In a journey that spans 50 books, hundreds of ideas, and over a century in time, 50 Psychology Classics looks at some of the most intriguing questions relating to what motivates us, what makes us feel and act in certain ways, how our brains work, and how we create a sense of self. Deeper awareness in these areas can lead us to self-knowledge, a better understanding of human nature, improved relationships, and increased effectiveness—in short, to make a real difference to your life.
50 Psychology Classics explores writings from such iconic figures as Freud, Adler, Jung, Skinner, James, Piaget, and Pavlov, and also highlights the work of contemporary thinkers such as Gardner, Gilbert, Goleman, and Seligman. There is a commentary devoted to each book, revealing the key points and providing a context of the ideas, people, and movements surrounding it. The blend of old and new titles gives you an idea of writings that you should at least know about even if you are not going to read them, and newer, really practical titles that take account of the latest scientific findings.
The focus is on “psychology for nonpsychologists,” books everyone can read and be enlightened by, or that were expressly written for a general audience. In addition to psychologists, the list includes titles by neurologists, psychiatrists, biologists, communications experts, and journalists, not to mention a dockworker, an expert in violence, and a novelist. As the secrets of human behavior are too important to be defined by a single discipline or point of view, we need to hear from such an eclectic collection of voices.
The book does not focus primarily on psychiatry, although works by psychiatrists such as Oliver Sacks, Erik Erikson, R. D. Laing, and Viktor Frankl are included, plus some by famous therapists including Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson. 50 Psychology Classics is less about fixes to problems than supplying general insights into why people think or act as they do.
Despite the inclusion of some titles relating to the unconscious mind, the emphasis is also not on depth psychology, or concepts of the psyche or soul. Some of the best popular writers in this area, including James Hillman (The Soul’s Code), Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul), Carol Pearson (The Hero Within), and Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), have been covered in 50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Spiritual Classics, which explore books on the more transformational and spiritual sides of psychology.
The list of 50 psychology classics does not claim to be definitive, just to range over some of the major names and writings. Every collection of this type will be to some extent idiosyncratic, and no claims are made to cover the various fields and subfields in psychology comprehensively. Here we are seeking basic insights into some of the most intriguing psychological questions and concepts, and a greater knowledge of human nature.
“Psychology is the science of mental life.” William James
As the early memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) wrote, “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.” He meant that people have been thinking about human thought, emotion, intelligence, and behavior for thousands of years, but as a discipline based on facts rather than speculation psychology is still in its infancy. Even though he made his statement a hundred years ago, psychology is still considered young.
It emerged from two other disciplines, physiology and philosophy. German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is seen as the father of psychology because he insisted it should be a separate discipline, more empirical than philosophy and more focused on the mind than physiology. In the 1870s he created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and wrote his huge work Principles of Physiological Psychology.
As Wundt is read today only by those with a specialized interest, he is not included in the list of classics. American philosopher William James (1842–1910), however, also considered a “founding father” of modern psychology, is still widely read. The brother of novelist Henry James, he trained in medicine and then transferred to philosophy, but like Wundt felt that the workings of the mind deserved to be a separate field of study. Building on a theory by German neuroanatomist Franz Gall that all thoughts and mental processes were biological, James helped to spread the remarkable idea that one’s self—with all its hopes, loves, desires, and fears—was contained in the soft gray matter within the walls of the skull. Explanations of thoughts as the product of some deeper force such as the soul, he felt, were really the realm of metaphysics.
James may have helped define the parameters of psychology, but it was Sigmund Freud’s writings that really made it a subject of interest to the general public. Freud was born 150 years ago, in 1856; his parents knew he was bright, but even they could not have imagined the impact his ideas would have on the world. On leaving school he was set to study law, but changed his mind at the last minute and enrolled in medicine. His work on brain anatomy and with patients suffering from “hysteria” led him to wonder about the influence of the unconscious mind on behavior, which sparked his interest in dreams.
