4 Must-Read Psychology Books That Most People Have Never Heard Of
Book #3 changed the way my mind worked forever
I experience mixed feelings whenever someone recommends a book or a song that came out years ago and which I’m just discovering now. One part of me is grateful for the recommendation, but another part of me says, “This came out years ago and I’m only just discovering it now?!”
Two of the books I’m going to share below just came out in 2020, so it’s entirely possible that you haven’t heard of them yet. The other two stretch a little further back (#3 on this list first came out in 1955), and I believe that they each deserve to be more widely known.
So let’s get into it! Book number one comes from one of my favorite human beings ever, Ernest Becker:
1) The Birth and Death of Meaning, by Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, where he showed that one of the biggest motivators of human behavior is the subconscious fear of death. Basically, human beings are afraid to die, so they/we try to leave legacies, amass fortunes, and “make a dent in the universe.”
I mentioned that he was one of my favorite human beings ever, and I’m not alone in this opinion! One time, in the 1960s, thousands of his students got together and offered to pay his salary when the University of California, Berkeley, threatened to remove him as a lecturer. Unfortunately, their petition didn’t succeed, but it shows you a little bit about how much he was loved by his students.
The Birth and Death of Meaning covers a lot of ground, but it mostly deals with how human beings collaborate in constructing meaning. He shows that our social context — i.e. society — is made up of a multiplicity of “selves,” or “egos,” who all want different things, and who continue “playing the game” so that we can all get what we need from each other.
This is a fascinating book, written by a beautiful human being who cared deeply about our world, and who hated to…
