This is the second edition of the book on psychology in the Very Short Introduction collection, which now has surpassed 400 volumes. It was number 6 in the reissued series in 2000. Even though the book is about general psychology, both the authors are clinicians from the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre.

The book covers the main headings in psychology: perception, learning and memory, thinking, motivation and emotion, development, intelligence and personality, abnormal and social psychology. It is well written and provides a useful overview, perhaps especially for those considering studying psychology.

I was interested to see how psychology may have developed from when I did my degree in the 1970s. Much of the content of the book I recognized, which suggests it hasn’t really developed as a subject. A photograph of William James was unexpectedly the first illustration. I was surprised to see the emphasis on Daniel Kahneman in the chapter on thinking and reasoning and to see that he had been described as ‘among the most influential of psychologists in history’ by George Pinker. He won the Nobel prize in economic sciences in 2002. His success was to point out that we are not always as rational as we might think we are and that we are all susceptible to erroneous intuitions.

Comparing the first chapter on What is psychology? between the two editions highlights that the first paragraph has been altered to add, “New ways of studying the brain, and of understanding its structure and workings, provide us with fascinating information about the determinants of our mental life. Improved technology means that activity in the brain can now be objectively observed and measured.” This change emphasizes how much brain scanning has become a central preoccupation with research. However, I don’t think any brain scanning studies figure in the rest of the book. And, the first paragraph recognizes the limitation of such work and goes on, “there is much we do not know about the relationships between subjective experience and the brain, and psychologists are still making hypotheses, or informed guesses, about how the two kinds of knowledge  — the subjective and the objective — are linked.” Psychology won’t solve the mind-brain problem.

We still need psychology and it hasn’t been taken over by neuroscience. This book, in its new edition, gives an overview of and introduction to some of the classic, now established, studies and perspectives in psychology.

© 2014 Duncan Double

Duncan Double is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust and University of East Anglia, UK; blogs at critical psychiatry.