Today, it is easy to take for granted how much the average person is familiar with psychological concepts such as the ego and the unconscious mind, but these and many others are all—for better or worse—Freud’s legacy. Well over half the titles covered in 50 Psychology Classics are by either Freudians or post-Freudians, or mark themselves out by being anti-Freud. It is now fashionable to say that Freud’s work is unscientific, and his writings literary creations rather than real psychology. Whether this is accurate or not, he remains far and away the most famous person in the field, and although psychoanalysis—the talking therapy he created to peep into a person’s unconscious—is now much less practiced, the image of a Viennese doctor drawing out the deepest thoughts of his couch-lying patient is still the most popular image we have when we think of psychology.
As some neuroscientists have intimated, Freud may be due for a comeback. His emphasis on the major role of the unconscious in shaping behavior has not been proved wrong by brain imaging techniques and other research, and some of his other theories may yet be validated. Even if not, his position as psychology’s most original thinker is not likely to change.
The reaction to Freud came most obviously in the form of behaviorism. Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments with dogs, which showed that animals were simply the sum of their conditioned responses to environmental stimuli, inspired behaviorism’s leading exponent B. F. Skinner, who wrote that the idea of the autonomous person driven by an inner motive was a romantic myth. Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person’s head (“mentalism”), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way. Our environments shape us into what we are, and we change the course of our actions according to what we learn is good for our survival. If we want to construct a better world, we need to create environments that make people act in more moral or productive ways. To Skinner this involved a technology of behavior that rewards certain actions and not others.
Emerging in the 1960s, cognitive psychology used the same rigorous scientific approach as behaviorism but returned to the question of how behavior is actually generated inside the head. Between the stimulation received from the environment and our response, certain processes had to occur inside the brain, and cognitive researchers revealed the human mind to be a great interpreting machine that made patterns and created sense of the world outside, forming maps of reality.
This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing our thinking, we can alleviate depression or simply have greater control over our behavior. This form of psychotherapy has now largely taken the place that Freudian psychoanalysis once assumed in treating people’s mental issues.
A more recent development in the cognitive field is “positive psychology,” which has sought to reorient the discipline away from mental problems to the study of what makes people happy, optimistic, and productive. To some extent this area was foreshadowed by pioneering humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote about the self-actualized or fulfilled person, and Carl Rogers, who once noted that he was pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about people.
In the last 30 years, both behavioral and cognitive psychology have been increasingly informed by advances in brain science. The behaviorists thought it wrong to merely surmise what happened inside the brain, but science is now allowing us to see inside and map the neural pathways and synapses that actually generate action. This research may end up revolutionizing how we see ourselves, almost certainly for the better, because while some people fear that the reduction of human beings to how the brain is wired will dehumanize us, in fact greater knowledge of the brain can only increase our appreciation of its workings.
Today’s sciences of the brain are enabling us to return to William James’s definition of psychology as the “science of mental life,” except that this time we are able to advance knowledge based on what we know at the molecular level. Having evolved partly out of the field of physiology, psychology may be returning to its physical roots. The irony is that this attention to minute physicality is yielding answers to some of our deepest philosophical questions, such as the nature of consciousness, free will, the creation of memory, and the experience and control of emotion. It may even be that the “mind” and the “self” are simply illusions created by the extraordinary complexity of the brain’s neural wiring and chemical reactions.
What is the future of psychology? Perhaps all we can be certain of is that it will become a science more and more based on knowledge of the brain.
Part of the reason psychology became a popular field of study is that its early titans, including James, Freud, Jung, and Adler, wrote books that ordinary people could understand. We can pick up one of their titles today and still be entranced. Despite the difficulty of some of the concepts, people have a deep hunger for knowledge on how the mind works, human motivation, and behavior, and in the last 15 years there has been something of a new golden age in popular psychology writing, with authors such as Daniel Goleman, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi fulfilling that need.
Below is a brief introduction to the titles covered in 50 Psychology Classics. The books are divided into seven categories that, although unconventional, may help you to choose titles according to the themes that interest you most. At the rear of this book you will find an alternative list of “50 More Classics.” Again, this is not a definitive list, but it may assist in any further reading you wish to do.
