Sybil - The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities, by Flora Rheta Schreiber

This book tells the story of Sybil, a woman that, as the title says, was possessed by sixteen different personalities. Unbelievably this was a real story. Sybil (which is a fake name) suffered from dissociative identity disorder caused by severe traumas that she experienced during her childhood, and she really had initially 16 personalities from different ages, that some were not even aware of the others (as Sybil wasn't aware of any), and interestingly two of them were even men. Each personality had its own taste for things, opinions, believes, that were strongly conflicted at times, even physically they were different, the way they dressed and talked, and that made Sybil's life a huge mess. The book basically tells the story of the psychoanalytical treatment she received during 11 years until she got completely healed. The good thing I liked about the book is that it goes step by step along the treatment showing in details all the difficulties faced by both therapist and patient and how they overcame them. It tells a lot about how the human psyche works sometimes. And the best thing is that, since it is a story and not a textbook on psychoanalysis,  it is very easy to follow everything even if you don't know much about psychology. It was really intense for me to follow all the steps of Sybil treatment because it did make me get in touch with a lot of working mechanisms of my own psyche. And not need to mention that the meditations I do on a daily basis, got again very deep and liberating during the period I was reading this book. It is something I can't explain exactly why an how it works but the true is that, in my case at least, the difference on depth of my meditations during normal periods and periods when I am reading such books is astonishing. It really is. Well, just to summarize, I did love the book. I always like books that make me get involved with them to such an extend that after reading I can say I am not the same person who started reading it. That's mainly it. Enjoy if you want.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin

Ok. How should I start this? Well, Kropotkin is my favorite social anarchist writer. By far! From the four main ones, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, he is the one I like the most. His first book I've read was a few years ago (maybe 4 years) and it was called The conquest of bread. About this subject, this was so far the book I tough it was the most honest and precise about all the aspects of the anarchist ideology, its necessity and its possibles developments, in a very simple, down to earth and human way. He doesn't have for example the frenetic fire Bakunin has, he is much more serene, which is quite hard to find in anarchists sometimes, and that amazes me about him. Well, I do like Bakunin also. Very much indeed. However I think Bakunin is more the kind of guy that would give the fuel to a machine, but wouldn't himself project and built the machine itself. For me this is more kind of a Kropotkin style. Well, anyway it doesn't matter. About anarchy Proudhon is a good guy also, however he gets to much into economics to me. I don't follow it to much so sometimes I get a bit lost into Proudhon's books. Well, Malatesta seems to be more of a Kropotkin also, however I confess I only read a few essays he wrote so I don't really have enough knowledge to conceive a very good opinion about him. Although I did like his essays I read. He has a nice touch of his Italianess on his philosophy I would say. He puts a bit of love into his writings for example. I find this amazing. This is something that to be fair you sometimes feel when reading about anarchy. That there is some ocean moving deep down that makes some people desire freedom for everybody. Call it love or whatever, although this is something I sometimes get from some anarchists essays, in Malatesta this seems to me to be more clear and open than in the Russians for example (Bakunin and Kropotkin). Although I confess this is more of a feeling I have than of an analytic analysis of theirs writings. But anyway, this was supposed to be about Kropotkin's book and not a review on anarchist writers. So let it be it. I might come back to the others latter on.

After falling in love with The conquest of bread, I decided to give a go at his other famous book called Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. I liked very much the title already. One of the things I most dislike about some capitalist preachers is when they come and say, but such are human beings, they like to compete, to be better than others, is the struggle to survive, the survival of the fittest, or whatever. Kind of trying to say that capitalism is almost nature's choice. Ok, as Kropotkin also says in his book, it is absolutely true that these kind of things are indeed present in human beings, and did exist over human evolution. But what is not true is that this is the only thing that exists in us. We are a bit more than only struggle and fight. This is what Kropotkin shows in this book. He starts showing mutual aid in nature, in animals. He does a very long analysis of Darwin's works but also does himself a lot of empirical research with many kind of animal species from Siberia and from other parts of Russian and the world. The first chapter is all dedicated to this study. I confess this kind of analysis is a bit new to me because I've never read Darwin's or any other biologist, or evolutionist, about those things. So Kropotkin was kind of the open door for me to it. I got a few other books about evolution and development of species to read latter, but that will still take some time. Ok, but the book is not only that. In the second chapter he starts to describe a lot of the development of the firsts human tribes and how mutual aid is present constantly over its evolution. He does a very anthropological study about human development from tribes, clans, small villages, cities and so on, and shows how even in the cruelest tribes there were always in some degree towards some aspects of its existence mutual aid. But more than this, he shows how mutual aid was indeed very important in the survival of animal species and of human societies all over history. In the latter chapters he goes on in history telling this kind of things until we get to our days. The book follows kind of the line: animals, savages, barbarians, medieval cities, and ourselves. It is a very good book about anthropology. But what impressed me the most is the amount of knowledge and detailed information he gives about such a variety of subjects. Specially biology and history. I don't know exactly how many years took him to write the whole book but I guess it couldn't have been less than ten years. The guy really studied and did a lot of research to write about it. To be fair, although I wasn't very familiarized with at least the biological part, I thinks this is by far one of the most rich books I've ever read in terms of content. The guy was amazing. Really, he was not only a social scientist but also a traditional scientist and knew history and anthropology very deeply. I am very amazed by him. And all for a noble cause. What a guy this Kropotkin was. Unbelievable!

