Here are 100 books that Governing the Soul fans have personally recommended if you like
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My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.
The epic 900-page Discovery of the Unconscious is a phenomenally detailed and well-researched book that still challenges many of today’s psychological ‘truths.’ Ellenberger takes as his starting point models of the unconscious developed by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, which still influence many contemporary therapeutic treatments. He then skilfully links these models of the unconscious mind back to exorcism, magnetism, and hypnotism. Ellenberger’s detailed account of the use of magnetism and hypnosis by Jean Martin Charcot and others is fascinating because he explains exactly how Charcot's approaches premised new “uncovering” models devised by Nietzsche and the neo-Romantic movement. He also explains how Charcot’s work related to the growing interest in instincts and sexuality inspired by Darwin that culminated in the Freudian unconscious. In doing so, Ellenberger exposes what was genuinely new in the modern unconscious, and which parts of it have a much longer history. The…
This classic work is a monumental, integrated view of man's search for an understanding of the inner reaches of the mind. In an account that is both exhaustive and exciting, the distinguished psychiatrist and author demonstrates the long chain of development,through the exorcists, magnetists, and hypnotists,that led to the fruition of dynamic psychiatry in the psychological systems of Janet, Freud, Adler, and Jung.
My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.
Foucault’s classic 1961 book, History of Madness, was republished in 2006 in its entirety, exposing the serious omissions of the earlier English translation. In its full form, it stands the test of time as a groundbreaking book that exposed the origins of the modern rational self as the product of repeated attempts to understand, exclude, contain, eliminate, and treat ‘madness’. Foucault’s main argument was that since the Renaissance, our understanding of madness shifted from a philosophical phenomenon into an objective medical science. In the Renaissance, madness could still provide wisdom and insight. Yet, during the 17th and early 18th Centuries, numerous institutions of confinement, such as asylums and poor houses, were established to contain both madness and economic redundancy.’
Foucault characterises the modern experience of madness as defined purely by medical science. He claims this perspective is limiting and definitely not a move towards the ‘truth’ of madness. His…
When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'age Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.
This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.
History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions…
I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners.
Hacking is one of the leading thinkers in the field of mental health. This exploration of multiple personality disorder helped me to think about similar cultural phenomena, including today’s significant increase in trans-identified teens.
Hacking doesn’t tell you whether he thinks MPD is “real” or not, but he dives deep into beliefs about memory and mental illness. I found his writing compelling and clear.
Twenty-five years ago one could list by name the tiny number of multiple personalities recorded in the history of Western medicine, but today hundreds of people receive treatment for dissociative disorders in every sizable town in North America. Clinicians, backed by a grassroots movement of patients and therapists, find child sexual abuse to be the primary cause of the illness, while critics accuse the "MPD" community of fostering false memories of childhood trauma. Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral and political climate,…
My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.
Forrester’s excellent, yet sadly unfinished, Thinking in Cases, advanced a radical new way to consider the history of the human sciences and their modelling of the self or the individual. Whereas Hacking and Foucault focused on population-based statistical styles of reasoning as the means by which the modern state operated, Forrester argues that these ‘styles of reasoning’ were always supported by what he has termed ‘case-based reasoning.’ In doing so, Forrester considers how biopolitical power has been advanced via both legal and medical cases. He describes his approach as being informed by ‘three rhizomic structures,’ namely ‘the psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; and the individual in the human sciences.’ This rhizomic model is unique to Forrester’s approach, and allows him to move freely between law, anthropology, medicine, politics, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, in his reflections on the case. He asks us to reflect on…
What exactly is involved in using particular case histories to think systematically about social, psychological and historical processes? Can one move from a textured particularity, like that in Freud's famous cases, to a level of reliable generality? In this book, Forrester teases out the meanings of the psychoanalytic case, how to characterize it and account for it as a particular kind of writing. In so doing, he moves from psychoanalysis to the law and medicine, to philosophy and the constituents of science. Freud and Foucault jostle here with Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and Robert Stoller, and Einstein and Freud's connection…
I’m a practical, straight-talking New Zealander who has lived in the UK since 2007. I’ve coached managers for over a decade, and one thing they all have in common is that they want to develop and empower their teams. What I love the most about my work is seeing the ‘aha’ moments unfold when they work out a path that is right for them. I’ve chosen these books for the ‘aha’ moments they sparked in me, and I hope they do the same for you.
