What is psychology Top notch Reading books for Psychology students

If you want to understand the human mind, you must begin with your own. Psychology has handicapped itself by trying to imitate other sciences where the mind of the observer, the scientist, appears to be less relevant. In psychology, this is not possible because the only mind directly accessible to anyone is one’s own mind and observing it assiduously provides a veritible treasure trove of understanding. You cannot understand yourself from a book written by someone else, particularly someone who has never bothered to pay attention to their own mind. Moreover, all the “psychology” books being suggested put your mind in a state where you are less likely to listen to yourself, not more likely. Unfortunately, nearly all psychologist are clueless about their own topic for the very reason just mentioned. They have been trained as scientists in other fields are trained; they are told to look to others rather than themselves for understanding. The only mind that is genuinely accessible to any of us, is our own. Fortunately, it is accessible to all of us. “Psychology” books, however, want to tell you what to think and how brilliant their author’s are rather than encouraging you to do the thinking necessary to genuinely understand the mind on your own and along the way recognize the errors in all the books by so-called experts. Ignore them all.

Reading has value, but not as a tool for learning. Some books open up your unconscious mind and the creativity within it, within you, so genuine understanding can come from your own processess of thought. The unconscious mind is not the seething demon described by Freud, it is an artistic genuius trying to reach your conscious mind and teach you all that it understands. Consequently, with artistic works you are placed into a more receptive state of mind and you become more likely to begin having your own thoughts about the topic you are interested in. Of course, some will scoff at the notion that there is value to reading fiction or philosophy as an approach to understanding the mind but that is because they do not understand the nature of fictional literature, philosophy, or the nature of art generally. They also fail to realize that if you merely learn from others, you are limited to the understanding others have attained, much of which may well be faulty despite being venerated.

Returning to the concept of art, it is not about creating a thing of beauty, like a pretty painting or sculpture, or an entertaining best selling novel. The artist, to the extent he is able, surrenders his or her conscious control to the unconscious mind, allowing creativity to flow out in a waking state like a dream flows out when we are sleeping. To the extent he is successful, what is created by this artist contains the unconscious mind’s effort to teach the conscious mind about the nature of the mind itself, and then also the relationship of the mind of the artist or artistic observer to the world generally. Genuine art is less about beauty being created than truth being revealed through the complex language we refer to generally as art. And only to the extent that beauty and truth are related, is beauty a necessary and fundamental part of art.

Finding the books that will tickle your own particular artistic genius is not simple. When I was young The Stranger by Camus did this for me, as did most of his other novels, but my thinking was still very rigid back then and it took years for me to see where Camus lost his way, and where his rigid dogmatic philosophy needed to be parsed from his purer artistic expressions. More recently, Haruki Murakami, H. Hesse, and Henry Miller, just to name a few, have awakened much within me. Hesse is the most capable writer of this group, but both Murakami and Miller allow their genius to flow more freely - and wildly - than Hesse.

In my view, within philosophy, Schopenhauer stands alone as the most brilliant psychologist. Nearly every element of Freud’s psychology appears to have been derived from Freud’s poor understanding of Schopenhauer’s writings. Surprisingly, you can obtain a Ph.D. in psychology and never be required to read one word of Schopenhauer though you will still be force fed Freud, despite the growing recognition that large swaths of his hypothesis of the mind are untrue. Freud is basically the only psychologist (yes, I know he was technically a psychiatrist, but that makes no difference to me) to have articulated a unified hypothesis of the mind - a completely wrong hypothesis, but a quasi-unified one and so it is what psychology continues to hang its hat on. Schopenhauer has a unified understanding of the mind as well and because his is original, not borrowed, it is far more accurate than Freud’s who distorted nearly everything Schopenahauer understood in an effort to make it seem original. If you choose to read Schopenhauer, I would begin with his essays from later in life, rather than his work, The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer wrote this major work at 28 years of age and notably, within his own later essays he indicates that no writer has ever written anything of value prior to 40 years of age - this is an accurate assessment of his own early writings. The seeds of his later understanding are there, but the narrow vision of youth was still containing and warping them.

As for reading, you might try any of the authors mentioned above, but if they do not resonate with you it is an indication that your starting point is in a different place and you will need to find artists that tickle somethig deep within you that will begin to draw out your own thoughts. Also, when you read others, keep a pen or pencil with you and do not treat books as sacred. If something you have read makes you think of something you agree or disagree with, do not discredit it or assume you have no business criticizing the author; write it in the margin and most importantly, begin writing your own ideas out and exploring what you believe to be true. Understand, however, that truth is an ever expanding river. You may have many “aha!” moments, that you later realize were only partially correct and need to be altered or expanded to accept subsequently received truths. Patience and the absence of ego are remarkable tools for understanding the mind, and anything else.

Lastly, the most important aspect of understanding the mind is not what others, who have come to be revered, think; it is your own thought processes. In one of Murakami’s books a character says something to the effect, “It is not the great things that great minds have discovered that matter; it is the little things I have discovered on my own.” Great things discovered by great minds all started with little things, pebbles kicked down a slope that created a surprising landslide of understanding. We, the public, hear about the landslide, but it was the initial pebbles that started it. Do not assume that because you haven’t been educated in psychology you cannot understand the mind. You have a mind and if you become acutely aware of it, allowing it to speak to you without judgment rather than telling it what to think and believe, you will be in a better place to understand the mind than almost anyone you will ever read. However, the mind is a complex thing and generally, it will almost certainly require you to write; both to explore your own thoughts about particular aspects of your own mind and to eventually begin putting together the larger pieces of growing understanding as you explore and see their connectedness to each other.

I have studied philosophy for six years at university and have been teaching philosophy for almost twenty years and I am sorry to say that I disagree with most of the answers given here.

Most of the works suggested here are undeniably important in the history of philosophy. But to this day, I, as a specialist, have a hard time figuring out most of them. Sure, Plato’s Republic and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are extremely important books. But a beginner will not be able to grasp the meaning of these works and will probably get bored very quickly and move on thinking that philosophy is hard and boring.

I will admit to something here that most people will not: even though I have been into philosophy for twenty-five years, I have yet to complete my reading of Plato’s Republic and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And that’s taking into account that I have completed forty-five-hour courses on each of these works individually as part of my bachelor’s degree in philosophy. That being the case, what chance would a beginner have?

I strongly believe that anyone interested in philosophy should work at cultivating their interest and avoid at all cost getting frustrated and turned off by actually reading philosophy. Hence, I would not recommend primary sources at the first stage of one’s journey.

According to my researched books my recommendation are following!

1. Study the Bible, even if you're atheist, I did it and I'm glad to.
2. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
3. Ethics Manual, Epiktetus
4. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud
5. Synchronicity, Carl Jung
6. Faust, Goethe
7. Enlightenment now, Steven Pinker
8. Panzram (to understand the psychopath logic)
9. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung
10. Towards a Psychology of Being, Abraham H. Maslow
11. Factfulness, Hans Rosling
12. The Karamazov Brothers, Dostoyevsk.
13. ​How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
14. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
15. ​The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning by Marcelo Gleiser
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
17. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
19. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
20. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
21. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
22. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
23. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
24. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip G. Zimbardo
25. Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung
26. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung
27. The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
28. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck
29. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
30. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
31. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
32. How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
33. Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities by Flora Rheta Schreiber
34. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
35. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
36. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy by Carl R. Rogers
37. The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
38. The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients by Irvin D. Yalom
39. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by Robert D. Hare
40. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
41. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
42. Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
43. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
44. The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
45. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris
46. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran
47. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks