Subreddit

Top books from r/askpsychology

A question-and-answer sub where people ask practicing psychologists and psychology students about mental health, behaviour, and research.

Updated August 2026 — rankings refresh with each new pull of comment data.

Books ranked

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

265k

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

The Body Keeps the Score dominates with 22 mentions — nearly double its tally on r/AcademicPsychology (12) — reflecting a crowd that skews toward lived trauma over academic theory. Thinking Fast and Slow (17 mentions) is the lone cognitive-science crossover, sitting right behind it, which separates r/askpsychology from the trauma-specialist subs like r/CPTSD or r/InternalFamilySystems where Bessel van der Kolk still leads but IFS and attachment texts take the rest of the top ten. Sapolsky's Behave (10 mentions) signals genuine interest in the biology of behaviour, a thread absent from most peer subs. Below that the list scatters across CBT (Feeling Good), coercive-control (Why Does He Do That), and Frankl — a general-interest psychology crowd rather than a therapeutic community.

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Ranked best-of lists and editorial guides that draw on r/askpsychology's tracked mentions.

By year

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Most-mentioned in r/askpsychology

Ordered by tracked mention count across all published years. Sentiment is shown as context and does not change the order. The Upvotes toggle re-sorts by comment-score weight — display only, the canonical order stays mention-count.

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Bessel van der Kolk spent his career arguing trauma changes the nervous system, and r/CPTSD made the book its shared vocabulary for what happened to them.

22 in this sub Not scored

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

A Nobel-winning psychologist splits the mind into a fast intuitive system and a slow deliberate one, then catalogues where the fast one lies to you.

17 in this sub positive

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky

A neuroscientist traces one punch backward through hormones, childhood, evolution, and culture to explain why anyone throws it at all.

10 in this sub positive

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Csikszentmihalyi spent decades interviewing artists to explain why total immersion in hard work beats effortless pleasure every time.

5 in this sub positive

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

A psychiatrist survives three concentration camps and concludes the ones who lived weren't the strongest, they were the ones who still had a reason to.

5 in this sub Not scored

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks

A neurologist's case files: patients who lost the ability to recognize faces, bodies, and the right side of the world — and remained fully themselves.

5 in this sub positive

Feeling Good

David D. Burns

David Burns hands depressed readers a list of ten named thinking errors and a worksheet to catch themselves making one.

3 in this sub Not scored

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

Lundy Bancroft

A domestic-violence counselor spent years running batterer-intervention groups, then wrote down the excuses so readers could recognize them faster.

3 in this sub Not scored

Attachment Disturbances in Adults

Daniel P. Brown

A Harvard psychologist's clinical manual on repairing adult attachment wounds, built around a guided meditation protocol called Ideal Parent Figure.

2 in this sub Not scored

#10

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

Pete Walker

Pete Walker names a fourth trauma response beyond fight, flight, and freeze: fawn, the instinct to appease the person who's hurting you.

2 in this sub Not scored

#11

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Sue Johnson

A couples therapist maps every recurring fight back to one question neither partner is asking out loud: are you there for me?

2 in this sub Not scored

#12

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

Richard C. Schwartz

A therapist explains why the voice in your head that hates you is just another part trying, badly, to protect you.

2 in this sub Not scored

#13

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

Jonice Webb

A therapist names what your parents never did: the neglect you can't quite prove, because nothing happened.

2 in this sub Not scored

#14

The Drama of the Gifted Child

Alice Miller

Alice Miller's 1979 argument that childhood emotional neglect creates a false self — and that reclaiming your real one requires grieving, not gratitude.

2 in this sub Not scored

#15

The Happiness Trap

Russ Harris

A psychologist walks readers through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, arguing the chase for constant happiness is what makes people miserable.

2 in this sub positive

#16

Atlas of the Heart

Brené Brown

Brené Brown catalogs 87 human emotions with research definitions so readers can name what they actually feel instead of guessing.

1 in this sub Not scored

#17

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment

Amir Levine

A psychiatrist and a researcher apply neuroscience to dating: figure out your attachment style, then stop being surprised by your relationship patterns.

1 in this sub Not scored

#18

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Daniel Goleman

A 1995 pop-science argument that self-awareness and empathy predict life outcomes better than IQ, the book that put the amygdala in everyday vocabulary.

1 in this sub Not scored

#19

Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety

David D. Burns

David Burns updates his 1980 CBT classic with a self-therapy manual that r/CPTSD says rewired thought patterns a therapist couldn't.

1 in this sub Not scored

#20

Healing the Shame That Binds You

John Bradshaw

John Bradshaw's 1988 guide distinguishes toxic shame from healthy shame and argues the internalized kind is the engine behind addiction, abuse cycles, and most self-destruction.

1 in this sub Not scored

#21

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Lori Gottlieb

A therapist goes to therapy: Lori Gottlieb tracks four patients across a year while her own life cracks open on someone else's couch.

1 in this sub Not scored

#22

The Courage to Be Disliked

Ichiro Kishimi

A Socratic dialogue walks through Adlerian psychology's central claim: your past does not determine your life, and you can choose who you are right now.

1 in this sub positive

#23

The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization

Onno van der Hart

A structural dissociation textbook by van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele that clinicians recommend alongside EMDR and parts-work training.

1 in this sub Not scored

#24

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté

A physician argues that trauma is the hidden engine of most chronic illness, and that Western society is the primary carrier.

1 in this sub Not scored

Looking for more? Similar subreddits

Subs whose top-mentioned books overlap most with this one.

r/therapists 29 r/CPTSD 27 r/attachment_theory 19 r/InternalFamilySystems 17 r/AcademicPsychology 14