Behavior, biology, and genes:
A science of the brain
Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain
William James, The Principles of Psychology
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
Anne Moir & David Jessel, Brainsex
Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
For William James, psychology was a natural science based on the workings of the brain, but in his era the tools to study this mysterious organ properly were not adequate to the task. Now, with technological advances, psychology is gaining many of its insights from the brain itself rather than from the behavior it generates.
This new emphasis on brain science raises uncomfortable questions regarding the biological and genetic bases of behavior. Is the way we are relatively unchangeable, or are we a blank slate ready to be socialized by our environments? The old debate over “nature vs nurture” has gained new energy. Genetic science and evolutionary psychology have demonstrated that much of what we call human nature, including intelligence and personality, is wired into us in the womb or at least hormonally influenced. For cultural or political reasons, Steven Pinker notes in The Blank Slate, the major role that biology plays in human behavior is sometimes denied, but as knowledge increases this will become increasingly difficult to maintain. Louann Brizendine’s book, for example, the result of many years’ study of the effects that hormones have on the female brain, brilliantly shows the extent to which women can be shaped by their biology at different stages in life.
More fundamentally, Moir and Jessel’s Brainsex presents a convincing case that many of our behavioral tendencies come from the sexual biology of our brains, which are largely set by the time the foetus is eight weeks old. Even our cherished ideas about the self are going under the microscope. Today’s neuroscience suggests that the self is best understood as a sort of illusion that the brain creates. The remarkable writings of Oliver Sacks, for instance, show that the brain continually works to create and maintain the feeling of an “I” that is in control, even if there is in fact no part of the brain that can be identified as the locus of “self feeling.” Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain’s remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.
Jean Piaget never did any laboratory work on the brain, but grew up studying snails in the Swiss mountains. He applied an early genius for scientific observation to the study of children, noting that they progress along a definite line of stages according to age, assuming there is adequate stimulation from their environments. Equally, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, also originally a biologist, sought to shatter the taboos surrounding male and female sexuality by pointing out how our mammalian biology drives our sexual behaviors.
The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression. Even amid the new findings on the genetic or biological basis of behavior, we should never conclude that as human beings we are determined by our DNA, hormones, or brain structure. Unlike other animals we are aware of our instincts, and as a result may attempt to shape or control them. We are neither nature nor nurture only, but an interesting combination of both.
Tapping the unconscious mind:
Wisdom of a different kind
Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear
Milton Erickson (by Sidney Rosen), My Voice Will Go With You
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Psychology involves more than the rational, thinking mind, and our ability to tap into our unconscious can yield a vast store of wisdom. Freud tried to show that dreams are not simply meaningless hallucinations, but a window into the unconscious that can reveal suppressed wishes. To him the conscious mind was like the tip of an iceberg, with the submerged bulk providing the center of gravity in terms of motivation. Jung went further, identifying a whole subrational architecture (the “collective unconscious”) that exists independent of particular individuals, constantly generating the customs, art, mythology, and literature of culture. For both Jung and Freud, greater awareness of “what lies beneath” meant someone was less likely to be tripped up by life. The unconscious was a store of intelligence and wisdom that could be accessed if we knew how, and their great task was reconnect us to our deeper selves.
As therapy, “depth” psychology has been no more than moderately successful, and tends to be only as effective as the insights or techniques of particular practitioners. Milton Erickson, for instance, a famous hypnotherapist, had the motto “It is really amazing what people can do. Only they don’t know what they can do.” He also understood the unconscious to be a well of wise solutions, and enabled his patients to tap into it and regain forgotten personal power.
As a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, intuition is a form of wisdom that we can cultivate. This is chillingly demonstrated in Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, which provides many examples of our natural ability to know what to do in critical life-or-death situations—as long as we are prepared to listen to and act on our internal voice. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink also highlights the power of “thinking without thinking,” showing that an instant assessment of a situation or person is often as accurate as one formed over a long period. While obviously logic and rationality are important, smart people are in touch with all levels of their mind, and trustful of their feelings even when the origins of those feelings seem mysterious.
