Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

Theodore Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist who has spent a lot of time counseling people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. He's also a penetrating author with a terrific prose style. He's worth reading for the style alone.

In this book Dalrymple asserts the strong thesis that modern psychiatry is not only largely a waste of time, but actually counterproductive. He's not talking about the cases of obvious pathology, where he is fully willing to concede that psychiatry has made genuine and valuable contributions. He is talking more about psychiatry as it tends to expand into a general philosophy or comprehensive view of human nature in the form of Freudian psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.  Dalrymple holds that in these forms psychology either teaches things that are trivially true and well-known, or novel ideas that are inherently destructive. Chief among the latter is the idea that some controlling force - be it childhood trauma, our genes, or our conditioning, etc. - dictates our behavior.

Dalyrmple is a master of the pithy phrase. Opening the book at random: "Psychoanalysis, like death, is a bourn from which no traveler returns."

Highly recommended.

Double Fault by Lionel Shriver

I haven't been keeping up with this reading log, although I've been reading. I'll post on the books I can remember I've read over the last few months.

This one is a novel by the same author as We Need To Talk About Kevin. And like that book, it explores a sort of Nietzschean theme of the will to power as fundamental to human relations. Shriver likes to take the most intimate of human relations - in the case of Kevin, that between mother and son - and tell a story of two people attempting to overcome the will to power to know each other. And if you are at all familiar with her work, she's not too optimistic about the outcome.

Double Fault does to marriage what Kevin did to motherhood. Shriver ups the ante by making the marriage partners both struggling professional tennis players. Since competition is at the heart of what they do, there is the danger that the marriage will become a contest as well - and it does.

This book isn't quite as compelling as Kevin, but still a good read.