4 Must-Read Psychology Books That Most People Have Never Heard Of

I experience mixed feelings whenever someone recommends a book or a song that came out years ago and which I’m just discovering now. One part of me is grateful for the recommendation, but another part of me says, “This came out years ago and I’m only just discovering it now?!”

Two of the books I’m going to share below just came out in 2020, so it’s entirely possible that you haven’t heard of them yet. The other two stretch a little further back (#3 on this list first came out in 1955), and I believe that they each deserve to be more widely known.

So let’s get into it! Book number one comes from one of my favorite human beings ever, Ernest Becker:

1) The Birth and Death of Meaning, by Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, where he showed that one of the biggest motivators of human behavior is the subconscious fear of death. Basically, human beings are afraid to die, so they/we try to leave legacies, amass fortunes, and “make a dent in the universe.”

I mentioned that he was one of my favorite human beings ever, and I’m not alone in this opinion! One time, in the 1960s, thousands of his students got together and offered to pay his salary when the University of California, Berkeley, threatened to remove him as a lecturer. Unfortunately, their petition didn’t succeed, but it shows you a little bit about how much he was loved by his students.

The Birth and Death of Meaning covers a lot of ground, but it mostly deals with how human beings collaborate in constructing meaning. He shows that our social context — i.e. society — is made up of a multiplicity of “selves,” or “egos,” who all want different things, and who continue “playing the game” so that we can all get what we need from each other.

This is a fascinating book, written by a beautiful human being who cared deeply about our world, and who hated to see it being torn apart by conflict and brought down by sorrow. If you’re looking to understand human nature more intimately, I highly recommend this book!

See my personal study notes for this book here.

“When people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down.” -Ernest Becker

2) Transcend, by Scott Barry Kaufman

This is probably the most uplifting book on this list, and Scott Barry Kaufman does an excellent job of extending Abraham Maslow’s ideas from nearly 70 years ago to show how human beings can move even beyond self-actualization and create a more humane and comforting society for every single one of us.

You may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (although, fun fact: Maslow himself never actually put them into a pyramid), but Kaufman shows how, towards the end of his life, Maslow was working on the next stage of his vision of human development.

The next stage is transcendence, where we realize that our own personal well-being is intimately tied up with the well-being of every single other person alive on earth. It’s a powerful, game-changing idea.

One of the most interesting parts of Transcend I’ll also mention briefly is Kaufman’s list of the thirteen sources of well-being: More positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, life satisfaction, vitality, environmental mastery, positive relationships, self-acceptance, mastery, autonomy, personal growth, engagement in life, purpose, and meaning in life, and what he calls “transcendent experiences.”

See my personal study notes for this book here.

“I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away.” -Abraham Maslow

3) The Sane Society, by Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm changed my entire life when I first read The Sane Society. Same with The Art of Loving, actually, where he says that love is the only rational answer to the problem of human existence. Amazing.

In this book, he shows why it’s really no measure of sanity to be considered “well-adjusted” while living in an insane society!

Fromm explains how we’re removed from the sources of genuine well-being we need in order to live full, human lives.

When mere conformity is seen as mental health, we’re blinded to just how crazy parts of our society really are. Fromm never lived to see Facebook replace many of our in-person interactions, but he was keenly aware of how the latest technologies allowed modern militaries to kill real people thousands of miles away just by pushing a button.

Depending on your politics, you may not agree with some of his potential solutions, but hardly anyone formulates the problems as well as Fromm does.

See my personal study notes for this book here.

“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies?” -Erich Fromm

4) The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel

Okay, so this is a much happier book than the last one. I swear!

There’s actually so much common (and not so common) sense in this book, which is why I believe that it’s an absolutely essential personal finance/psychology book.

Housel teaches that knowing what to do doesn’t really teach us anything about what happens in our heads when we actually try to do it. We all know that we should be saving for retirement, getting out of debt, following a budget, etc. And yet, when it comes to actually doing those things, our plans often fall apart.

That’s true because our feelings and emotions get involved when we deal with money! It’s kind of like what physicist Richard Feynman said when he wondered aloud about how much more difficult physics would be if electrons had feelings!

The best thing about The Psychology of Money is the friendly, convivial tone of Morgan Housel throughout, as he teaches us everything he’s learned about how to master our own psychology when it comes to money and spending.

See my personal study notes for this book here.

“Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.”

-Morgan Housel

Of course, there are hundreds more excellent psychology books I could add, and who knows how many must-read books that I myself have never heard of? I honestly don’t even want to think about it!

But if you haven’t heard of any of these, or if maybe you have heard of at least one of them but just haven’t found the time to read it yet, I hope I was able to stir up your curiosity a little bit. Remember, the cure for boredom is curiosity! Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no cure for curiosity.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

Click here for my top 20 unconventional reading strategies that will help you read 13x more books this year, along with my complete reading list (850+ books!)