I love this book because it taught me emotional self-control. One of the things I really disliked about myself was how stressed I’d get and then take it out on my team. I’d always apologize, but I think they were often afraid of me and not sure which Jude they’d get. Peters’ Chimp model helped me to understand why this was happening and what to do about it.
I learned to nurture my ‘chimp’ brain more, notice when I was talking to other ‘chimps,’ know how to calm them, and most of all, manage my stress better. I often explain this model to the managers I coach to help them embrace their emotions as a way of managing them.
Do you sometimes behave irrationally or impulsively? Do you face some situations with fear and trepidation? Do feelings of self-doubt consume everyday activities?
Leading Consultant Psychiatrist, Prof Steve Peters, knows more than anyone how impulsive behaviour or nagging self-doubt can impact negatively on our professional and personal lives.
In this, his first book, Steve shares his phenomenally successful mind management programme that has been used to help elite athletes and senior managers alike to conquer their fears and operate with greater control, focus and confidence.
Seemingly complex concepts are made simple with the use of memorable analogies -- such as…
Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated with people’s stories. I think this came from my grandfather, who, whether we liked it or not, would gather his grandkids in his study and wax poetically about his life. He was a writer and a teacher, so he knew how to spin a tale and keep even the most inattentive grandchildren captivated. I have for many years referred to myself as a “memoir junkie,” consuming life after life like a starving drifter. Memoirs are a great way to continue to remind ourselves that life is guaranteed to provide us with struggle, but we are equipped to overcome it. We must endure, explore, and prevail.
If you want a FIRE lit under your ass, read this book!
I love this book so much and have reread this one a couple of times because of the sheer injection of motivation I get straight into my veins when I read it. What I love about this first memoir from David is his brutal honesty about his childhood and his subsequent journey to become “the baddest motherfucker on the planet.”
This guy is the quintessential story of polishing a terd long enough, you will get a diamond. Whenever I am feeling sorry for myself, my mind goes back to this book. I think, “If David can do it, I can too. This is nothing compared to the odds he faced, and look at him now!”
For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare -- poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a U.S. Armed Forces icon and one of the world's top endurance athletes. The only man in history to complete elite training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller, he went on to set records in numerous endurance events, inspiring Outside magazine to name…
“Everyone’s got something,” my mom used to say about my cerebral palsy. I knew kids who wore glasses or had mouthfuls of metal, but those somethings seemed normal compared to my leg brace, my limp, and my inability to run. When Judy Blume’s Deenie came out on my eleventh birthday, it was the very gift I needed: the story of a girl, a diagnosis, a brace. Reading it, I felt seen and understood, which led me to believe I might have a story to tell. Now, I’m thrilled to share these books by disabled authors about disabled kids leading authentic, relatable lives. I had Deenie. Today’s lucky young readers have these.
Being a poet, I love verse novels, and this one grows richer every time I read it. Seventh-grader Selah works hard to follow rigid, self-imposed rules so she’ll be seen as a “normal” girl in school, someone who doesn’t get overwhelmed by crowds or noise or jump from unexpected touch as though she’s been shocked.
What’s amazing about Selah is that, when keeping to those rules proves impossible and she gets in trouble, she trusts herself. With a few clues, she comes to understand she’s on the autism spectrum and finds simple tools that make a big difference.
She also starts expressing herself by writing poems. It moves me so much that poetry is represented here as a source of strength and that being unique is recognized as an asset.
A debut novel-in-verse about understanding and celebrating your own difference. Selah knows her rules for being normal.
This means keeping her feelings locked tightly inside, despite the way they build up inside her as each school day goes on, so that she has to run to the bathroom and hide in the stall until she can calm down. Selah feels like a dragon stuck in a world of humans, but she knows how to hide it.
