What are the absolute essential pieces for starting psychology

I'm fond of 'Psychology: Themes and Variations' as an introductory text.

A psychology textbook for an introductory university course.

>>9224199
Not that wannabe wizard for sure

>>9224222

Honestly this. I know it's the boring answer but it truly is the best starting place.

>>9224217
Why thank you anon. Shall look into it

>>9224222
>>9224247

What is the best one? I find that most are disorganized pieces of trash with no coherent structure.

>>9224363
> I find that most are disorganized pieces of trash with no coherent structure.

Welcome to Psychology

Introductory Psychology textbooks.

How the mind works by Steven Pinker

>>9224778
>Pinker

Dude he's not even a psychologist

>>9224794

He teaches intro psych at Harvard you fucking cunt

>>9224878
Sure if you call that psychology

Question for knowledgeable psychology anons:

Is there are comprehensive overview of the development of psychology from its inception to the 21st century, something akin to the History of Western Philosophy (Russel) but obviously confined to a more tight time frame (and thus much more in depth)

Are introductory text books into uni psychology like this?

>>9224901
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/historyofpsych.html

This is recommended by Wikipedia

>>9224937

Anybody here actually in the know?

I think philosophy of psychology texts might be useful here, too.

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>>9224199

William James and Bertrand Russell.

James in particular writes beautifully, can't recommend him enough.

>>9224901

Russell actually has a series of lectures called Analysis of the Mind that is thorough and, surprisingly, hasn't dated in the way you would think.

>>9224955
There is no apparent authorative textbook on the subject, I found others which were specifically published by the American Psychologist Association which can go straight in the garbage

>>9224363
Kalat was mine, I thought it was a good overview. And >>9224366 is right, any psych textbook is going to be a mess of directly competing theories and methods, because that's what the field is. Experimental psychology is probably going to get the most attention, since that's what much of the field is nowadays, but any intro textbook will discuss niche areas and thinkers like Freud, Jung, Skinner, and others whose ideas have fallen out of fashion within psychology departments.

>>9224901
I took a course at my uni that covered this, starting around 1879 with Wundt's founding of the first psych laboratory, which inaugurated "modern" experimental psychology. We didn't have a textbook though, the professor just assigned essays. Best you can probably find is an "Ideas in psychology" book or something like that, which ought to give you some historical background on thinkers and how their ideas related to society at the time (for example, Milgram's shock experiments and their how the Holocaust influenced the reasoning behind that study).

>>9225008

I don't mind competing theories. At least it will illuminate a structure of the mind that's more robust than simply going through the standard psych. history tropes and then presenting the latest developments in psychological stamp-collecting. In my intro. psych. textbook, I continued to notice some of the same structural/functional patterns between topics, like Learning and Emotion, and I'm wondering to myself: has anybody else stumbled on this too? It's like there's connections that desperately want to be made, but nobody wants to make them.

Does such a textbook or reading list exist? Why hasn't anybody cared to explore, for example, Boris Sidis for his work in psychoanalysis and education, considering that his son supposedly developed into a prodigy because of his methods? How has our understanding of the mind changed since the time of William James besides our experimental methods and our philosophy of science? etc. Why can't return meaningfully to where Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud left off, now knowing what we know in experimental psychology, to develop a more robust picture of the mind.

I don't know of many textbooks, or really books at all, that give the breadth of psychology a fair handshake. I don't even think you could get a decent understanding of the mind, or even a glimpse of its nuanced and complicated structure, by reading a textbook. You're better off reading more literature unless you want to isolate a particular mechanism, study the hell out of it, and present your results to a field in disarray.

>>9224955

Philosophy of Psychology - Jorge Luis Bermudez

That's a good one.

>>9225073
The issue is too that different nations health care systems have completely different allegiances based on their own contingent history.
So for example in France Psychoanalysis is still promoted as treatment by the state whereas in England Cognitive-Behavioralism predominates

>>9224199
>What are the absolute essential pieces for starting psychology

On a related note - what's /lit/'s opinion on "The Civilization and it's Discontents" by S. Freud?

>>9225101
Really fascinating work, especially when it comes to its description of mans relationship to technology and the meaning of Fascism.

>>9225088

I guess there's multiple elements to psychology. One deals with the ideas that minds generate. The other deals with the structures that generate those ideas. I wish there was a greater understanding of the synthesis between the two, even if it's woefully incomplete. Unfortunately, there's not much history of psychology books or psychology textbooks that do the job well. They neglect either one or the other element.

>>9225121
The issue to me resides far more in Cognitivist-Behavioralists (who in your words would be those that those who "deal with the structures that generate those ideas") attempting towards a reductionism to claim their school is the only legitimate form.
Whereas others such as the Psychoanlytic schools (who match those who deal with the ideas that minds generate) don't claim any contradiction with most cognitive models, simply the limitation of their explanative worth.

>>9225073
>I don't know of many textbooks, or really books at all, that give the breadth of psychology a fair handshake. I don't even think you could get a decent understanding of the mind, or even a glimpse of its nuanced and complicated structure, by reading a textbook. You're better off reading more literature unless you want to isolate a particular mechanism, study the hell out of it, and present your results to a field in disarray.

Between Chomsky's criticism of Skinner, the anti-psychiatry movement, and the development of more sophisticated neuroscience, psychology has really been in a disarray since the late 60s/early 70s. Granted, it wasn't wholly unified before that, Freud was considered outdated and conservative by the 1940s while most in the field embraced behaviorism for the next two decades. But after somewhere around 1970, there are major divisions between the brain science/cognitive psych types with many tending towards reductionism, humanistic and clinical types who sometimes verge on New Age-Esalen territory (which gave birth in the 70s to the numerous flavor of the month therapies like primal scream and past-life regression), and the social or cultural types who realistically have more in common with sociology and anthropology departments and tend towards a crude relativism. Of course this is a simplistic reduction of various currents and camps in psychology, but these are the main divisions that I can discern.

A lot of people are attempting to reconcile these fields by coming back to philosophy, but it's hard to do that when so much of the current state of academic psychology is based on getting grants, doing empirical studies, and publishing your data and analysis so that you or someone else can influence the public or create policy.

>>9225220

You seem knowledgable. What would you recommend?

>>9225494
>someone is getting payed to draw brainstorms

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>>9225502

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>>9225571
>math and logic as sciences
>math and logic on seperate lines
>math and mathematical logic as seperate categories
>mathematical logic and computational logic as seperate categories

Psychology by Ciccarelli & White is pretty good for an absolute beginner

>>9225502
>payed