REVIEW: “Psychology. People, concepts, experiments ", Paul Kleinman

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Many wanted to become psychologists. Mainly due to the fact that this profession allows you to get into the head and understand other people. "Psychology" by Paul Kleinman will not be able to teach this, but this is the only book that will give you an understanding of the basics of psychology and, possibly, continue to study science further.

I recently finished reading the book "Aristotle for All", a review of it can be found. Perhaps this is the first book in my life that looks more like a sammari. It seemed difficult to fit key information about an entire science into one book, but Mortimer Adler did it.

Psychology is the second such book, and I was no longer skeptical about it. I heard the name of its author, read a few (positive) reviews, and tuned in for fun and useful reading.

The book immediately shows that Kleinman is a blogger. Each chapter takes no more than two pages, everything is clearly structured, and I never got bored: as soon as you start nodding off a boring topic, it ends immediately.

The book contains not only a lot of information, but also interesting facts that people who do not specialize in psychology hardly knew about before.

Confrontation between Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney

If psychology had a reward for misogyny, Sigmund Freud would surely have received it. In his theory of psychosexual development, girls between the ages of three and six - the phallic phase - with their fathers are based on penis envy.

Of course, Horney (and many others) disagreed with this theory. However, instead of refuting it, Karen came up with another theory, which, by and large, also did not stand up to much criticism.

At the phallic stage, there is supposedly a phenomenon that Horney calls uterine envy. She suggests that men are jealous of women’s ability to bear children.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Horney's theory was rejected by society, but later it contributed to the development of the idea of gender equality.

Seven plus or minus two

Another chapter I remember was devoted to the cognitive psychologist George Miller. In 1956, he published The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: The Limits of Information Processing Ability, which is still relevant today.

In it, Miller expressed the idea that a person's short-term memory can store only seven pieces of information, plus or minus two. In order to memorize more elements, they need to be combined into blocks of five to nine pieces each. For example, it's hard to remember the number 198719052345. But if you combine the numbers into blocks, you get the following:

1987 19 05 23 45.

Thus, numbers are associated with the date and time, and it is much easier to remember them.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that Kleinman does everything and a little, in "Psychology" he managed to collect all the information that an unprepared person needs. Pavlov's experiments, Freud's theories, the Stanford experiment, personality disorders - all of this is given a little space in the book, but this is enough.

It is unlikely that you will learn something new for yourself if you are already familiar with psychology. However, if you need an interestingly written encyclopedia or you want to plunge into the world of psychology, but it is not clear where to start, Kleinman's Psychology is what you need.