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In his introduction to Thorndike's 1905 textbook, The Elements of Psychology, William James wrote that for any given discipline, textbooks offer a window into the soul of the culture. James Hansell and Lisa Damour's new textbook, Abnormal Psychology, offers just such a window with a wonderful view—if not of what our culture is like now, of what it could be.
Hansell, who teaches in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, is a graduate of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and has published extensively in the psychoanalytic literature on psychotherapy process and outcome and in gender and sexual identity. Damour teaches in the Department of Psychology at John Carroll University and is an expert on the training of graduate teaching assistants. Both are recognized educators in the field of psychology. The overriding aim of their textbook is to introduce students to the fascinating complexities of abnormal psychology from a point of view that includes multiple theoretical perspectives and attention to the patient as a whole person.
While recognizing the overwhelming importance of diagnosis and of the need for textbooks to be consistent with the DSM-IVTR system (which this one certainly is), Hansell and Damour