Thinking better, feeling better:
Happiness and mental health
Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem
David D. Burns, Feeling Good
Albert Ellis & Robert Harper, A Guide to Rational Living
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy
Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice
Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness
William Styron, Darkness Visible
Robert E. Thayer, The Origin of Everyday Moods
For many years, psychology was surprisingly little interested in happiness. Martin Seligman has helped to raise the subject to serious study and observation, and his “positive psychology” is revealing through science the sometimes unexpected recipes for mental wellbeing. Barry Schwartz’s distinction between maximizers and satisficers has given us the counterintuitive insight that restricting our choices in life can actually lead to greater happiness and satisfaction, and Daniel Gilbert’s book points out the surprising fact that, although humans are the only animals who can look into the future, we often make mistakes in terms of what we think will lead to happiness. Turning from the macro to the micro, Robert Thayer’s work into the physiological causes of daily moods has helped thousands of people gain better control over how they feel hour by hour. The fascinating insights of each of these books show that the achievement of happiness is never as simple a matter as we would like.
The cognitive psychology revolution has had a dramatic impact on mental health, and two of its major names are David D. Burns and Albert Ellis. Their mantra that thoughts create feelings, not the other way around, has helped many people to get back in control of their lives because it applies logic and reason to the murky pool of emotions. Yet their work has many implications for achieving happiness generally, in that most of us can literally “choose” to be happy, if we understand the mind’s thought–emotion mechanism.
The concept of self-esteem has been criticized in recent years, but Nathaniel Branden’s seminal work on the subject remains convincing in its argument that personal esteem arises from having our own set of principles and acting on them. When we fail to do this, it is easy to descend into selfhatred and depression. Yet as William Styron’s classic account of his own battle with depression indicates, the causes of the condition are often mysterious and can strike anyone. He notes that it remains the cancer of the mental health world: We are close to finding a cure, but not close enough for those who do not respond quickly to drugs or therapy.
Why we are how we are:
The study of personality and the self
Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing
Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther
Hans Eysenck, Dimensions of Personality
Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts
Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self
Gail Sheehy, Passages
The ancients commanded us to “know thyself,” but in psychology this quest takes on many aspects. Eysenck’s work on the extraverted and neurotic dimensions of personality paved the way for many other models, with contemporary psychologists commonly assessing people according to the “Big Five” personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Today, we can take myriad tests to determine our “personality type,” and while it is wise to be skeptical of their validity, some can provide genuine insights. The best known of the modern forms is the inventory originally created by Isabel Briggs Myers.
Of course, who we are at one point in our life may be different from who we are at another. Erik Erikson coined the term “identity crisis,” and in his compelling psychobiography of religious reformer Martin Luther, he conveys both the pain of uncertain identity and the power that comes when we finally know who we are. As Gail Sheehy pointed out in her 1970s hit Passages, we go through many crises during adult life, and not only are they somewhat predictable, we should welcome them as an opportunity for growth.
Human beings sometimes have to cope with what seem like competing selves. Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses. Neo-Freudian Karen Horney believed that childhood experiences resulted in our creation of a self that “moved toward people” or “moved away from people.” These tendencies were a sort of mask that could develop into neurosis if we were not willing to move beyond them. Underneath was what she called a “wholehearted,” or real, person.
Melanie Klein focused on how a “schizoid” personality could develop as the result of an infant’s relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world. Most of us do have a strong sense of self, but as R. D. Laing showed in his landmark work on schizophrenia, some people lack this basic security and attempt to replace the vacuum with false selves. Most of the time we take it for granted, but it is only when it is lost that we can fully appreciate our brain’s ability to create the feeling of selfpossession, or be comfortable with who we are.
Why we do what we do:
Great thinkers on human motivation
Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature
Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority
Ivan Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes
B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
Alfred Adler was a member of Freud’s original inner circle, but broke away because he disagreed that sex was the prime mover behind human behavior. He was more interested in how our early environments shape us, believing that we all seek greater power by trying to make up for what we perceive we lacked in childhood—his famous theory of “compensation.”
If Adler’s theory of human action relates to power, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s brand of existential psychology, “logotherapy,” posits that the human species is uniquely made to seek meaning. It is our responsibility to look for meaning in life, even in the darkest times, and whatever the circumstances we always have a vestige of free will.
