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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)

Psychoanalytic theory isn't going to give you much insight into the mind, sadly. It's outdated by almost 80 years at this point. The main psychoanalytic theories on personality and structure of the mind are the common ones in pop-psych that most people know. Freud believed that early experiences were sexual in nature, and failure at any stage of psychosexual development resulted in being "fixated" on that stage (Oral, Anal, Phallic, or Genital), which lead to problems later in life. It's not a testable or falsifiable theory, so it's been abandoned since before WWII as a serious area of scientific inquiry, though many practitioners of classical Psychoanalysis were trained through the 1980's.

Various Behaviorist concepts now dominate the practical applications of psychology, but don't often give much in the way of insight into the mind as it is considered little more than a processor of stimuli. Neuroscience is left to fill in the blanks of how the mind processes that information, and that's how the vast majority of the modern work on it is done: fMRI studies on stimulus-response patterns creating activity in various sections of the brain. for the most part it's working quite well so far and some people have recently begun having human brains directly transmit information/commands through an electronic medium.

If you're looking more for the internal experience or organization of the mind, there's a very wide variety of authors and theories to choose from. The ideas of Schemas and cognitive development by Jean Piaget are still taught and utilized today as they provide a useful foundation for understanding how the mind learns to process information. Similarly, Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development is also still taught and prominent because of the foundation it lays for understanding the basic information processing that's going on in us all the time, usually without our awareness.

For book recommendations, I would have to go with Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence as a good start for laymen in the field to understand where much modern theory is pointing. Goleman's explanation of the slow and fast processes of perception and cognition (one conscious and slow, the other unconscious and fast) are largely responsible for the Freudian phenomena of the "unconscious mind." The ideas of id and super-ego have been largely replaced with neuroscience regarding behavioral reward pathways in the brain (especially relating to addictions), impulse control, and social influences on behavior (taboos, mores, laws, etc).

Personality theories get complex because just defining what a personality is (or agreeing that such things even exist to define) has proven to be problematic. This site gives a pretty good overview of personality theories in psychology and is very well sourced.

Defense mechanisms are part of the out-dated psychoanalytic model, but are still mostly recognizable today as maladaptive behaviors. They're as varied as the people that come up with them, though some are common across populations and cultures (dissociative fugues, Stockholm Syndrome, Munchausen Syndrome, etc.). I don't really have much recommended reading here for informational purposes, sadly. The idea of a coping mechanism or maladaptive behavior is somewhat nebulous and could be almost anything done cognitively or metacognitively to reduce overall stress on the self, including various addictions, self-delusion, repressing a memory completely, rewriting a memory through repeated story-telling, or just ignoring something stressful and hoping it goes away.

Hope I managed to help a little here, even if I didn't give you exactly what you asked for. Good luck in your search!

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 were probably able to focus better in some subtle ways reading a hard copy, but since text is text, and meaning is meaning, in the end the responsibility to focus or not focus is on you, on the individual.

Maybe you'd be interested in this. I've read it, and it's pretty good in my opinion, if a few years old now. http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains-ebook/dp/B003R7L90I

Check out The Owner's Manual For the Brain by Pierce Howard. It is not a page-turner, but there is a load of great data in it for reference. It also uses neuroscience to give you some tips on managing your life. For instance, it will give you some scientific studies on depression, stress, and relationships and tell you how you can use that knowledge to better your life.

https://smile.amazon.com/Owners-Manual-Brain-4th-Performance-ebook/dp/B00DB3672S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498166787&sr=8-1&keywords=brain+manual

Also Phantoms of the Brain. Dudeman who wrote that is terribly intelligent and is good at describing the complexity that is neuroscience. There's a really interesting interview on youtube with him that sparked my interest. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtoaGaSs7W8&index=8&list=PL8qcvQ7Byc3OJ02hbWJbHWePh4XEg3cvo)

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

This question gets asked a lot! Good on ya for reading outside your field of study.

Best recommendation for easy readability:

https://youarenotsosmart.com/

"You are Not so Smart", and possibly it's follow up (*which I haven't read)

https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-So-Smart/dp/1592407366

https://www.amazon.com/You-are-Now-Less-Dumb/dp/1592408796/

The Rape Recovery Handbook: Step-by-Step Help for Survivors of Sexual Assault

This guide applies to other sexual assault encounters. There's different exercises that can help you work through your emotions. At first it might seem to make you feel worse and cause a lot of crying, but it helps you go actually work through your emotions and maladative thoughts. This book helped me a lot.

You will get through it. (: stsy strong!

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.

I have worked in the mental health field. No matter what advice you read you are going to have to find something that works for you. I tend to perceive life from an existential point of view. Your choices define you. You cannot change what choices you have made in the past. You can only control what choices you make in the present. Focus on making choices that help you feel fulfilled and that encourage personal growth. Let the guilt be the fuel that drives you to make better choices in the present. Don't make any choices that are going to add to the guilt you feel.

Here is a book that may or may not help you: [Man's Search for Meaning] (http://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X)

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.

Gross' Psychology is a fantastic core textbook which covers a large range of topics across psychology. It is useful from the first introduction to psychology all the way to undergraduate study. But by being so comprehensive, it is a bulky book.

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.

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