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Hello. For general introduction these books (here, here) are popular picks. They are revised every few years and include new findings accordingly. (here is the link to the free e-book) You can continue reading into the disciplines you find interesting. I definitely recommend sticking to the history of psychology, how it historically developed and branched out of modern philosophy. The reason for reason for this is because you need to be able to engage psychology philosophically in order to interpret what underlies psychological findings. Also most of the early psychologists were philosophers, not scientists. (one might be interested to trace all the way back to Greek philosophers, by that I mean "Read classics!") You will learn about some of the precursors of psychology in the books I mentioned.

One can find excellent lectures on Psychology online these days for free so you might want to check them out. (Yale University has a popular course on introductory psychology)

Also what type of field in Psychology interest you? (Animal Behavior, Biology, Neuroscience, Sociology, Clinical Psychology, Developmental, Culture/Religion, Language, Psychoanalysis, Cognition)

Here are some of my personal recommendations.

1. A History of Personality Psychology - Frank Dumont (2010)
   
2. Discovery of the Unconscious - Henri Ellenberger (1994)
   
3. Fifty Key Thinkers in Psychology - Noel Sheehy
   
4. Statistics - David Hand
   
5. Factor Analysis - Richard L. Gorsuch (if you are interested in the scientific end of psychology, especially research fields, learning statistical tools like factor analysis will help greatly)
   
6. Little Science, Big Science, and Beyond - Derek Solla Price (1986)
   
7. Anxiety - Daniel Freeman & Jason Freeman
   
8. Perception - Brian Rogers
   
9. The Emotional Brain - Joseph Ledoux (1998)
   
10. Cognitive Neuroscience꞉ The Biology of the Mind (2019)

Two books that really helped me with this are Moonwalking with Einstein, which lays out a good narrative and overview of how various memory devices works and How to Develop a Brilliant memory. The authors, Joshua Foer and Dominic O'Brien both competed in memory competitions, doing rather well using techniques used here.


For lists and such I particularly like the Memory Palace method.




For more specific and complex things like passwords I like the Dominic System.


There are several other methods mentioned in these books, some help linking names to faces (very helpful and very easy). Alot of the things they suggest seem ridiculous, and take practice, but the strangeness is part of what helps you remember.

Anyway, hope that gives you a good starting point!

I know what you're talking about, but I apologize that I can't remember where I read that either. Ultimately it reminds me of what I read in the book Give and Take by Adam Grant - https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986

It has to do with the law of reciprocity and how doing things for other people first makes them feel indebted which isn't a good feeling that makes them feel favorable of you. But in opposite, when people do for you, they feel good about themselves and attribute that positive feeling from you. I'm heavily paraphrasing but maybe that book will send you in the right direction. Sorry I couldn't be more help than that though. I actually spent like an hour looking through my book notes but couldn't find exactly what we're both thinking about here.

While evolutionary psychology is considered a "new" subfield of psychology, it has its origins in Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. Darwin argues that, in the future, psychology will be based on a foundation which is, "of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." An excellent foundation for evolutionary psychology begins in The Origin of Species.

Regarding newer works, I would recommend Robert Wright's The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. This is an excellent encapsulation of how evolutionary psychologists primarily interpret moral behavior in both humans and non-human animals alike.

I would also check out Jerome Barkhow's incredible work The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. I recommend this book if you're looking to understand why human intelligence is fundamentally distinct from other species, and how evolutionary forces shaped human culture.

Happy reading!

You could give choice theory a look. I struggled with depression for years and it helped me turn myself around and become the happiest person I know. I'm not saying it will definitely work for you since everyone finds success in their own way, but it's worth a try.

If reading a whole book is too intimidating you can get a taste of it by looking at the wikipedia article about it, or this website that teaches choice theory.

And if you feel like getting a pep talk from Will Smith you can check out this instagram video he did that mirrors the main idea behind choice theory.

Best of luck to you in finding a way out of the darkness.

Try "The Psychology Book: big ideas simply explained" I got it as a gift a while back and it's pretty awesome. It's actually simplified and not dumbed down and it's really colorful so maybe it'll keep his attention.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0756689708/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1450027180&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX118_SY170_QL70&keywords=the+psychology+book

Depends on the theoretical models he’s interested in. Here’s my favorite Jungian gift:
The Red Book
It’s something I would never have bought myself because of the cost, but am glad to have it for its historical significance.

Got this for my dad for the same reason. It's a great book and I like to joke that reading it is more or less like getting a bachelor's in psych

I've not read it and am by no means an expert, but The Power Paradox is worth looking into.

My basic understanding of it is that people who are more altruistic and friendly tend to become more popular and also powerful, but once they have power, those traits diminish.

The Stanford Prison experiment is a classic and famous experiment on this topic. I understand it's methodology to be questioned on the basis of selection bias.

This isn't exactly what you are asking, but a good psychology-related book that is written for the layman would be Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow

It is an interesting read that provides a lot of information about thinking.

Can't say it's the best because I haven't read them all, but check out Seven Psychologies by Edna Heidbreder. It seems to fulfill all the desiderata you specify.

This answer is a bit more of a "how" than a "why", but maybe it'll spark some interest anyway...

This book describes us as behaving in ways that imply that we have a hierarchy of behaviors structured under goals and ideals. Any behavior that doesn't contribute to some higher-order goal or ideal will tend to feel less rewarding, so you'll do it less... and to not have goals or ideals at all or the ability to set them and hold to them (or to organize your behavior as if you did, since sometimes they're subconscious) can be dysregulating. Purpose and meaning are in some sense even bigger meta-goals and meta-ideals, ways we can organize our lives that are bigger than an individual person, sometimes spanning longer than any one person's lifetime. In that sense, we seek purpose and meaning because it sucks not to have it. It leaves you blowing in the wind, like everyone in this thread is saying.

To make this more concrete, here's a clinical example of something that could be related: people with borderline personality disorder tend to have many short, intense relationships that flame out, coming in part from experiencing a strong conflict between wanting to feel close to people and being overwhelmed by fears that they'll be hurt or abandoned. They also tend to experience an unstable sense of self. The unstable sense of self might contribute to overly intense, conflictual, unstable relationships by robbing them of a stable backdrop against which to ask themselves "who am I in this relationship and what do I actually want it to be for myself?" In other words, I think those behavioral phenomena might be a particularly vivid example of what happens when you don't have access to some organizing principle to hold sway over your fleeting whims, habits, less helpful or savory subconscious motivations, etc.

If it's purpose or meaning that you feel conflict about or a lack of rather than a sense of self, that's not going to produce the same surface manifestation of unstable relationships... but it might well produce a life course that has the same overall structure of instability, maybe manifested instead in ways like not being able to pick a career or a college major, demotivation leading to cycles of procrastination and then hyperproductivity once the pressure is past a certain threshold, making major changes like moving to a different state often without having a clear picture of what it is you're looking for, that kind of thing.

There's a good book called Work with Me thats exactly on this topic. Amazon link

Not a real easy read unless one has a lot "pre-requisite" knowledge, but Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary has been one of the very hottest books in the EP field since it was published. Lawrence Kohlberg's The Philosophy of Moral Development (both volumes) is another bedrock. But I would say that anyone who has looked into the social construction of reality and the evolution of the "consensus trance" is worth your time.

You are right, psychodynamic theory tends to be skimmed over as it is a bit thin on empirical evidence. Rather, it relies on case reports to build the knowledge base.

A few books come to mind.

Nancy McWilliams is one of the more prominent names and is a pretty great writer and speaker.

http://www.amazon.com/Nancy-McWilliams/e/B001K8DARQ

There is the PDM which excels at speaking about the subjective experience of an individual with a particular disorder

https://www.amazon.com/Psychodynamic-Diagnostic-Alliance-Psychoanalytic-Organizations/dp/0976775824

For developmental psychology there is the Evolving Self by Kegan

https://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Self-Problem-Process-Development/dp/0674272315/

Interpersonal world of the infant by Stern is dense, but can help understand the role of early life and help explain the impact of pre-verbal trauma, neglect

https://www.amazon.com/Interpersonal-World-Infant-Psychoanalysis-Developmental/dp/0465034039/

There are ton more out there, but the above I have read personally.

Check out "object relations" for a more general psychodynamic approach. Some psychodynamic theorists have also been incorporated into more modern approaches. For instance Alfred Adler theorized "basic mistakes" which in turn lead to REBT and later the "Cognitive Distortions" in CBT.

https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X

Check out the chapter on Authority, and the bibliography - should get you on the right track.

I'm seeing Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness, January First: A Child's Descent into Madness and Her Father's Struggle to Save Her, Descent into Madness: A Personal Look into Schizophrenia, and The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. All of those are about schizophrenia, none of them are textbooks or as old as you describe.

Not every older book is possible to find with google. It's possible that she has the title exactly right, and it's just so obscure that nobody is talking about it online.

Inter-Library Loan is a great way to get ahold of rare books. If you have enough information, you can give that information to the library, and they'll check with other libraries until they find one that has the book. Then that library mails the book to your library. It can cost some money, but sometimes it's the only way to find some rare books.

My local Psyc department uses this to guide 1st year undergrad courses

Ah, will do that as often as possible then. By the way, this is the book I mentioned:

http://www.amazon.com/Developmental-Psychology-Adolescence-David-Shaffer/dp/0495601713

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition


This book is an academic look at modern psychologically developed marketing practices and how they convince, manipulate, and influence consumers.

All the marketing techniques herein could and are used to control and manipulate people. The book even mentions that it could serve as a guide to intentionally hone unethical and manipulative influence over others.