Reviews and Comments

This is a brilliant, expansive, and inspiring examination not only of the roots of human trauma and suffering, but what might bring healing and hope to both individuals and society. There are many things to praise about this book, and others have said them better than I could attempt here. But Maté also frustrates me with an excess of exhaustive biographical (and autobiographical) examples, and goes on for too long about a topic, and when he repeats myths, oversimplifications and sometimes misleading truisms. The first two of my grievances made it a hard slog to read. At over 400 pages (excluding notes and references), and given the difficult nature of much of the subject matter, I had to challenge myself to keep going. And my last grievance is why I can’t give it the 5 stars it would probably get with tighter editing and fact-checking. Some of the generalizations he employs and some of the references he makes are of low grade quality, whether it be the so-called neural net he describes enmeshing the cardiac system, or the meaning of a Chinese phrase for “crisis”. The book is peppered with sloppy statements that just beg to be looked up and on many cases turn out to be misleading. The sad thing is that none are central to his thesis and could easily have been left out, especially since Maté himself says he deplores superficial pop science and pop psychology.

So far, I’ve found this book raises some genuine areas of concern, but the author places too much emphasis on societal and parenting failures as creating permanent trauma with deep scars than on the remarkable ability of the individual to adapt to such circumstances and still develop into a healthy adult. Not all ills can be explained by the parents’ behavior or by societal failure to nurture parents or children. A blade of grass can thrive in a rocky, barren place under the right circumstances. I’m not yet seeing any positive prescriptions - maybe these will come later in the book?

I’ve also noticed some dubious anthropological commentary - for example, comparing and equating modern “hunter-gatherer “ societies (e.g. the Kalahari “bush-men”) with those of 20,000 years ago, as if these communities are living fossils of the ancient ones. This is a highly neocolonial attitude. And idealizing these supposedly static societies as more “in tune with nature” than our modern ones is also anthropological rubbish.