Psychology Memoirs

This captivating and deeply emotional memoir pulls back the curtain on the complex relationship women have between their bodies, love, and the way the two work together. Kerry Cohen is eleven years old when she recognizes the power of her body in the leer of a grown man. Her parents are recently...

A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction. As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time...

Considered to be the world’s foremost post-Jungian thinker, James Hillman is known as the founder of archetypal psychology and the author of more than 20 books, including the bestselling title The Soul’s Code. In The Making of a Psychologist, we follow Hillman from his youth in the heyday of Atlantic City, through post-war Paris and Dublin, travels in Africa and Kashmir, and onward to Zurich and the Jung Institute, which appointed him its first director of studies in 1960.

Dealing with some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, forensic neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Lettieri gives a behind-the-scenes look at criminal psychology through case studies from his over 30 years of experience as a court-appointed and privately retained psychologist.

With a 4-page full-color insert, and black-and-white illustrations throughout Why do some innocent kids grow up to become cold-blooded serial killers? Is bad biology partly to blame? For more than three decades Adrian Raine has been researching the biological roots of violence and establishing...

In 1990, a young woman was strangled on a jogging path near the home of Pat Brown and her family. Brown suspected the young man who was renting a room in her house, and quickly uncovered strong evidence that pointed to him - but the police dismissed her as merely a housewife with an overactive imagination. It would be six years before her former boarder would be brought in for questioning, but the night Brown took action to solve the murder was the beginning of her life's work.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

For fans of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman, a postdivorce memoir, one woman's story of starting over at 60-in youth-obsessed, beauty-obsessed Hollywood. After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life's savings, and the collapse of her once-happy marriage, Meredith Maran - whom Anne Lamott calls "insightful, funny, and human" - leaves her San Francisco freelance writer's life for a 9-to-5 job in Los Angeles.

Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a 13-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall's journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.

I haven't tasted chocolate for over ten years and now I'm walking down the street unwrapping a Kit Kat. Remember when Kate Moss said, 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'? She's wrong: chocolate does. At the age of 32, after ten years of hiding from the truth, Emma Woolf finally decided it was time to face the biggest challenge of her life. Addicted to hunger, exercise and control, she was juggling a full-blown eating disorder with a successful career, functioning on an apple a day.

On February 29, 2000, John Price took out a restraining order against his girlfriend, Katherine Knight. Later that day, he told his coworkers she had stabbed him and that if he were ever to go missing, it was because Knight had killed him. The next day, Price didn’t show up for work. A coworker was sent to check on him. They found a bloody handprint by the front door, and they immediately contacted the police. The local police force was not prepared for the chilling scene they were about to encounter.

Early motherhood is supposed to be joyous, but for Aaisha Alvi those early days were ruined by terrifying thoughts about her baby and family. Her experience was the antithesis of everything she had ever been told about motherhood, far beyond the trials of breastfeeding or putting her baby to sleep. Aaisha did recover and began to enjoy motherhood. She was thrilled when she fell pregnant again. Sadly, that pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and the psychosis returned. This time, however, she was blindsided by the unimaginable: voices urged her to stab her daughter and to harm innocent people.

Serial killers: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are often the first names that spring to mind. Many people assume serial killers are primarily an American phenomenon that came about in the latter part of the 20th century. But such assumptions are far from the truth. Serial killers have been around for a very long time and can be found in every corner of the globe - and they're not just limited to the male gender either. Some of these predators have been caught and brought to justice whereas others have never been found, let alone identified.

On July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, a man in dark body armor and a gas mask entered a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises with a tactical shotgun, a high-capacity assault rifle, and a sidearm. Soon twelve were dead and fifty-eight were wounded. A Dark Night in Aurora uses the twenty-three hours of unredacted interview transcripts never seen by the public and Reid’s research to bring the listener inside the mind of a mass murderer. The result is chilling, gripping study of abnormal psychology and how a lovely boy named Jimmy became a killer.

What started as a wonderful love story for Mélissa and Scott ended 16 years later with Scott’s dramatic death, leaving Mélissa and her two young children to endure the unimaginable. In her desperation, Mélissa prayed for guidance, and God responded by sending her an army of angels to make her transition from wife to widow more bearable. Since her husband’s passing, Mélissa has felt a strong calling to use her voice to address the stigmas around suicide and mental health.

Drawing on rarely consulted archives, Crews shows us a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who never produced a corroborated cure, who promoted cocaine in one decade and was deluded by it in the next, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise.

Michael Jordan defied gravity, transcended the world’s expectations, and exceeded the limits of age, soaring to fame as the world’s greatest basketball player of all time. While his talent was breathtaking to behold—those flying dunks and record-breaking sixty-point games have inspired generations—the unseen forces behind his success are the kind we can all harness for our own. M. J. and his accomplishments were founded on discipline, hard work, and knowing how to channel the deep competitive drive within.

Desde la infancia hasta la maternidad, Fernanda Gamboa comparte su experiencia vital con el Trastorno por Déficit de Atención e Hiperactividad (TDAH), revelando cómo una diferencia neurológica puede convertirse en fuente de fortaleza. A través de historias íntimas, anécdotas conmovedoras y reflexiones profundas, esta obra guía al lector por un viaje de autoconocimiento, sanación y empoderamiento. Con un enfoque práctico y humano, la autora desmitifica el diagnóstico, ofrece herramientas para familias y parejas, y construye una comunidad de aceptación: la Tribu Especial-Mente.

It should have been Rebecca Schiller's dream come true: moving her young family to the English countryside to raise goats and coax their own fruit and vegetables from the land. Instead, Rebecca's health begins to crumble, with bewildering symptoms: frequent falls, uncontrollable rages, and mysterious lapses in memory. Her diagnosis finally comes: severe ADHD. Written in unsparing, luminous prose, this is an all-absorbing memoir of one woman's newfound neurodivergence—and a clarion call to overturn the narrative that says minds are either normal and good or different and broken.

Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenona mind-changer. Widely consumed by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. In his new book, A Synthesizing Mind, Gardner reflects on his intellectual development and his groundbreaking work, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor.