Control, Escape, and White Bears.
Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self:Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, & Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood (Basic Books, 1993)—Baumeister explores the appeal of escaping from self-awareness. Although some degree of self-awareness is important for guiding behavior, all of us occasionally find it unpleasant to focus on our shortcomings, deficits, or problems. Baumeister describes the psychological mechanisms that produce such escapes and examines the consequences.
Daniel Wegner, White Bears and OtherUnwanted Thoughts (Viking/Penguin 1990)—Wegner begins by referring to an important aspect of everyday cognition: the difficulty people have in suppressing or controlling unwanted thoughts. Exploring how current social, clinical, and cognitive theories explain mental control, he demonstrates how basic laboratory research can help us understand why it is so difficult to keep secrets, think ourselves out of a bad mood, or ignore innuendo.
Wendy Kaminer, F?n Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The RecoveryMovement & Other Self-Help Fashions (Random House, 1993) Kaminer's wonderful critique of the self-help recovery movement is must reading for anyone who has ever wondered about the widespread proliferation of 12-step programs. Despite its breezy title, Kaminer's book is a sophisticated and scholarly examination of the tendency that people with difficulties have to portray themselves as helpless victims.
Stanton Peele, Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment out of Control (Free Press, 1989)—Peele proposes that contemporary American society has created addicts of us all. This provocative book traces the historical development of the addiction-as-disease model and cogently argues that the disease perspective may cause more problems than it solves.
Roy Baumeister, Todd Heatherton, and Dianne Tice, Losing Control:How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation (Academic Press, 1994)— Our book explores how people go about trying to control a wide variety of impulsive thoughts and behaviors—including moods and thoughts, eating, drinking, work performance, gambling, and shopping.
Heatherton
