The Textbook of Personality Disorders

Ever dealt with a kid who only ate grilled cheese? Or a kid who claimed he was allergic to all cheeses except chemically processed American cheese, and got mad at you when you insisted that his “allergy” didn’t make sense? What about that kid who was always grabbing stuff and throwing it into the other kids’ faces? I’m sure you’ve met someone whose life story impressed you, and then you found out they were lying about it. I certainly had that experience, and when I confronted her, she didn’t care, she just moved on to another sucker who’d be her captive audience. There are all people with personality disorders.

The Textbook of Personality Disorders makes clear that these are not “mental” disorders. There are no hallucinations or hearing weird voices. It’s all about motivation, cognition, and avoidance of certain things. In chapter one, we read about a man who misinterprets what people say, holds grudges, and feels slights more easily than others. We also read about narcissism, in particular a case where a person is deluded as to what he’ll accomplish, holding unrealistic goals.

This book also makes clear that a lot of the disorders are “made” and not “born.” They’re often the result of nurture rather than nature, the product of overstimulation in infancy. ASPD, for instance, can generate a total lack of regard for others, occasionally leading to violent behavior. The therapies outlined in this book focus on things like CBT, or Cognitive Behavior Therapy. It stresses coping skills, not cures.

But there’s one thing absent from this book, and that is the ways in which these disorders effect the individuals family and/or school environment. I’ve seen a lot of people with extreme phobias or narcissism who are enabled by their families. It would be a welcome change to see some advice on how the families can deal with the individual so that their behavior doesn’t create a hardship.

The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru

Claudia Brosseder’s book portrays pre-Columbian religion as the unifying factor among Peru’s natives. The term Huaca (wak’a in the original language) means “sacred object” or some inanimate structure, like a burial mound, where spirits were thought to reside. It’s not exclusive to Peru; other cultures, like Japanese Shinto, had similar animistic beliefs. But in this case, it was more significant because it allowed the people to keep some independence under colonialism.

From the start, Brosseder makes clear that Peru’s natives weren’t all swayed by Christianity. It was introduced by their Spanish Conquistadores, and since the natives had no rights, Christianity didn’t seem very welcoming either. Indigenous religion continued into the 1600’s, but the Jesuits made efforts to lure the people away from it. Unlike the Franciscans, the Jesuits permitted local religious customs along with Christian ones, so they weren’t entirely averse to animistic beliefs.  However, they did use sneaky tactics with the natives, such as offering rewards to those that were cooperative with the missionaries and using them to influence others.

The author discusses other reasons for Spain’s proselytizing in Peru, such as the protestant versus Catholic conflict in Europe. With Catholic Spain fighting Protestant-led forces in the Netherlands, perhaps Spain’s Bishops saw Latin America as a recruiting ground. But at the same time, Spain was also the nation that had a violent Inquisition, and that didn’t offer much encouragement. If Spanish speaking Priests wanted to stamp out the belief in demons, then violent sermons would not have been much help.

Outsourcing: All You Need To Know

Outsourcing has been so much in the news for the last decade, usually demonized as the business that stole our business. This book portrays it as not only a major change in the labor market, but also a change to profits. The concept of having a popular US product, such as Nike footwear, manufactured in Asia can also be a way to subliminally advertise it in that continent. The same would hold true if NBA shirts were manufactured in Nigeria.

Dell Computers are used as an example in the book for the outsourcing of administration, not just manufacturing. If payroll recording and processing are outsourced, the company is no longer responsible for it. For a huge corporation, payroll can run up a big bill in work hours and effort, but if you hire another company to handle payroll, you rid yourself of the responsibility. You’ll cut out the middlemen and have more time for other things.

The book also covers rubrics and contracts. Everything must be clearly outlined, and it must be clear, according to the contract, as to who assume liability. You don’t want to outsource to a company in Bangladesh and get sued because they used child labor and stole their wages. Delivery of good requires a contract, because you don’t want to find out at the last minute that the foreign made Nikes require passive import duty, thanks to a tariff on goods from that country.

While this book was definitely thorough, I would have like to see more case studies and examples of outsourcing being used. It’s being used for computer support services, with great success, and even 30 years ago it was used by manufacturers who moved some of their factories to Asia. Outsourcing has spread to other industries, such as medicine, with US citizens travelling to India for heart surgery and to Thailand for sex changes. There’s even a scholarship fund that sends minority students from the USA to study medicine in Cuba. Perhaps we’ll soon see education being outsourced too?

