(Part 2) Best products from r/askpsychology

I highly recommend this book. It talks a lot about disagreements and fights in relationships. Gottman is the best in his field and the science and advice is pretty solid.

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.

Attachment and object relations are important concepts in the conception of personality disorder, but they are a bit outdated in the sense that these concepts have been somewhat refined.

You can find more modern conceptions in relational psychoanalysis / mentalization theory (e.g. Fonagy/Target -- Attachment theory and psychoanalysis, Attachment and reflective function: their role in self-organization).

Or interpersonal neurobiology. For example, this article by Daniel Stern, this one by Daniel Siegel, and something by Allan Schore, like this or this).

Here's another decent overview article

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1. Get yourself a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - this is a nice readable paperback you can carry with you daily
   
   
2. Pick it up daily and read a paragraph
   
   
3. That's all you need to do for now. A master or mentor is helpful, but they are in short supply these days
   

Stats :) https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Statistics-Using-IBM-SPSS/dp/1446249182/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494420070&sr=8-1&keywords=statistics+using+spss
(also other versions if you/your school doesn't use SPSS)

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

Dr. Paul Ekman, a specialist on the psychology of lying calls this telling the truth falsely,

He defines this as "admitting the truth but with such exaggeration or humor that the target remains uniformed or misled."

What makes some a lie is not that the statement is false, but rather the intent to mislead.

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.

Hey there, I came across this in the British Psychological Society's magazine which looked like a tasty read: 'The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia' by Nathan Filer.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heartland-finding-losing-schizophrenia/dp/0571345956/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1U4CJW9MJXIQQ&keywords=the+heartland+finding+and+losing+schizophrenia&qid=1564741705&s=gateway&sprefix=the+heartland%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-1

Not sure how good it is, as I haven't read it, but definitely takes a critical look at the diagnosis and the place of Schizophrenia in the history of psychiatry. Alternatively, Mind often have empowering rather than solely medicalised info on their website for survivors: https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/your-stories/schizoaffective-disorder-and-me/#.XUQQ3C2ZM1I

Here's another good book that focuses on dealing with people that have diagnoses other than BPD (Which is what "Stop walking on Eggshells" focuses on.)

Codependent no More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

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.

This textbook describes this as Short Transient Inferences

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Cognition-Understanding-Others-Psychology/dp/1593850859