Dr. Feelgood and the Silence of the Lambs

In I Can Get It For You Wholesale I wrote: "I'm looking forward to getting many engaging and insightful posts out of this fabulous set" -- the set being the five volumes I have taken to calling The Library of World Bullshit. In keeping with that threat, today's text is a book whose very title is a demonstrative lesson in prolixity: 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do; Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books. Perusing the table of contents, I see the usual suspects listed: Freud, Adler, Jung, Maslow, William James, B.F. Skinner, Steven Pinker -- including many I hate: Adler, Jung, Maslow, William James, B.F. Skinner, Steven Pinker. Then there are those I really hate: Nathaniel Branden, Fritz Perls, Martin Seligman. There are also (literally) a few I like: Harry Harlow and William Styron. But what is surprising are (to no one's surprise) the surprises. To give just a couple examples... At some time or other, everyone has heard of I'm OK - You're OK, the foundational handbook of Transactional Analysis first published in 1969. Yes, but how many are aware that Thomas Harris went on to write the fabulously successful series of novels about Hannibal Lecter? It was a rush to find this one listed, as I had totally lost touch with the far-famed Queen of the Speed Freaks sometime back in the late '60s. Without further ado, this is your brain on Benzedrine... or I guess, vice versa. Let's hear it for Psychology, then...

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