By the way, this is a link for the .pdf if you are interested: http://www.complementarycurrency.org/ccLibrary/Mutual_Aid-A_Factor_of_Evolution-Peter_Kropotkin.pdf

Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology by Paul Radin

This was the last book I've read. I wasn't particularly interested in american Indian mythology, but I was as I still am very interested about the Trickster figure. This is an archetype that continuously appears under different forms in my dreams and because of that I decided to study it more deeply. And to be fair I think this is also a figure which is very present and unconsciously admired in the current Brazilian culture (or should I say in the Brazilian soul to give it a more mystic touch?). Anyway, the trickster is one of the archetypes that appears a lot in the Jungian texts. Its main characteristic is its extreme contradiction between its divine essence and its animal destructive unconscious. This antagonism between destruction and creation is always present in the Trickster image. It is very interesting to see how very old american Indian cultures have tales in which the hero behaves exactly as a Trickster showing all its life cycle and the transformations that happen during his life. The book tells some of these myths and after that the author makes some comments about these cultures and how they related to the myths, where he tries to explain the nature and the meaning of the stories. There are also two extra chapters in the end, one from Karl Kerényi about the Trickster in the Greek mythology, and other from Jung himself about the psychology of the Trickster figure. I quite like books like this one that shows a nice historical account of an psychological pattern (or an archetype) that is still very alive, although many times unconsciously alive, showing indeed that our behavior today is still very much guided by forces which are much older than what we can imagine. I don't know. I simply like to deconstruct the idea that nowadays we do things differently, that we are "modern innovative people creating the future". Well, obviously there are differences, but I don't know exactly to what extend the are just different variations of old patterns or whether they are indeed some new elements that came into life. Anyway, this is a talk for other time. That's all for now.

Inner Work - Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth by Robert A. Jonhson

This was one of the books I most liked reading last year. The author is an Jungian analyst that had lectures with Jung himself. The book explain a lot about analytical psychology and it gives a lot of techniques on how to use it on ourselves. A lot involves active imagination and dream analysis. What I liked most was the dream analysis. On a daily basis I have a very lively memory of my dreams and I can clearly remember the feelings that were involved in each situation of the dream. So this book and all the information and techniques it shows have been very useful to me in order to understand the hidden mechanisms that are operating in my unconscious world. Nowadays I use a lot of the content I find in my dreams even on my nearly daily meditations and it has been priceless because it helps me a lot to guide myself on where to go during the meditation. The book is very well written, it is very clear and even if you don't know to much about analytical psychology this is not a major issue. The author gives a lot of practical examples of dream analysis and active meditations of some of the patients he had and sometimes even of the work he did on himself so that all the theory he explains in the early chapters of the book becomes very tangible and real. I read a few other books of the same author, but this one was by far the best I've seen so far because it sums basically all the theory with very good examples. This is kind of his bible I would say. It is much more complete and useful than his other works. Inner Work is a very good tool for people interested in dealing with its own unconscious mechanisms. I absolutely loved it.

Finnish lessons - What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg

I read this book a couple of months ago, and it tells a lot about the current educational system in Finland and how it got to this point. What happened there was something very interesting. A couple of decades ago the Finnishs decided that the educational system should not anymore be based on competition and prize-given for goal-achievers, but rather on cooperation and equality. There was a big change in basically all aspects of the teaching process. Much less homework, much less examinations, much less hours in class, more freedom to chose the learning subjects, no failing mechanisms, flexible times, and better conditions for teachers. Schools became a bit less like a prison, such as they usually are all over the world. But the most interesting thing about it was the results that came over the years. The intention of the changes were more to bring equality to society and to make the educational system more accessible and human. However, surprisingly the result was not only that but also Finnish students started to achieve the highest grades in international examination process. Although that wasn't the goal, the average grade of the Finnish students in international examinations started to achieve levels never achieved before. I think this is really amazing. The changes were better for everybody in all aspects. People were effectively learning more with more freedom. That is all I believe about education. Exams, grades, goal-achieving, prizes, discipline, I think this is all rubbish that brings nothing good to anyone. I really think true education should help the students to learn what they want to learn rather than giving them something you want them to learn and then examining them about that. This Finnish example is a very good thing in this direction. This book itself is sometimes a bit repetitive and it was written quite in an almost academic style (although not to much), but it is a very nice account of what happened and is still happening in Finland. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in educational issues. 

First as tragedy, then as farce by Slavoj Žižek

I have to confess that Zizek is in the moment the guy I most like to read and to listen to. This book, First as tragedy, then as farce is the first actual book I read from him a few months ago, however I think I've heard and watched more than 20 hours of his public lectures or speeches that one can find on youtube. Zizek is an Marxist philosopher that is in loved with psychoanalysis. He loves Lacan and specially Hegel, which was the greatest philosopher ever according to him. What I most like about Zizek is the fact that he is a left wing thinker that treats things not only from a social or philosophical viewpoint but mainly through a psychological view trying to understand the hidden truth behind sociological and political speeches. I simply like the guy very much. This specific book talks about lots of things, as Zizek always does, but it focus mainly on the madness of capitalist economic laws, analyzing a lot of what happened after the beginning of the current economic crisis that started in 2008. It is definitely worth reading if you like politics and economics. Although if you are a right winger you will probably not enjoy it.

Inaugural post

The idea of this blog is basically to have a space in which I can write a bit about the books I read and found interesting. I like to read and quite often I read not very conventional books that I would like to talk about. More than this I also would like to keep practicing my English since after living 4 years in London now I am back to Brazil where I do not have the opportunity of using this language on a daily basis. Well, I think that's all for now.