I am minoring in Psychology. I actually didn't like the classes for a while, because it seemed to take agency out of the picture. Then . . one semester I took a class - LDS Perspectives in Psychology, with Dr. Edwin E. Gantt - and it changed my life. I LOVED it.
There are a lot of readings for that class (which I highly suggest that everyone take), and a lot of them come out of a book called Turning Freud Upside Down, edited by Aaron P. Jackson and Lane Fischer with Doris R. Dant. This book explores some of the fundamental problems in psychoptherapy and explores how the issue should be addressed instead. It defines concepts of truth, and of agency, and of the way we think about things. It is hard to explain this class in a nutshell. Will it suffice to say that I recorded and saved all the lectures and all the readings for future reference? That is how much I loved this class.
The only other book that I have truly enjoyed from my psychology classes is called Opening Skinner's Box by Lauren Slater. I enjoyed her witty and realistic writing style as she explored the great psychological experiments of the twentieth century. In every chapter she goes over a new experiment, giving interesting background information about the experiment and the experimentors so it isn't boring. She brings the stories to life!
So, if I were going to read two books from the field of psychology it would would be those two. The textbooks would have a happy flight sailing out my window. :)
