Operators’ manual for the people of Lake Woebegone and other shy persons

A review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re the sort of person who gravitates to the sidelines at parties, shuns speaking opportunities and the spotlight in general, and wonders how gregarious people ever got to be that way, this book was written for you. And, as it turns out, not just for me, too, but also for between one-third and one-half of the American population.

Here’s Susan Cain framing her subject: “Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality — the ‘north and south of temperament,’ as one scientist puts it — is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them.” And, of course, lots more.

The popular misconception of introversion in America is that it’s “somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” By contrast, extroversion has become what Cain calls the “Extrovert Ideal” in U.S. society, making the rest of us feel somehow guilty when we don’t measure up. Cain takes on this misguided notion with a vengeance. In Quiet, she demonstrates how each of these two personality types has its own advantages and disadvantages. She makes a clear case for including a balance of the two types in any organization, the extroverts to push the limits and the introverts to hold them back from hurtling over the edge.

The terms introvert and extrovert were popularized by Carl Jung in an influential book published nearly a century ago (1921). “Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves.” In Quiet, Cain details the many ways in which the two personality types differ in the ways they work, play, invest, love, and perform just about any other function common to Americans in the here and now.

The distinction between the two types isn’t hard and fast. For example,
“[i]ntroverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while they wish they were home in their pajamas. . .  Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.” Introverts listen more than they talk. Extroverts talk more than they listen. Still, the contrast isn’t complete: these are tendencies exhibiting strong statistical correlations with distinct patterns of chemical interaction in the brain . They’re not universal guides to behavior.

Cain places contemporary views of introversion and extroversion in historical context. A century ago, during what she terms the “Culture of Character,” Abraham Lincoln was placed atop the pedestal of virtue. Today? Tony Robbins represents the ideal in the Culture of Personality. (Tony Robbins?! You’ve got to read the book.)

Quiet is endlessly fascinating, with lengthy passages and sometimes chapters devoted to Robbins, Harvard Business School, Dale Carnegie, Rosa Parks, open-plan offices, Steve Wozniak, and other icons, fads, and trends of today’s America. Throughout, the author presents the detailed findings of research in “personality psychology,” as the relevant field is called. She cites the jargon but explains everything in clear, straightforward prose.

If you want to gain insight into who you are and why you act the way you do, read this book. It’s a pleasure.

From the ashes of the Holocaust, a gift of lessons for living

A review of Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.” This is the conclusion that a young Viennese psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, reached in the course of more than three years in a succession of four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The book he wrote in the space of nine days in 1946, originally under another title, morphed over the years into the thin volume known around the world today as Man’s Search for Meaning. It has sold more than 12 million copies and been translated into 24 languages, serving as a source of inspiration and solace for millions of people. Man’s Search for Meaning is frequently cited as one of the most important books of the 20th Century.

Frankl’s almost matter-of-fact description of his years in concentration camps is profoundly moving, the more so because it’s a fiercely personal document and makes no attempt to relate the familiar statistics now surrounding the topic or to place the Nazi phenomenon in historic perspective. Frankl writes simply about how he personally managed to remain hopeful in the face of staggering brutality, including the murder of his young wife at Bergen-Belsen and the death of numberless friends and colleagues. As Frankl relates, their deaths came not only at the hands of SS guards but also, at least equally, as the result of sadistic behavior by the “Capos,” prisoners themselves raised to positions of authority and privilege by the Nazis. The effect of reading this material is searing. Here, God is truly in the details.

However, Frankl’s story about life in the concentration camps is only one of several parts in Man’s Search for Meaning. The edition I read included five pieces written over more than half a century by three different authors: a foreword by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, an Afterword by William J. Winslade, and three articles by Frankl. The first of these three, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp,” has received the most attention from non-professionals. The second, “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” is Frankl’s brief summary of the principles and procedures of logotherapy, the “third school” of Viennese psychiatry that Frankl created — an approach that’s often termed “existential psychiatry.” (Somehow, Carl Jung seems to have gotten lost in the numbering system — perhaps because he was Swiss, not Viennese.) Frankl also wrote a “Postscript 1984” bearing the title, “The Case for a Tragic Optimism.” And all this writing fits comfortably into a remarkably thin little volume. 

Intellectually, Frankl’s abbreviated introduction to logotherapy for the layperson, was the most intriguing part of the book. The term itself is derived from the much-used Greek word, logos, which has been applied to all manner of pursuits in philosophy, rhetoric, and religion. Frankl took it to mean something like “meaning.” He rejected the determinism of Freudian and Adlerian psychiatry, insisting that neither approach was useful in treating more than a minority of psychological problems. In his own practice and that of the students under his supervision in a series of top Viennese hospitals, Frankl found that many psychological problems could be easily cured by one or a few conversations between the patient and the logotherapist. Logotherapy involved no years-long sojourns on the analyst’s couch. (In fact, patients sat in chairs.) He cites many cases of ingrained phobic and compulsive behavior that he and his disciples cured by somehow convincing patients not to worry about their behavior. A lifelong stutterer, for example, was cured when he was persuaded to enter conversations unconcerned about stuttering — and the cure was lasting. A fellow physician transcended his depression over the loss of his wife in a single, short conversation with Frankl. The essential truth of logotherapy is as Frankl discovered in the camps: so long as we maintain a powerful commitment to some life goal outside our present circumstances, we can get through practically any privation.

Man’s Search for Meaning should be in everyone’s library. The lessons Viktor Frankl teaches can be applied to challenges in any culture and all walks of life.