Listing 10 books you have to read


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Of all the questions that students have asked me over the years, one of the most interesting comes from an intern who requested a list of 10 books that I would recommend she read. I thought this would be easy as a few favorites quickly came to mind but, when the count soared past 10, the challenge of being selective or exercising discernment became apparent.

When you ask a supervisor for a top 10 reading list, you are really asking for two things - a body of work that you think might be helpful or interesting to you because it is considered valuable by one of your teachers and, if you ask the question to enough people, an insight into different preferences that reflect and shape the ways your mentors think.

The more I thought about my student's question in terms of valuable content, the harder it became to honor her simple request. The traditionalist in me argued in favor of suggesting a great books curriculum - the classics of literature, philosophy, theology, history and a few carefully chosen representatives from our own field of psychology. My pragmatic side quickly dismissed such foolishness not only as impractical and redundant but also as missing the point. If someone about to receive a doctorate in psychology had not already been introduced to at least 10 great books, then surely nothing I could suggest could make up for what had been missed even if I knew which 10 to recommend.

Clearly, I was taking this too seriously and might just as well give in to my first impulse to jot down the first 10 titles that came to mind even if most of them turned out to be mysteries and thrillers.

Maybe the specific content didn't even matter. After all, it wasn't like this person was moving to a deserted island and could only bring the 10 books I recommended. Maybe she was asking everyone this question and planned to read only those suggestions that appeared on more than 75 percent of all respondents' lists. Now that's how a psychologist would think and, with a creative experimental design, she might even turn her project into a research study. Bulletin: "Seventy-five percent of practicing psychologists recommend English murder mysteries. Two percent favor Pavlov." So maybe it wasn't content that she was after so much as some idea of what makes her supervisors think the way they do. If so, then perhaps the chief value of my list would be as a catalogue of reading to avoid.

As with most things in life, truth resides somewhere between the extremes and so my list is neither the product of impulse nor a tortured attempt to produce the definitive 10 best life-enhancing references. Rather it is a representative sample of writing in different genres over a broad range of subject matter where the principles of selection are ultimately more important than the items chosen. Read what you will but don't confine your reading to a narrow range of ideas or a single kind of writing.

Read non-fiction for facts, information and understanding but go beyond what academic psychology has to offer. Read outside of our field - history, biography, religion, travel, the natural sciences or anything else that captures your interest and imagination. The more we know about our world, the more likely we are to see the connections that hold all things together like barely visible threads. Pick up any one and it will lead you to points of intersection with strands of thought from directions you never imagined would lead you to the very place you stand. We learn about people in a similar way - by being curious and receptive to the connections or insights to which our curiosity leads.

Read fiction of two kinds - stories that tell us what next and literature that tells us why. The "what next" kind of fiction can engage both rational thought and strong emotion as when we follow the twists and turns of an intricately plotted mystery even as we identify with the joys, sorrows and fears of sharply drawn characters. Let literature take you deeper into the inner lives of characters with conflicts and motivations that, in words Harry Stack Sullivan once used of troubled souls, are "more simply human than otherwise."

Read poetry to appreciate the power and economy of language. Listen to the simple beauty of a few well-chosen words the way you would listen to a song for the sheer pleasure of the tune. Let language evoke sensations, feelings and thoughts that carry you in two directions at once - away from the cares of your everyday life and deeper into the heart of what we all experience. Robert Frost believed that, in poetry, the feeling finds the thought and the thought finds the words. How would our practice of psychotherapy change if we could listen and speak to our patients as poets?

My student will soon have her list of my top 10 books. She may find some of them worth reading but I hope she will substitute others of her own from the broad categories I suggest. Ask me next year or even next week, and my own list may be different, but after all these years, at least I learned how to make one. n Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

Listing 10 books you have to read (June 2009 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Listing 10 books you have to read
(June 2009 Issue)