Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

During my first job, as a psychologist at a psychiatric hospital, I told my psychoanalyst/supervisor my adolescent patient’s statement. “That’s psychotic,” the doctor replied. Though able to define “psychotic,” until that moment I hadn’t grasped the power of this condition.
Similarly, when the latest horrors became public–the mass murders  Read More 

I was once interviewed by a trade magazine reporter for an article relating to my book, Through Children’s Minds: The Marketing and Creation of Children’s Products. She has a Ph.D. in art history, writes long, engaging restaurant reviews, and has begun writing fiction. We had several phone conversations that became personal  Read More 

As a psychologist, I've long found that parents complain most about schools. They are, as institutions, hermetically sealed, uninterested in any opinion that doesn't agree with their own and, when their efforts with troubled children fail (as almost always happens), the parents become termed expert and the school demands that they resolve their child's  Read More 

While producing advancing technology and art both demand creativity, they differ greatly. The conceptual creation of a Google-type enterprise requires a broad, expert knowledge of technology, including its current use in society, and its products advance societal development. But the motivation for artistic creation is to partially resolve the author's emotional  Read More 

President Obama's proposal to provide free E-books reflects naive psychology since there are already free books available through school and local libraries. What is needed is for parents to read to toddlers and to speak with rather than to their children (i.e., explain why something shouldn't be done rather than saying, "Do  Read More 

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms reflect the mind's healthy attempt to heal itself, to re-integrate and, in this way, to regain the adequacy of functioning that it possessed before experiencing unbearable stress. PTSD also reflects that the mind has limited capacities.

It has long been stated that the greatest fear is of public speaking: having to appear before an audience and "deliver." I can still remember my terror when speaking before a high school school class and likely most have shared this experience.

In later years, when public speaking became important in my career, I learned  Read More 

ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and AD/HD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) have been widely used terms to diagnose children's problematic behavior for the past fifty years though the particular symptoms that they comprise have been noted for two hundred years ("mental restlessness").

Fifty years ago the symptoms were believed to reflect MBD (Minimal Brain Dysfunction). Yet rather  Read More 

People instinctively know, despite how they might then feel, that their life is not over when a relationship ends: that the abused wife can move on, and the battered teenager can find a better home.

Or two sisters may relate pathologically, being hatefully tied to each other with their love being overlain by envy or  Read More 

During World War I, the British General Sir Douglas Haig presided over the greatest slaughter of that country's armed forces in history. Virtually every family had a member who was killed or wounded and the grief nearly led to revolution. There were over a million dead, a half-million missing, and two million wounded. This  Read More