Psychological readings
Psychological conflict, belief and reasoning, and interaction research offer
ways to understand how people experience, interpret, and respond to their lives.
For ordinary users, this repository's route is for the model to work with
philosophy and personal material to help form and revise an understanding of
the person. The person contributes experience, purposes, recognition, and
correction. Psychological research and professional methods are collected at the end.
Links lead to publisher records, samples, author materials, or public full texts.
Psychological conflict, relationships, and change
As environments and relationships change, earlier wishes, commitments, and habits can pull against new circumstances. These readings address ambivalence about change, competing needs, self-criticism and protection, love and hostility toward the same person, and knowing something without being able to act on it. Different theories explain these phenomena through their own concepts and evidence.
More accessible books
| Author and book |
Reading entrance |
| Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap, second edition (2022) |
A general-reader entrance to acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT): entanglement with thoughts and feelings, values, and action. More approachable than beginning with its theoretical manual. |
| Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts (2021) |
A general-reader entrance to Internal Family Systems (IFS), using parts and their protective roles to understand self-criticism and internal opposition. |
| Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko, Reinventing Your Life |
An accessible schema-oriented account of recurring life patterns, needs, and coping, illustrated through cases. Pair with the professional schema-therapy text below. |
| Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts |
A classic entrance to the tensions among moving toward, against, and away from others. Read its diagnostic vocabulary in its historical context. |
Contemporary psychotherapy: understanding conflict and change
These readings cover approaches developed in recent decades and their updated textbooks, including theory, cases, and dialogue.
| Approach and representative book |
Question to bring to the reading |
| ACT: Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, second edition; Harris, ACT Made Simple, second edition |
Professional theory and a more accessible practice introduction. How can action follow values without first eliminating inner experiences? Focus on psychological flexibility, defusion, acceptance, and committed action. |
| DBT: Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual, revised edition (2025) |
A professional skills-teaching manual. How can acceptance and change coexist? Examine mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance. The companion handouts are a separate volume. |
| Schema therapy: Young, Klosko, and Weishaar, Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide |
A professional text on needs, early schemas, coping, and modes in recurring internal and relational conflicts. Pair with the accessible Reinventing Your Life. |
| IFS: Schwartz and Martha Sweezy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, second edition (2019) |
A professional text on opposition, relationships, and change among protective parts; chapter 11 specifically addresses protector polarizations. |
| Emotion-focused therapy: Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings, second edition |
A professional text on emotional functions and expression, self-criticism, unfinished relational experience, and emotional transformation. This entry refers to Greenberg's emotion-focused approach. |
| Motivational interviewing: William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing, fourth edition (2023) |
For helping professions and practitioners. Follow ambivalence about changing and reasons to retain the present arrangement through engaging, focusing, evoking, and planning. |
| Coherence therapy and memory reconsolidation: Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, and Laurel Hulley, Unlocking the Emotional Brain, second edition (2024) |
Advanced theory and cases concerning conflict between explicit wishes for change and implicit emotional learning. Distinguish reconsolidation research, the authors' clinical interpretation, and evidence for particular methods. |
| Mentalizing: Carla Sharp and Dickon Bevington, Mentalizing in Psychotherapy (2022) |
A professional introduction with dialogues and cases. How do people understand their own and others' mental states under relational strain while keeping interpretations revisable? |
Classic conflict theories and psychoanalysis
| Author and original work |
Reading purpose |
| Freud, Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXIII; The Ego and the Id |
Historical theoretical accounts of compromise between opposing tendencies and pressures among identifications, reality, and the ego ideal. |
| Freud, Mourning and Melancholia |
Examine how love, hostility, identification, and self-reproach are related in the explanation. |
| Melanie Klein, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946) |
The trust's original-work reading entrance. Examine splitting, projection, and different aspects of the same object alongside the earlier depressive-position account. |
| D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality; Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self |
Transitional space between creation and encounter, and the relationships among compliance, spontaneity, and true/false self. |
For Freud, Lacan, and philosophical discussions of will and self-deception, see philosophical readings.
Belief and reasoning
These references address belief revision, information access, and reasoning, connecting formal rules, particular situations, and actual change.
| Paper or reference |
Reading purpose |
| Logic of Belief Revision |
Use AGM and related frameworks to distinguish expansion, contraction, and revision, while keeping formal rationality distinct from a person's actual changes. |
| Dynamic Epistemic Logic |
Compare information events, knowledge and belief states, and updates, including public announcements and other information events. |
Research on conflict, fragmentation, and dynamic revision
Interaction research
These studies address meaning, coordination, epistemic trust, and learning in relationships.
Psychological research and professional methods
Professional references on case formulation, experiential material, and language-model research.
| Book or chapter |
Content and source |
| The Psychodynamic Formulation Collective, Psychodynamic Formulation: An Expanded Approach (2022) |
A professional textbook on psychodynamic formulation, including development, conflict and defense, relationships, self, sociocultural context, and collaborative formulation. The publisher provides a contents list and first-chapter sample. |
| Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, second edition (2011) |
A professional conceptual and case textbook on psychoanalytic personality theory, defenses, and relational organization, with publisher contents and a sample. |
| Tracy D. Eells, Psychotherapy Case Formulation, second edition (2026) |
A case-formulation textbook addressing explanatory hypotheses, quality, and clinical application. The link leads to the APA publisher record. |
| Jacqueline B. Persons and Michael A. Tompkins, Cognitive-behavioral Case Formulation (2007) |
A chapter in Eells's edited Handbook of Psychotherapy Case Formulation, second edition, pp. 290–316. Author institution's bibliography · Author-uploaded chapter. |
Experience and individual differences
| Book or paper |
Content and source |
| Braun and Clarke (2006), Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology |
A foundational qualitative-methods paper addressing theoretical positions, analytic choices, and patterns in material. |
| Oblak et al. (2024), Crisis of Objectivity |
An open case study constructing an individualized network from experiential material to understand connections among difficulties. |
| Mischel and Shoda (1995), A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality |
A theory of situations, cognitive-affective relations, and behavioral variation, including “if–then” behavioral signatures. |
| Navarro and Foxcroft, Learning Statistics with jamovi (2025) |
An open textbook covering measurement, research design, descriptive statistics, sampling and estimation, correlation, and regression. |
Research methods and model explanation
| Book or paper |
Content |
| Borsboom et al. (2021), Theory Construction Methodology |
Psychological theory construction and the relationships among data, phenomena, explanations, and formal models. |
| Jhangiani et al., Research Methods in Psychology, fourth edition |
An open textbook covering hypotheses, qualitative research, observation, cases, measurement, and research design. |
Language models and personal understanding
| Research |
Subject and available material |
| Hossain et al. (2025), AutoPsyC · Code |
Recognizing psychodynamic conflicts in semi-structured interviews, comparing prompting, retrieval, and fine-tuning. |
| Hu et al., TheraMind · Code |
Research on a longitudinal counseling agent, evaluating cross-session information and strategy adjustment through simulated conversations. |
| Zhou et al. (2026), ReaLMem and ChronoProfiler |
A benchmark and profiling study of long-term multimodal personal archives, distinguishing factual recall, persona inference, and predictive personalization. |
Related work includes Vazire (2010) on
self–other knowledge asymmetry, Peters, Cerf, and Matz (2024)
comparing GPT-4 personality inferences with self-report Big Five measures, and
Burger et al. (2022)
connecting case formulation with Bayesian idiographic networks in Clinical
PREMISE.
boluopai.