Individual Reading

I've been trying to consider which theoreticians/psychologists/philosophers to read up on next and what area's I'm interested in.

At first I was tempted to just expand on interests/narrow understandings I already have, rather than tackle something new. My first priority was Existentialism and the concept of the "absurd", mainly due to my recent decision to reread Albert Camus 'The Myth of Sisyphus', which I read a year or two ago and (what I understood of it) found fascinating.

Camus claimed that "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." He went on to compare living a life with no religious obligation to the existence of the mythical Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to push a rock up a mountain, only for the rock to roll back down and his task to be repeated.

So, as well as re-reading the essay, I ordered 'The Outsider', his first novel, where "Camus explores the predicament of the individual who refuses to pretend and is prepared to face the indifference of the universe, courageously and alone."

Along with this, I decide to read something entirely new to me and I thought I would try some form of modern psychology. I decided on a book by Malcom Gladwell, suggested by my dad, called 'Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking'. As a sufferer of procrastination and over-thinking, I thought the synopsis sounded ideal:

"[Blink] explores the extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind. Gladwell’s major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking."

So these will be the next two books I concentrate on once I finish my current two. However, I also ordered Carl Jung's 'The Undiscovered Self', which I see as slightly overdue, as Analytical Psychology was one of the first strands of psychology I was ever interested in and Jung's ideas of the unconscious, the shadow, individuation and self-realisation are the backbone to some of my favourite works of literature, film and TV, and even a lot of my own writing.