Malcolm Gladwell examined how setbacks can aid the underdog in David & Goliath. Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./ Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBISEver since its origins in the late 19th century, psychology has been a double discipline. There are the laboratory experimentalists who look "objectively" – from the outside – at behaviour, emotions, perception, or thought. Imaging technologies have turned them into neuroscientists who can now follow the routes of all this in the brain. Then there are the psychologists with a more literary or philosophical bent. They probe experience, listen to the inner human story, and may, like Freud, think that this, too, is scientific, even therapeutic – arguably more so than any fashionable diagnostic classifications. This year the most interesting books have come from the latter camp.
Darian Leader's Strictly Bipolar (Penguin) is a passionate attack on the rise of bipolarity as a diagnostic category. Big Pharma's mood-stabilisers have meant that diagnoses have gone up by 4,000%, while pop-cultural evocations have bred unconscious imitation. What is taking place, he argues, is a shoehorning of a complexity of experience into a sloppy paradigm defined only by highs and lows.
Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life (Chatto & Windus) is a finely honed rendition in some 30 vignettes of what passes in his consulting room. There's 21-year-old Matt, reckless in his behaviour, who can't seem to feel his own emotions; Amanda, who imagines terrorists in her flat; Graham, who bores for England. The always surprising "whys" of all this, teased out in the analytic hour, may be individual but they implicate us all.
Doubling as a literary academic and a psychoanalyst, Josh Cohen is well poised to engage in acts of interpretation – of texts, patients, the culture as well as himself. In The Private Life (Granta), he examines some of the tensions in our current snooping- and celebrity-obsessed world, where privacy is in danger of becoming a dirty word. At the same time he journeys into that cloudy terrain of the unconscious to probe the uncanny stranger within, that ultimate guarantor of privacy.
Any list of the psychological best has to include a new volume from Adam Phillips. One Way and Another (Hamish Hamilton), with a brilliant introduction from John Banville, brings new essays together with some selected old ones, to reflect on narcissism, obstacles, compromise, tickling, being bored and more. It doesn't really matter what Phillips puts his mind and prose to. To use Virginia Woolf's words on the essay, he can always "sting us awake and fix us in a trance, which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life".
Naoki Higashida's The Reason I Jump (Sceptre) is an extraordinary account of how autism feels from the inside, written by a 13-year-old boy. The book, in one way, underlines the theme of Malcolm Gladwell's David & Goliath (Allen Lane), an energetic, counterintuitive exploration of why (and how) underdogs succeed, and how disabilities, traumatic childhoods, and other seeming lacks can sometimes trump power.
The year also brought us the excellent Life Lessons series (Pan Macmillan). These popularising pocket volumes highlight quotations from the great thinkers of the past and interweave them with interpretation that brings them closer to our own times. Brett Kahr's Freud is both elegant and useful in this respect, as is John Armstrong's Nietzsche.
Finally, neuroscientist Giovanni Frazzetto's How We Feel (Doubleday) perhaps signals a trend towards a less imperialist neuroscience. He takes us on a journey through anger, guilt, anxiety, grief, joy, love – and underlines just how far science can now go in its explanations before we have to call in those other kinds of explorers of the inner life, the poets and the philosophers.
Lisa Appignanesi's King's College debate series can be seen at thebrainandthemind.co.uk. Her next book, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness, is published next April by Virago
