100 Books Like The Divided Self

We humans, for all our accomplishments in science, art, engineering, architecture, and literature, are haunted psychologically by the stark awareness of the reality that we all die. The various individual, group, and collective unconscious ways of trying to deny the reality of death are legion.

Becker stunned me with the way he organized a penetrating discussion of how many domains the effort to deny the reality of death enters. In the process of exploring these roads of travel to deny death, I found myself searching my own efforts to get meaning in my own life and try to prepare for my death.

This book is full of stories, using case studies that include the lives of Walt Whitman, Saint Augustine, and Russian writer Leo Tolstoy—that I found fascinating. Here psychologist William James challenges what he—and I—were both taught: namely, that religions are primarily childish fantasies (the view of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, in The Future of an Illusion). But after James, as a young man, experienced a terrifying depression, he describes his surprise at what felt to him like a spiritual breakthrough that enabled him to recover. James skips questions about dogma and belief, instead identifies a range of different “varieties of religious experience” that, far more than “belief,” can give rise to spiritual insight. 

I love Carl Jung’s ability to see into the nature of consciousness and make the connection between the experience of being a being on Earth and the true nature of our being. He is one of the first scientists to describe the near-death experience and to see it as another trick of the dualistic world.

Jung explains how, during his heart attack, he died and was transported above the earth to a doorway guarded by a cosmically dangerous spike. Jung’s observations as a scientist and doctor about what makes us tick are a foundation for people realizing their true nature through people like David Bingham today.

This is an amazing book to really get sucked into.

Written in 1976, it is a fantasy to go hide in from today’s dystopia of post-COVID and early climate change. You can join 1960s Consuela Ramos in her escape from a forced hospitalization in a mental institution to a utopian world that she visits with Luciente, a time-traveler.

That future is full of amazing people who do not celebrate hierarchies of race and gender but live in anarchist poly-amorous villages where hard labor is performed by machines and babies are produced in breeders with biological components of three parents.

The book is rich in blueprints for liberated education, conflict resolution, socio-economic innovation, and relationships. The beautiful world is threatened by a wicked parallel future world that Consuela must help to prevent.

What would happen if instead of throwing people into jail-like mental wards and hammering them with tranquilizing drugs, we instead welcomed them into home-like settings and spent time listening and caring, patiently giving them time and space to explore the emotional roots of their crisis? Psychiatrist Loren Mosher did just that in the Soteria House research project in the 1970s and 80s, and the results were clear: people do better without medications and with listening and caring in a safe environment instead.

Mosher was the first chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia of the National Institutes of Mental Health but you’ve probably never heard of him – his innovative project proved that psychosis can be healed more effectively without medication and outside of  hospitals, but came at a time when biological and pharmaceutical solutions – and the profits they generate – came to dominate psychiatry, so he was… show more.

Hearing voices is considered a symptom of schizophrenia and can quickly lead to hospital lockup, medication, and being shunned by society as “mentally ill.” In this fascinating account, Smith reveals the truth about this experience we call “madness” – hearing voices is actually a normal human experience across history and culture. Poets, religious visionaries, people spending time alone or grieving – even Freud, Gandhi, actor Anthony Hopkins, singer Lady Gaga -- all heard voices, and anyone under the right kind of stress can hear voices. The problem only arises when people hear distressing voices and have nowhere to go for help other than being treated as ill by a doctor.

Psychiatry made the catastrophic mistake of calling homosexuality a mental disease, and for many decades LGBT people were abducted, confined in hospitals, drugged, tortured, and killed for the mental crime of being different. Today people who hear voices are also… show more.

Tillich’s work is foundational for any “mystery-based” religiosity, or to put it another way, “awe-based” spirituality, and The Courage to Be is one of his most accessible and popular works. The Courage to Be, which influenced generations of humanistic and existential-oriented thinkers and therapists is about the willingness to face the anxieties of existence in the service of maximal participation in the life-space we are granted. It is all about boldness and risk-taking, with full awareness of limitation and fragility, to meet the demands of creative participation in love and work. 

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

One of Oliver Sack’s delightful books containing stories of individuals with various neurological disorders. I read the first one, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, back in the 1980s  when it first came out and was hooked, now having read almost all of them.

The one I am recommending is, I believe, more relevant to an understanding of brain mechanisms. One criticism I have had of Sack’s books is that there is little in the way of neurobiological explanations for the conditions described. In my book, most chapters begin with a Sack-like story about a specific neurological condition that is then explained, as far as possible, neurobiologically in the chapter.

I haven’t come across a clearer and easier to read account of how psychiatry became the modern version of colonial missionaries "educating" the “backward,” “uncivilized” world.

By examining Western biomedical models of mental health and how they are communicated, he shows how existing and helpful local approaches are erased by colonizers portraying them as “uneducated superstitions.”

Coming from the global south myself, the story examples that Watters describes resonated not only with my academic understanding but also with my personal experience. Western mental health ideology is inherently imperialist, and Ethan Watters will help you appreciate why.