"The Pursuit of Attention" is not just an exception to this habit, it is for me, the premier exception. I first received this book as an unsolicited bonus from the bomc. I can honestly say that the insights it contains changed my life, almost revolutionized it.
You would expect to hear hype like that attached to some vapid self-help book. This is nothing of the sort - it reads much more like an extended scholarly paper. Not at all soft, not padded with a lot of empathy or pain-feeling, the book is pithy and somewhat short, and hits even harder because of that.
Attention, important enough to be the subject of the title, is presented as the underlying driving force in social interactions, and the books explaination of how the tactics and strategy of social interactions are affected by this 'pursuit of attention' will open your eyes to behavior all around you, including your own. In a way, this book is to Transactional Analysis what, in mathamatics, basic math is to algebra. Put back in the psychological realm, much of psychology is about the HOW of how people act, this book discusses the fundamentals of the WHY of how they act.
I treasure my copy. I strongly recommend you purchase your own.