Until the day she explodes and hits a fellow student.
As her comfortable, familiar world crumbles around her, Selah starts to figure out more…
When I was a child, I was fascinated by the supernatural and wanted to believe in the paranormal. On reaching university, I discovered there was no reliable evidence for such phenomena but rather there was a much more satisfying explanation based on the weaknesses and wishes of human psychology. Development is critical to human psychology and as I specialized in children’s thinking, I found more reasons to understand the natural origins of the peculiarities of our reasoning. SuperSense was my first popular science book to expound my ideas, but all of my subsequent books apply similar novel ways of explaining human behaviour from surprising perspectives.
This is an easily accessible book based on Wegner's brilliant work on consciousness and mental control. I have always found Wegner’s work utterly fascinating as it provides such a convincing picture of a mind constantly in a struggle to think coherently – something that I easily recognise in my own conscious awareness. The findings on intrusive implicit thoughts were particularly influential in my own writing about the conflict between dormant thoughts and conscious appraisal that may be factors in why magical thinking surfaces in the rational mind.
In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Daniel M. Wegner told subjects not to think about white bears. Of course, they found it impossible to avoid thinking of the bears--just as it often seems impossible to stop thinking about forbidden foods, a painful memory, or everyday fears and worries. Synthesizing a wealth of scientific knowledge in an accessible, engaging style, this book reveals that the more we attempt to push away or avoid unwanted thoughts, the deeper they take hold. Wegner offers compelling insights into how unpleasant or obsessive thoughts get out of control--and what we can do to break free…
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” - Goethe. As Singletasking notes, we’ve become relentlessly disrespectful of the people and experiences right in front of us. Reversing this is a mission of mine. Nothing seems more important than redirecting our lifelong attention to what matters most. As an international author and speaker about both Singletasking and personality styles, I’m convinced paying attention to and honoring each other is the key to a meaningful life and deep relationships.
The subtitle of Focusis The Hidden Driver of Excellence, yet this driver is arguably hidden no more upon the book’s release. As a journalist, psychologist, and top-notch researcher, Goleman is uniquely qualified to delve into the ‘science of attention.’ Plus, he has accumulated plenty of street cred from the various iterations of hisEmotional Intelligencecanon.
Goleman compares attention to a muscle; requiring regular use to build it up. I couldn’t agree more. This premise is supported by myriad examples, accompanied by useful techniques for application in all aspects of life.
For more than two decades, psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman has been scouting the leading edge of the human sciences for what's new, surprising, and important. In Focus, he delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long overdue discussion of this little-noticed and under-rated mental asset that matters enormously for how we navigate life.
Goleman boils down attention research into a three parts: inner, other, and outer focus. Goleman shows why high-achievers need all three kinds of focus, as demonstrated by rich case studies from fields as diverse as competitive sports, education, the arts, and…
My super-power is making brain science accessible and entertaining for children and adults alike. I am living this out as an author, mental health counselor, and the founder of BraveBrains. In addition to training parents and professionals, I have the joy of sharing my passion and expertise through podcast appearances, blogs, and articles. The lightbulb moments are my favorite, and I'm committed to helping people bring what they learn home in practical ways. I write picture books because the magic of reading and re-reading stories light up the brain in a powerful way. But don’t worry…I always include some goodies for the adults in the back of the book.
This book lays a great foundation to help children understand their feelings (and the feelings of others). The author draws on her experience as a school counselor to expertly walk the reader through some essential social-emotional learning. The bright colors and clever illustrations keep kids engaged, and the activities throughout make this a fabulous title to use at home, school, or in the counseling office.
When a big feeling comes along…you can handle it! Teach kids ages 7 to 10 how to manage their feelings.
Sometimes, emotions like anger or jealousy or excitement can seem too big to keep inside. Me and My Feelings is here to teach kids that it’s okay to have big feelings! They will learn how to calm down those strong emotions so they don’t feel overwhelmed and can continue to take on the world.
This book gives kids the skills to stay in control―by breathing deeply, saying positive things to themselves, talking about their feelings instead of keeping them inside,…
