Based on the author’s forty years of experience in psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences, How to Rethink Psychology argues that to understand people we need to know more about their contexts than the dominant modes of thinking and research presently allow. Drawing upon insights from sources as diverse as Freud, CBT, quantum physics, and Zen philosophy, the book offers several fascinating new metaphors for thinking about people and, in doing so, endeavors to create a psychology for the future.
The book begins by discussing the significance of the key metaphor underlying mainstream psychology today – the ‘particle’ or ‘causal’ metaphor – and explains the need for a shift towards new ‘wave’ or ‘contextual’ metaphors in order to appreciate how individual and social actions truly function. It explores new metaphors for thinking about the relationship between language and reality, and teaches the reader how they might reimagine the processes involved in the act of thinking itself. The book concludes with a consideration of how these new metaphors might be applied to practical methods of research and understanding change today.
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How to Rethink Psychology is important reading for upper-level and postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of social psychology, critical psychology, and the philosophy of psychology, and will especially appeal to those studying behavior analysis and radical behaviorism. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas in science and thinking.
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Review
' Metaphors simplify what is complex: that is why we use them in normal life, and that is why scientists use them. This book makes a powerful case for the ways in which the dominant metaphors in psychology today ensnare us and limit our possibilities. Bernard Guerin successfully shows us how to rethink psychology with a dynamic range of new metaphors.’
– Steven C. Hayes , Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
'In this indispensable book you will find provocative arguments and metaphors that will shake your beliefs about human action. Rather than providing answers, Bernard Guerin shows what kinds of questions are worth asking in order to advance our understanding of psychology.'
– Julio C. de Rose , Department of Psychology, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil
About the Author
Bernard Guerin is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Australia.

motw/How to Rethink Psychology_ New - Bernard Guerin.pdf

How to Rethink Psychology (Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour)

Guerin, Bernard;

Ashgate Publishing Limited

Taylor & Francis Group

Taylor & Francis Ltd

Gower Publishing Ltd

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

How to Rethink Psychology, 2015

London, 2016

1, US, 2015

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 7.0 (Windows)

Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

Cover 1
Title Page 4
Copyright Page 5
Table of Contents 6
List of tables 10
Preface 12
Acknowledgements 14
CHAPTER 1 Understanding our own psychology: alternative ways to think? 16
New metaphors to help rethink how people work 17
What will be different after rethinking? 21
Why bother? 22
Causes and contexts: shifting metaphors from current psychology 23
Sequential, causal, or contextual basis for human actions? 25
Metaphor 1. Our actions are like lumps of Plasticine 26
Why do we think action is sequential and constantly decided? 29
Thinking contextually 31
Metaphor 2. Contexts not causes for growing seeds into plants 32
We do not have a ‘control center’ 33
Contextual observation 34
Metaphor 3. Contextual observations of (blue) holistic elephants 36
The rethinking to take away from Chapter 1 37
CHAPTER 2 The ubiquitous social: from social constructionism to social contextualism 41
Contextual influence better thought of as waves than particles: three metaphors 43
Metaphor 4. Understanding people is better thought of as attuned responding to external contexts using wave-thinking 49
Metaphor 5. We can utilize gravity even if physicists do not understand how it works 54
Metaphor 6. Think of attunement as sympathetic resonance 57
Twelve ways that being alone is social: how can we think that? 59
How do social relationships pervade our actions, thinking, and self-thinking? 71
What does the wave metaphor get us? 73
CHAPTER 3 Language use as the original virtual reality 80
Words do not control language use: social contexts do 80
Magic, words, and power 83
Language use as the original virtual reality 84
Metaphor 7. Language use as the original virtual reality 85
Two metaphors that help rethink language use as virtual reality 93
Back to electromagnetic waves 93
Metaphor 8. Language better thought of as attuned responses to waves than as reactions to particles 93
“It either happens or it doesn’t”: contexts are 100 percent 94
Metaphor 9. Getting hit 100 percent by a brick and other brute facts of life 96
What does all this mean for language use? 99
How does this affect the analysis of language use? 105
What do we need to know about language-in-social-interaction to understand people? 106
CHAPTER 4 Thinking, self-talk, and how to read minds 111
Rethinking thoughts and thinking 115
Thinking and causality 115
Thoughts refigured as virtual reality: the external social control over thoughts 117
Metaphor 10. Thinking can also be reimagined as virtual reality 117
Thoughts as associations: replacing this oldest metaphor 118
Metaphor 11. Thoughts are like the effects of waves rather than emitted particles 119
Seven key points for rethinking thinking 122
‘We’ do not control thinking: all thoughts are intrusive thoughts 122
Words are not controlled by what is named and neither are thoughts 125
Why ‘consciousness’ is directed towards other people 126
Thinking is social – it depends on audiences 128
What are the events that happen when we ‘think’? The social dynamics of thinking 131
We can read people’s thoughts – in a way 134
Talking about ‘inner’ processes for utilization as rhetoric 135
What do we know about contextual strategies of thinking? 136
Types of audiences and how they affect thinking 136
Ultimately, talking to oneself is from economic, social, cultural, historical, and environmental contexts 138
The social strategies of cognitive models 139
Conversational strategies in thoughts and thinking 143
Discursive strategies implicit in psychotherapies 145
Types of unconscious editing 147
Types of repression and similar strategies of thoughts 149
How can we rethink thoughts? 153
CHAPTER 5 The Zen of running our lives: doing, thinking, and talking 158
Summary of the plot so far 158
Summary description of life 158
Two short examples 160
Life, words, and Zen 163
Where to from here? 166
Practical methods of research, understanding, and change 166
Philosophy: on being very clear that actions, thinklings, and spoken words are not metaphysically, philosophically, or essentially different 167
How should we understand people? 172
Appendix: tractatus psychologica 175
Index 181

Based on the author' s forty years of experience in psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences, How to Rethink Psychology argues that to understand people we need to know more about their contexts than the dominant modes of thinking and research presently allow. Drawing upon insights from sources as diverse as Freud, CBT, quantum physics, and Zen philosophy, the book offers several fascinating new metaphors for thinking about people and, in doing so, endeavors to create a psychology for the future. The book begins by discussing

2025-10-27