Book Reviews
A Circle Unbroken: The hidden emotional patterns that shape our lives
By Hugh Crago
ISBN: 978-1-8644881-3-5; 1999; xi+214 pages; Allen & Unwin, St Leonards NSW;
Reviewed by Sotirios Sarantakos
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga NSW
A Circle Unbroken is a book that deserves the tide "Developmental Psychology Made Easy" (made interesting and approachable, I should add). It is a book that takes as its task to simplify and demystify expert knowledge and still remain a useful source. Doing justice to its tide, A Circle Unbroken looks at how people go through the life cycle (including gains and deficits in relationships, dependency, etc.), while progressing from infancy to adulthood and late life. A difficult task for a small book, given its size and nature (a self-help book!), which the author handles very skillfully.
A Circle Unbroken contains 10 chapters, each covering a specific stage of life. It begins with a brief chapter entided "The End of the Beginning", where birth - "life's first great journey" and "the first great migration" - is explored. In Chapter 2, "Born or Made?", the century-old question about nature versus nurture is revisited, and in Chapter 3, "Into our First World", a child's confrontation with the new world, the first relationships, the separation-individuation process, and the development of self are explored. Chapter 4 focuses on the years of preschool to puberty. Here we are told that "our first caregiver [is] the mirror in which we saw and learned about our own selfhood" (p.121). From here, the book takes us to adolescence (Chapter 5) and to adulthood (Chapter 6). Issues relating to self and sex, as well as to living on the borderline and to the "cradle of pathology", are introduced. Here the author reminds us that many emotional problems, such as anorexia and bulimia, show up for the first time during adolescence. What follows (Chapter 7) is a popular subject: marriage and parenthood, or, in the author's words: "The Maker and the Made". Here we learn what marriage really means, how important it is for a person that the parental marriage is happy, and how perceptions of parental marriage are reflected in the marriage of their children. The next step of discussion takes the reader to "The Middle of the Journey of our Lives" (Chapter 8), to the reflection of the "death of youth", to the "crisis and creativity", and to the midlife in the family life cycle, where we are reminded again of the inevitable linkage between present and past, and of the reenacting of the dramas of our own adolescence. "The Midlife and Late Adulthood" (Chapter 9) is a bridge to "the top of the tree", to the shade of death, and the mystery of repeating patterns (cycle of violence, intergenerational transmission of violence, "cycles of resilience", "intergenerational transmission of love"). These cycles of life, the interlocking of patterns of experiences explained in this and the following last chapter, "Full Circle", bring the reader close to the focus of the book. Old age leads people "back home again": to loneliness, to the emptying of the inside (dementia, Alzheimer's, etc.), to the flickering in and out of consciousness, and to death. The author advises: "only when we allow ourselves to notice what we do, only when we allow ourselves to think about our present behaviour in the light of our past behaviour, and the behaviour of others in our family, past and present, do we give ourselves the chance to exert some control over the patterns of our lives" (p. 165).
This is an interesting book, that reads like a novel, is free of heavy referencing and academic jargon, and conveys a clear message to the reader. Here, personal experiences and stories from the lives of well-known personalities displace partly "evidence and procedure" which is the toolbox of the orthodox psychologist. In this sense, this book will not appeal to students and academics or professionals but rather to the general reader, who I am sure, will find it entertaining and informative. It will appeal to the uninitiated in psychology, who bother little about the real mechanics of personality development, and who want to gain an idea in a brief period of time about the complex processes of becoming a person. For the psychologically-minded reader, who demands more depth in the academic analysis of the stages of life, where differences are highlighted within a critical psychological argumentation and a more technical framework, and where simplification and eclecticism are given less importance, there are other books to choose from.
