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Personality Theory
This text covers general personality theory, with an emphasis on cultural aspects affecting personality development. There is also a section focusing on making positive choices in the development of one's personality from a number of different cultural/philosophical perspectives.
501 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 15, 2014
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December 10, 2024
I’m currently reading this for a class and find it laughable that my college actually assigned this textbook. It’s always jarring when Mark, the author, starts using first-person language, often in the middle of a paragraph. He loves sharing his opinions about people being “too hard on Freud”, perhaps unaware of how emergent sociologists “disagree” with Freud because that’s how research works: the building upon of previous knowledge and rejection of over-generalized and harmful claims about certain classes of people.
I’d like to ease Mark’s borderline hysterical defense of Freud with these words: Hey man, your buddy Freud’s work was like, so foundational to western psychology and even inspired a century of rapid progress in the realm of psychotherapy. Mad respect. But maybe there’s even more to the human psyche than your super cool friend claimed?
Anyway, another issue I have with the author is how he summarized a single case study as general evidence, drawing from the experience of Norah Vincent, a woman who pretended to be a man for 18 months, who discovered that men actually have it just as hard as women because of how often they’re rejected in the dating world. The significance Mark places on these “findings” are so telling of his own lived experience.
To add to the laughs, he even pulled “evidence” from the bogus 90’s pop psychology book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”, summarizing its “findings” with earnest respect.
The fact that this even got published as a textbook within the last decade just goes to show how deeply entrenched misogyny is in academia and psychology.
I’m giving this two stars because at least it was an engaging textbook, I actually did learn quite a bit.
I’d like to ease Mark’s borderline hysterical defense of Freud with these words: Hey man, your buddy Freud’s work was like, so foundational to western psychology and even inspired a century of rapid progress in the realm of psychotherapy. Mad respect. But maybe there’s even more to the human psyche than your super cool friend claimed?
Anyway, another issue I have with the author is how he summarized a single case study as general evidence, drawing from the experience of Norah Vincent, a woman who pretended to be a man for 18 months, who discovered that men actually have it just as hard as women because of how often they’re rejected in the dating world. The significance Mark places on these “findings” are so telling of his own lived experience.
To add to the laughs, he even pulled “evidence” from the bogus 90’s pop psychology book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”, summarizing its “findings” with earnest respect.
The fact that this even got published as a textbook within the last decade just goes to show how deeply entrenched misogyny is in academia and psychology.
I’m giving this two stars because at least it was an engaging textbook, I actually did learn quite a bit.
Displaying 1 of 1 review