The neuroscientific inflation of recent years may have peaked. Not a single image of a scanned brain figures in the best of this year’s psychology books. Perhaps in a period of austerity, we need broader and deeper understandings of the human.
Reith lecturer and surgeon-writer Atul Gawande sets the tone with his wise and moving Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End (Profile £15.99). This timely and important book sets limits on the usefulness of scientific medicine when it comes to dying. Instead, Gawande turns to Tolstoy, Montaigne, Plato, family and medical experience to probe ways of meeting the end with dignity and courage.
In The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (OUP £20) historian Joanna Bourke charts the ways in which pain was felt in the past and shows that sensation itself is inextricably bound up with mind, culture and soul. She scours medical and psychological sources, images, gestures and written testimony to build up a picture of suffering and its interpretations since the 18th century. Like Gawande, her underlying question is: can we learn to “suffer better”?
This year’s two best memoirs of intense psychological pain offer no easy answers. Barbara Taylor’s The Last Asylum (Hamish Hamilton £18.99) is a bold, absorbing look backwards into her own experience of breakdown and the journey through treatments that are now not only unfashionable, but almost impossible to procure: psychoanalysis plus care and confinement, in her case at Britain’s largest and last asylum, Colney Hatch. A historian, Taylor makes an eloquent plea for the benefits of care in safe havens, alongside the talking cure. In the current crisis of mental health provision, this is a book for policy-makers to note.
Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety (Windmill £8.99) adds a Woody Allenish hilarity to a form where laughs are rare. For much of his life, he has been plagued by paralysing anxieties and phobias. His pilgrimage towards the holy grail of cure has taken him through three decades of a huge variety of talking therapies, not to mention CBT, yoga, and a vast cocktail of medications made up of several generations of sedatives, tricyclics, SSRIs, you name it… The book he has made of the experience doubles as a hugely knowledgeable reflection on the history of psychiatry and diagnoses, current neuroscience in the field, plus an unblinkered and sympathetic engagement with Freud.
Freud, himself, serves as the subject of two remarkably innovative examples of biographical writing. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s Becoming Freud (Yale £18.99) is a riveting anti-biography, one that bristles with argument and insight. It plumbs aspects of Freud’s life to muse on the cultural and personal forces that shaped his thinking. For Phillips, Freud’s ideas about the “unassimilable”, those oppressive frustrations of the civilising process, stem from his childhood as a Jewish outsider. The Freudian child has all the characteristics of an immigrant, a relatively helpless being “who has to find a way of living in other people’s regimes”. Phillips focuses on the years up to 1906, by which time, he claims, Freud had made most of his major discoveries and written his core volumes. This Phillipsian Freud is an artist, a writer, dreamer and outsider, not the inventor of a global institution.
Long immersion in the Freud archives has given Michael Molnar, at once a scholar and a fine historical stylist, the material for what is a near-Sebaldian volume. Looking Through Freud’s Photos (Karnac £24.99) focuses on some telling images of Freud, his fellow neurologists, his intimates and family to excavate biographical facts, conundrums and missing links. The picture of the 66th Meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors in 1894, for example, finds Freud off to one side, amid some 60 notables. Molnar’s musing essay travels from Kant and Ernst Mach, to the status of the subjects, their lectures, the concept of nature, and the “deliria of dying” that plagued Freud that year. Without quite realising it, we learn a great deal from Molnar about psychoanalysis, photos and the life of the mind and the emotions.
