an ex-Benedictine monk) and it shows here, as this is a reflection on the meaning of the doctrine of the Second Coming of the Christ from a non-literal and archetypal point of view. Even if you are not religious, you will enjoy his approach. I think some of the things he says are beautiful and spiritually soothing, and his reflection on literalism is brilliant:

Literalism knows no end, and literalism is the death of insight. But that sublime archetypal structure is always available in its true, interior way, for anyone who chooses to touch it and is capable of touching it. Sometimes the point of contact becomes accessible only in our deepest, darkest moments. (....) Speech is literal and rational and cannot easily contain the depths of the mystery. For that we need symbols and symbolic language. (...) We can discover within ourselves the capacity to sustain both the presence of the divine and the holiness of daily life. The two are, in fact, one. (pp. 75-76)

Johnson speaks of God often, so if you are an atheist or agnostic you have to decide what God means to you. I thought that he connects well with some of the teachings of the New Thought Church.

Hurry Down Sunshine is the true story of Michael Greenberg's family when his teenager daughter started to have mental problems and especially after she was interned in a psychiatric isolation ward.

This could have been one of those soapy self-pity sympathy-seeking books that one find everywhere, but it is not. This is a raw memoir that reflects on how mental illness affects everybody (the sick, their families, their entourage and the health professionals) without adornment but elegance.

Greenberg portrays the reality of madness masterfully. He shows an extreme sensitivity and empathy towards all parts involved, without hiding the contradictory feelings that such situations brought to his life. He is able to make us feel the pain, despair, impotence and heartbreak that he found at being unable to deal with the problems that his daughter brought to life, but also the strength, hopes, awareness and depth of feelings that they came with.

This is the best Memoir I have ever written regarding the literary qualities of the writing. The book is superbly written (after all Greenberg is a reputed translator and writer), his English is refined and precise, and his narrative and composition clear, engaging, fresh and profound.

I read this book a few years ago, and it is still in my memory. It is just a great book.

This is a very short but very useful and practical book on what manipulation is, how manipulators act and what you can do about it. It is written by an experienced psychotherapist in a very simple language, really easy to understand for the lay reader. Unlike so many other authors, he does not mix apples with bananas (so to speak) and puts in the same basket things like how to influence people and manipulative behaviour, overt manipulation and covert manipulation (the latter mostly hidden and the worst of all kinds of manipulation).

The first part of the is a categorization of what manipulation in general is, covert aggression specifically, and the different types of manipulative people you can find. He uses long study real-life cases that show how these people operate. The second part is the practical one, and shows how manipulators operate practically, which sort of techniques and behaviour they show, which buttons of yours they push, and what you can do about it. This part is very well organized, very sound, and useful.

Some of the main takes from the book, among others, are:

> Many of these manipulators do not have any trauma background or anything that justifies their actions. They are nasty per se.

> Covert aggression is an attack, always hidden, never explicit, and has a hidden agenda. The agenda is using you the more the better. All covert aggression is active, intentional and aggressive in its nature.

> Manipulators come in all shapes, ages, social status, civil status, gender and religious beliefs.

> Most covert-aggressive people have a character disturbance, wear a social mask, and don't want to change.

> You cannot and must not try to understand why these people operate the way they do. A psychotherapist should be doing that. You have to take care of yourself, put yourself and escape as fast and as soon as you see them manipulating.

> Learn which are your weakest points in your character, because these are the buttons they will push you to use you.

The main downside of the book, to me, is the fact that the two parts of the same are quite unbalanced, with the descriptive part occupying most of the book. I think most readers would come to this book looking for tools to use, not for a description of people who they are probably already found. Although, I agree with many of the things Simon says in the epilogue, I consider it unnecessary, a big preachy, and does not help the reader to get more "juice" from the book. Finally, I missed among the ways of identifying manipulators more tools on the language they use, which makes easier to spot them before, during and after you get involved with them.

This is a good read, like a basic introduction to the subject. I wanted more!

Introvert Power second edition is a very enjoyable read, and an encouraging book for introverts. It helps introverts to feel OK about being introvert, to recognize themselves as such, act in "hot" situations with extroverts, and teach extroverts how we operate. The book is, in part, a bit of a memoir as the author comments how she deals with introversion in her private life.

The book explains things easily and clearly, and kills many myths and assumptions about introversion that have been thriving in the media and in the academia for decades despite their lack of accuracy.

Some of the points the author makes are terrific:

> Introversion is not a flaw, a mental disturbance or an aberration of the character, but a way of being and relating that is intrinsically natural and healthy but different from extroversion.

> Introverts are almost half of the population, not a weird minority.

> The dominant culture in a given country affects the way introverts express and relate in general.

> Shyness and introversion are two very different things.

> Not all introverts are the same. There are the Socially Accessible and the Dark Hidders. (Actually, I think there are the Chameleon Introverts, which go from SS to DH depending on the circumstances, just my personal contribution).

> Seeking silence, solitude and alone time are all empowering means for an introvert to recharge and find harmony.

I also loved:

+ The way the author describes the ways in which introverts think, behave, feel and relate.

+ That the author uses the word p*ss off sparingly. What a lovely verb!

+ The snippets about thoughts and ways of being described by many introverts, which are reproduced throughout the book

+ Some of the techniques used to cut exhausting talkers and how to negotiate, face or say no to parties and noisy stuff.

Having said this, the book is repetitive at times, a bit shallow others, the author offers some generalizations on foreign countries and cultures that are not based on direct experience but on readings that are not produced by locals, the book is unnecessarily wordy at times, and some of the advice given is just obvious. For example, if you are an introvert you do need to retreat and will find ways of retreating no matter what, you don't need a chapter to tell you to do so, or how to do so. There are many examples of the sort.

Most recommended for teenagers and people who feel awkward because they seem to be "boring", "quiet", or a "loner". It will help them to deal better with many of the every-day challenges that introverts face.