Psychology Memoirs

The New York Times best-selling author of The Year of Living Biblically goes on a journey to understand the enduring power of puzzles: why we love them, what they do to our brains, and how they can improve our world.

I was you. I was once afraid, anxious, confused and lost. I was crippled with panic attacks, trapped by agoraphobia, and riddled with constant anxiety. I almost lost everything important in my life as my world became smaller and smaller. This is the story of my journey through anxiety, panic disorder, and agoraphobia. The good, the bad, and the ugly of panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, irrational and obsessive thoughts, and being afraid to leave my house or be left alone.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types - extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving - has inspired television shows, Online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results - no less account for its success.

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.

If you struggle with a highly sensitive personality, this memoir and collection of stories will help you heal and flourish. Benita A. Esposito is a licensed professional counselor and best-selling author with four decades of professional experience. Even smart high-achievers have themes on their hero’s journey to the authentic self, and these were hers. What unconsciously drew her to an emotionally distant relationship or an emotionally abusive relationship? Why did she feel so hurt when others judged her? Why was she so tired? What compelled her toward self actualization?

Chasing the Devil is the gripping firsthand account of Sheriff David Reichert's relentless pursuit of the Green River Killer -- a 21-year odyssey full of near-misses and startling revelations. For eight years, Sheriff David Reichert devoted his days and nights to capturing the Green River Killer...

There's no doubt that Dein has been one of the most significant and influential figures in British football for over three decades—operating at club and international level. He was a prime mover in the creation of the Premier League, hugely influential within the England set-up and, of course, was the mastermind—along with Arsène Wenger—in creating the glory days of Arsenal Football Club, leading the team for almost a quarter of a century.

This renowned journalist's classic Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of schizophrenia - now reissued with a new postscript - follows a flamboyant and fiercely intelligent young woman as she struggles in the throes of mental illness. "Sylvia Frumkin" was born in 1948 and began showing signs of schizophrenia in her teens. She spent the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. In 1978, reporter Susan Sheehan took an interest in her and, for more than two years, became immersed in her life.

Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.

Delve into the minds of real people whose actions may shock and stun you, but whose stories have the power to challenge your assumptions and the stigma that surrounds mental illness. I Don't Talk to Dead Bodies shines a powerful, emotional, and surprisingly moving spotlight on the fascinating life of a forensic psychiatrist and the people she works with. It goes beyond the sensationalist headlines to show you just what happens in a world where mental illness occasionally makes good people do bad things.

Wilhelm Reich and the Function of the Orgasm; Great Minds Series, Vol. 11 - the 2017 revised, updated and reformatted edition - is a study about one of the greatest authorities on the discovery of the bioenergy for modern science and medical science. The author understands his engagement for Reich as a contribution to the rehabilitation of one of the greatest but also one of the most misunderstood scientists of the 20th century.

My Beautiful Psychosis is a stunning debut memoir from international award winning documentary filmmaker, Emma Goude. It is a gritty tale of transformation, depicting from the inside some of the most powerful experiences a human mind can endure. What if psychosis is really a wake up call? Emma is a 20-something who likes to party and take drugs...until she decides to give them up...and that’s when the insomnia starts. After five nights without sleep she ends up in A&E. Three questions determine whether she is sane or not.

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...

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.

This is how Miranda Newman’s mother described the experience of trying to find an explanation for her daughter’s behaviour. It would be years before Miranda was able to find a diagnosis that explained the complicated way she moved through the world. She would have to advocate for herself in the mental health system while dealing with abuse, being unhoused, survival sex, suicide attempts and hospitalizations.

In 2002, at age 28, David MacLean woke up in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed malarial medication he was taking. Upon hisreturn to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself.

Sigmund Freud revolutionized the way in which we think about ourselves. From its beginnings as a theory of neurosis Freud developed psychoanalysis into a general psychology, which became widely accepted as the predominant mode of discussing personality and interpersonal relationships. Anthony Storr goes one step further and investigates the status of Freud's legacy today and the disputes that surround it.

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her. Desperate for a solution, she asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that she could consult. With no blueprint to life, Pang began to create her own, using the language she understands best: Science. That lifelong project eventually resulted in An Outsider's Guide to Humans, an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in.

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.

In his 26 years in the field, Richard Taylor has worked on well over a hundred murder cases, with victims and perpetrators from all walks of life. In this fascinating memoir, Taylor draws on some of the most tragic, horrific and illuminating of these cases - as well as dark secrets from his own family's past - to explore some of the questions he grapples with every day: why do people kill? Does committing a monstrous act make someone a monster? Could any of us, in the wrong circumstances, become a killer?