Summary of Timothy D. Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 What are more important than matters of the heart. Or more difficult to decipher. Some people know exactly what they want, but are unable to achieve it because of their own pride, stubbornness, or lack of self-insight.

#2 The idea that a large portion of the human mind is unconscious is not new, and was Freud's greatest insight. Modern psychology owes him a large debt for his willingness to look beyond the narrow corridor of consciousness.

#3 The first experimental psychologists to jump off the behaviorism bandwagon said little about whether those aspects of the mind they were studying were conscious or unconscious. But as cognitive and social psychology flourished, it became clear that people could not verbalize many of the cognitive processes that psychologists assumed were occurring inside their heads.

#4 The modern, adaptive unconscious is not the same as the psychoanalytic one. The gap between research psychologists and psychoanalysts has narrowed considerably as scientific psychology has turned its attention to the unconscious.