How To Rethink Psychology

Based on the author’s forty years of experience in psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences, How to Rethink Psychology argues that to understand people we need to know more about their contexts than the dominant modes of thinking and research presently allow. Drawing upon insights from sources as diverse as Freud, CBT, quantum physics, and Zen philosophy, the book offers several fascinating new metaphors for thinking about people and, in doing so, endeavors to create a psychology for the future. The book begins by discussing the significance of the key metaphor underlying mainstream psychology today – the ‘particle’ or ‘causal’ metaphor – and explains the need for a shift towards new ‘wave’ or ‘contextual’ metaphors in order to appreciate how individual and social actions truly function. It explores new metaphors for thinking about the relationship between language and reality, and teaches the reader how they might reimagine the processes involved in the act of thinking itself. The book concludes with a consideration of how these new metaphors might be applied to practical methods of research and understanding change today. How to Rethink Psychology is important reading for upper-level and postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of social psychology, critical psychology, and the philosophy of psychology, and will especially appeal to those studying behavior analysis and radical behaviorism. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas in science and thinking.

The world of mental illness is typically framed around symptoms and cures, where every client is given a label. In this challenging new book, Professor Bernard Guerin provides a fresh alternative to considering these issues, based in interdisciplinary social sciences and discourse analysis rather than medical studies or cognitive metaphors. A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader: how we attribute ‘mental illness’ to someone’s behavior why we call some forms of suffering ‘mental’ but not others what Western diagnoses look like when you strip away the theory and categories why psychiatry and psychology appeared for the first time at the start of modernity the relationship between capitalism and modern ideas of ‘mental illness’ why it seems that women, the poor and people of Indigenous and non-Western backgrounds have worse ‘mental health’ how we can rethink the ‘hearing of voices’ more ecologically how self-identity has evolved historically how thinking arises from our social contexts rather than from inside our heads. Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.

Developed from the author’s long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable ‘facts’. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history. The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed. Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn: How to think about people with ecological or contextual thinking How your thinking is a conversation with other people How to analyze talk and conversations as social strategies How capitalist economies change how you act, talk and think in 25 ways How living in modern society can be linked to generalized anxiety and depression How to Rethink Human Behavior is important interdisciplinary reading for students and researchers in all fields of social science, and will especially appeal to those interested in mental health. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas and skills in understanding themselves and other people.

Developed from the author’s long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable ‘facts’. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history. The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed. Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn: How to think about people with ecological or contextual thinking How your thinking is a conversation with other people How to analyze talk and conversations as social strategies How capitalist economies change how you act, talk and think in 25 ways How living in modern society can be linked to generalized anxiety and depression How to Rethink Human Behavior is important interdisciplinary reading for students and researchers in all fields of social science, and will especially appeal to those interested in mental health. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas and skills in understanding themselves and other people.

The world of mental illness is typically framed around symptoms and cures, where every client is given a label. In this challenging new book, Professor Bernard Guerin provides a fresh alternative to considering these issues, based in interdisciplinary social sciences and discourse analysis rather than medical studies or cognitive metaphors. A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader: how we attribute ‘mental illness’ to someone’s behavior why we call some forms of suffering ‘mental’ but not others what Western diagnoses look like when you strip away the theory and categories why psychiatry and psychology appeared for the first time at the start of modernity the relationship between capitalism and modern ideas of ‘mental illness’ why it seems that women, the poor and people of Indigenous and non-Western backgrounds have worse ‘mental health’ how we can rethink the ‘hearing of voices’ more ecologically how self-identity has evolved historically how thinking arises from our social contexts rather than from inside our heads. Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.

Despite more than half a century of psychological research on creativity we are still far from a clear understanding of the creative process, its antecedents and consequences and, most of all, the ways in which we can effectively support creativity. This is primarily due to a narrow focus on creative individuals isolated from culture and society. Rethinking Creativity proposes a fundamental review of this position and argues that creativity is not only a psychological but a sociocultural phenomenon. This edited volume aims to relocate creativity from inside individual minds to the material, symbolic and social world of culture. It brings together eminent social and cultural psychologists who study dynamic, transformative and emergent phenomena, and invites them to conceptualise creativity in ways that depart from mainstream definitions and theoretical models existing in past and present literature on the topic. Chapters include reflections on the relationship between creativity and difference, creativity as a process of symbolic transformation, the role of apprenticeships and collaboration, the importance of considering materiality and affordances in creative work, and the power of imagination to construct individual trajectories. The diverse contributions included in this book offer readers multiple pathways into the intricate relationship between mind, culture, and creativity, and invite them to rethink these phenomena in ways that foster creative action within their own life and the lives of those around them. It will be of key interest to both social and cultural psychologists, as well as to creativity researchers and those who, as part of their personal or professional life, try to understand creativity and develop creative forms of expression.

This groundbreaking book shows how we can build a better understanding of people by merging psychology with the social sciences. It is part of a trilogy that offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people’s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions. Putting the ‘social’ properly back into psychology, Bernard Guerin turns psychology inside out to offer a more integrated way of thinking about and researching people. Going back 60 years of psychology’s history to the ‘cognitive revolution’, Guerin argues that psychology made a mistake, and demonstrates in fascinating new ways how to instead fully contextualize the topics of psychology and merge with the social sciences. Covering perception, emotion, language, thinking, and social behaviour, the book seeks to guide readers to observe how behaviours are shaped by their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, colonized, historical, and other contexts. Our brain, neurophysiology, and body are still involved as important interfaces, but human actions do not originate inside of people so we will never fi nd the answers in our neurophysiology. Replacing the internal origins of behaviour with external social contextual analyses, the book even argues that thinking is not done by you ‘in your head’ but arises from our external social, cultural, and discursive worlds. Offering a refreshing new approach to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, discursive, and societal worlds, rather than inside their heads, and how we might have to rethink our approaches to neuropsychology as well, this is fascinating reading for students in psychology and the social sciences.

The recent widespread rejection of conventional theory and method has led to the evolution of different ways of gathering and analyzing data. This accessible textbook introduces key research methods that challenge psychology′s traditional preoccupation with `scientific′ experiments. The book provides a well-structured guide to methods, containing a range of qualitative approaches (for example, semi-structured interviews, grounded theory, discourse analysis) alongside a reworking of quantitative methods to suit contemporary psychological research. A number of chapters are also explicitly concerned with research as a dynamic interactive process. The internationally respected contributors steer the reader through the main stages of conducting a study using these methods.