Yet as amateur psychologist Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, people allow themselves to be swept up in larger causes in order to be freed of responsibility for their lives, and to escape the banality or misery of the present. And Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments showed that, given the right conditions, human beings exhibit a frightening willingness to put others through pain in order to be seen kindly by those in authority. Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.
While poets, writers, and philosophers have long celebrated the inner motive that guides autonomous human behavior, B. F. Skinner defined the self simply as “a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.” There was no such thing as human nature, and conscience or morality could be boiled down to environments that induced us to behave in moral ways. Skinner’s ideas built on the work of Ivan Pavlov, whose success in conditioning dogs’ behavior also brought into question the freedom of human action.
Despite these vast differences in understanding motivation, together these books provide remarkable insights into why we do what we do, or at least what we are capable of doing—both good and bad.
Why we love the way we do:
The dynamics of relationships
Eric Berne, Games People Play
Susan Forward, Emotional Blackmail
John M. Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Harry Harlow, The Nature of Love
Thomas A. Harris, I’m OK—You’re OK
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists. In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. Remarkably, this sort of touching went against the child-rearing views of the time.
More recently, marriage researcher John M. Gottman looked at another aspect of relationship dynamics and found that the conventional wisdom on what makes long-term romantic partnerships work is often wrong. The most valuable information on how to maintain or save relationships comes from scientific observation of couples in action, right down to the microexpressions and apparently inane comments seen in everyday conversations. Similarly, in the past we may have looked to literature to be enlightened about a subject as intensely personal as emotional blackmail, but psychologists such as Susan Forward are now providing better answers on how we can protect ourselves against this corrosive element in relationships.
Pop psychology pioneers Eric Berne and Thomas Harris understood our close personal encounters as “transactions” that could be analyzed according to the three selves of Adult, Child, and Parent. Berne’s observation that we are always playing games with each other is perhaps a cynical view of humanity, but by becoming aware of those games we have the chance to move beyond them.
The contribution of humanistic psychology to better relationships is recognized by the inclusion of Carl Rogers, whose influential book reminds us that relationships cannot flower if they don’t have a climate of listening and nonjudgmental acceptance, and that empathy is the mark of a genuine person.
Working at our peak:
Creative power and communication skills
Robert Bolton, People Skills
Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking
Robert Cialdini, Influence
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity
Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind
Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations
Debates rage in the academic world over the true nature of intelligence, but in working life we are interested in its application. Two of the outstanding titles in this area, by Daniel Goleman and Howard Gardner, both suggest that intelligence involves much more than straight IQ. There are an array of “intelligences” of an emotional or social nature that can together be a decisive factor in how well a person does in life.
Unlike IQ, one’s ability to communicate well can be improved relatively easily, as Robert Bolton’s perennially popular book shows. And in Difficult Conversations, a product of extensive Harvard research, Douglas Stone and his colleagues give excellent advice on how to deal with some of the most challenging workplace encounters. As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone’s dignity intact.
One of the decisive factors in success in business is the ability to persuade. Robert Cialdini’s landmark work on the psychology of persuasion is a must-read if you are involved in marketing, but also of interest to anyone who wishes to understand how we are made to do things we would not normally choose to do.
Another component of work success is creativity. Edward de Bono’s term “lateral thinking” seemed very new in the 1960s when he coined it, but in today’s entrepreneurial culture we are all expected to think outside the box. At a broader level, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity, based on a systematic study, shows why creativity is central to a rich, meaningful life, and why many people do not achieve their full flowering until their later years. Most importantly, the book provides many features of the creative person that we can emulate.
“The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.”
Alfred Adler
“Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick.”
Steven Pinker
William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature. Some 80 years after Alfred Adler made the remark above, we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology.
In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick. To survive and thrive, we have to know who and what we are, and to be canny about the motivations of others. The common route to this knowledge is life experience, but we can advance our appreciation of the subject more quickly through reading. Some people gain insights from fiction, others from philosophy. But psychology is the only science exclusively devoted to the study of human nature, and its popular literature—surveyed in this collection—aims to convey this vital wisdom.