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  • Strangers to Ourselves

  • Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
  • Written by: Timothy D. Wilson
  • Narrated by: Joe Barrett
  • Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (16 ratings)

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Strangers to Ourselves

Written by: Timothy D. Wilson
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
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Publisher's Summary

In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us. This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primative drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. If we don't know ourselves -- our potentials, feelings, or motives -- it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful that Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves. The book is published by Harvard University Press.

©2002 the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2011 Redwood Audiobooks

What the critics say

"[Wilson's] book is what popular psychology ought to be (and rarely is): thoughtful, beautifully written, and full of unexpected insights." (Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker)

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