Beyond The Surface by Jack Spencer

Jack Spencer creates beautiful artwork. His photographs are imaginative manifestations of emotions, evoking the greatest works of Ansel Adams and Robert Mapplethorpe. Never mind the one on the cover, that uses color. Most of his works are in black and white, and they are even more beautiful, no matter what the subject. One of the photos, titled Mezquit, is of what appears to be two boys beside a tree. The boys and the tree are in silhouette, and the shapes give off an eerie glow. These images are both beautiful and haunting to see.

Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic

Darren Main, doesn’t mince words, he gets right to his point; we often get so caught up in getting ahead of everybody else that we forget about ourselves. We go crazy because education, jobs, and social life are so incredibly competitive that we neglect our own spiritual fulfillment.

He begins a chapter by discussing Maya, or the way to appreciate mundane things. During a meditational exercise, he is able to look at a tree (a common sight that most would barely care for) and find great beauty in it. As the book progresses, he describes how yoga helped improve his health, concentration, and ability to adjust to modern living. Samtosha, or the state of contentment, is described heavily in this book. He doesn’t trash materialism; on the contrary, the philosophy here encourages you to never make rash judgments of others. Samtosha encourages you to seek contentment in what you have already, before seeking contentment in more than you already have. It kind of reminds you of that line from Star Wars, where Yoda, thinking Luke is unready to be a Jedi, says “always his mind was on the future, never was his mind on where he was!”

Perhaps the problems that necessitate the philosophy of the Yogi are really an American problem. Everything in the USA is competitive, and our people are encouraged to take out huge loans to go to college, buy huge houses, and drive huge gas-guzzling cars. We end up working all our lives to pay for these things, because the average American family doesn’t want to cram into a tiny apartment and drive a tiny car. Europe, by comparison, is smaller on all scales, with small families, small apartments, and small cars. Teenage girls aren’t pressured to be popular, women don’t go crazy about their hair, they have children later than Americans.

Maybe the first step in the path to fulfilment is to learn to live without the things everyone else has.

Berlin: A Green Archipelago

Before I review this book, I must first mention a short film about Berlin that I saw at the TimesUp movie night. The Invisible Frame, it is called, where Tilda Swinton cycles around the perimeter of West Berlin, a year before the wall came down. I got the feeling that West Berlin, despite fixed boundaries and being landlocked, was doing quite well for itself. I saw closely-packed homes, parks, gardens, and none of the pinched crowding I expected to see. It was nothing like the old city of Kowloon in Hong Kong.

This unusual book, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, was written as a pamphlet in 1977, and printed in Ithaca by a German professor working in the USA. It is a manifesto for turning Berlin into a planned community that would accommodate residential, commercial, and open spaces. There would even be areas where Gypsies would be allowed to camp. In the first chapter it says that Berlin has fixed boundaries that can’t expand, so the architects would have to take into account the issue of overcrowding.

Rather than call for demolition and (what Americans call) urban renewal, the manifesto suggests creating a grid that would include existing buildings and make room for new ones. This makes sense because it allows streets large enough for buses to get through, and avoids the creation of enclaves that are badly served by public transit.

Though I love the ideas in the manifesto, a lot of them eventually became unnecessary. The unification of Germany in 1989 eliminated the need for a lot of the space mentioned in here, because the population would shift to where there was employment. After the Berlin Wall came down, the “no man’s land” on the East German side became available, as did previously undesired areas. On the opposite side of the argument are huge apartment blocks that are being demolished because there’s nobody to rent them to; people have abandoned communities where there is no employment.

I would encourage the reading of this book to anybody studying urban planning or architecture. It definitely has some important points about urban living.

Lanahan Cases in Developmental Psychopathology

One of the real-life cases in this book was a six year old boy who liked girl stuff; dolls, girls’ clothes, playing with the girls at school and not the boys. It drove his mother crazy, infuriated his father, and left them tearing their hair out trying to get him to do gender appropriate things. He loved going to the home of a cousin of the same age, so he could play dress-up in her clothes. If you’re wondering, the answer is yes, his aunt and uncle were seriously creeped out!

I don’t know when this was written, but transgender kids are all over the news nowadays, being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Twenty years ago, however, the parents would not have been encouraged to allow their son to wear a dress to school. The chapter, as with all others, comes with questions to ponder, such as how you’d feel in the clothes of the other gender, and having to do gender stereotyped activities. Would you feel bored? Out of place? Generally uncomfortable?

There are more cases in this book, equally important, mostly involving children. Some involve anxiety that keeps kids out of school, or teenagers with PTSD. All of them are worth reading, because they’re all the kind of things that a therapist will deal with. No theories here like in the usual psychology textbook, no going on and on about Vygotsky, Freud, and Piaget. These are the real things that a therapist will deal with.

But the case of the transgender kid was probably the most interesting. The next volume could be a whole book about families coping with this.