At the moment you caught sight of this book, what were you thinking? Was your thought a stream of sensations? Or was it a voice in your head? Did you ask yourself, “I wonder what that's about?” Did you answer? And what does it mean if you did?
When someone says they hear voices in their head, they are often thought to be mentally ill. But, as Charles Fernyhough argues in The Voices Within, such voices are better understood as one of the chief hallmarks of human thought. Our inner voices can be self-assured, funny, profound, hesitant, or mean; they can appear in different accents and even in sign language. We all hear them—and we needn't fear them. Indeed, we cannot live without them: we need them, whether to make decisions or to bring a book's characters to life as we read. Studying them can enrich our understanding of ourselves, and our understanding of the world around us; it can help us understand the experiences of visionary saints, who might otherwise be dismissed as schizophrenics; to alleviate the suffering of those who do have mental health problems; and to understand why the person next to us on the subway just burst out laughing for no apparent reason.
Whether the voices in our heads are meandering lazily or clashing chaotically, they deserve to be heard. Bustling with insights from literature, film, art, and psychology, The Voices Within offers more than science; it powerfully entreats us all to take some time to hear ourselves think.
Review
“In The Voices Within, [Fernyhough] has rendered complicated mental experience without losing its human texture, as so often happens when psychological questions are addressed in the lab.... [It's] an intriguing and deeply humane book.”
—Casey Schwartz, New York Times Book Review
“[T]his book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the voices in their heads.”
—Discover
“The author's investigations, at once scientific and humane, represent the discipline of psychology at its rare best.... That Mr. Fernyhough is a novelist as well as a psychologist is evident in his illuminating discussion of the polyphonic art of fiction and the way in which writers such as Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark and William Golding unpack characters from the voices they generate in those characters' heads.... Some of the most compelling pages in Mr. Fernyhough's book describe how hearing voices may be a response to traumatic, sometimes repressed, memories, rather than merely being the result of the atypical processing of inner speech. The voices carry messages that cannot otherwise be spoken.... After reading The Voices Within, you may never again be quite as thoughtless about the fact that you think.”
—Raymond Tallis, Wall Street Journal
还没人写过短评呢
还没人写过短评呢