Author: Gerard M. Gallucci
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1462835333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Though some might dispute it, Freud -- along with Marx, Darwin and Einstein -- ranks among the intellectual fathers of the 20th century. We all talk about the meaning of our dreams, make "Freudian" slips, appreciate the power of unconscious desires and accept the influence of childhood experiences on adult behavior. Nevertheless, despite his pervasive influence and all the words that have been written about him, the real importance of Freud´s work has been obscured. He asks what may be the most pressing question of the age that we live in: how can we win power in our own soul? As we move through the first years of a new millennium, it sometimes appears that the world has become too large, too complex and more dangerous and inhospitable every day. We seem beset by nightmares: fascism, communism, tribalism, nationalism, racism and the other -isms that have prevented us, as individuals and as societies, from thinking clearly and acting with humanity. We paid dearly for our nightmares in the 20th century and the end is not in sight. We feel increasingly challenged to preserve -- or gain -- a minimum sense of community, security and well being in the midst of the globalized struggle of billions of others to do the same. In this struggle, our political systems -- the governments that oversee our domestic and foreign affairs and the organizations that connect us internationally -- often seem overwhelmed by the effort to stave off ever-threatening crises and disasters of one kind or the other. No place, no one, no system appears immune to difficulty. At a time when the major ideological and systemic competitors to Western liberal-democracy and free-market capitalism have collapsed, neither democracy nor the market appear to offer, by themselves, the answers we need to our many problems. Freud offers a way to understand ourselves that makes clear the need for a revolution within the soul if we are to rid ourselves of the nightmares and gain the capacity to live our lives with reason and humanity. His focus on helping the individual banish the irrational has roots deep in Western civilization in the classic Greek concern with "living the good life." Freud approaches this ultimately practical question from the perspective of one who wishes to help the individual achieve psychic health. Freud does not define health as "happy" or "well-adjusted." Nor is it contingent on physical well being. Health is the capacity to determine, consciously and rationally, one´s own approach to life -- our relationship to the external world around us and to the internal wellsprings of our individual mental and emotional existence. Psychic health is a prerequisite to living the good life, to using what we have at hand -- to the best of our ability -- to complete our existence as human beings. Plato and Freud: Statesmen of the Soul seeks to show how Freud´s work recalls Socrates´ invitation, in the Republic, to establish within ourselves the rule of reason without which we cannot live well and achieve just and well-ordered societies. Plato showed Socrates engaging individuals in dialogue one by one in order to help them understand the need to reorder their souls and subject the disorder within to the control of intellect and reason. Plato´s Socratic dialogues offer a powerful model of political change through changing individuals, soul by soul. For Plato, the nature of the soul was intrinsically a political matter. He sought to put political power into the hands of intellect, and thereby into the hands of those individuals whose souls are justly ordered by intellect. Those thus ordered would be "philosophers" -- which in Greek meant simply "lovers of wisdom." Through the ability of these "philosophers" to perceive the good and, consequently, to act rightly, the state too would be guided by the good. Plato and Freud: Statesmen of the Soul seeks to escape the previous mistranslations and misunderstan
Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674455347
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Freud is discredited, so we donÕt have to think about the darker strains of unconscious motivation anymore. We know what moves our political leaders, so we donÕt have to look too closely at their thinking either. In fact, everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. This book is a spirited assault on that deadening trend, especially as it affects our deepest attempts to understand the human psycheÑin philosophy and psychoanalysis. It explodes the widespread notion that we already know the problems and proper methods in these fields and so no longer need to ask crucial questions about the structure of human subjectivity. ÒWhat is psychology?Ó Open Minded is not so much an answer to this question as an attempt to understand what is being asked. The inquiry leads Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, back to Plato and Aristotle, to Freud and psychoanalysis, and to Wittgenstein. Lear argues that Freud and, more generally, psychoanalysis are the worthy inheritors of the Greek attempt to put our mindedness on display. There are also, he contends, deep affinities running through the works of Freud and Wittgenstein, despite their obvious differences. Both are concerned with how fantasy shapes our self-understanding; both reveal how lifeÕs activities show more than we are able to say. The philosophical tradition has portrayed the mind as more rational than it is, even when trying to account for irrationality. Psychoanalysis shows us the mind as inherently restless, tending to disrupt its own functioning. And empirical psychology, for its part, ignores those aspects of human subjectivity that elude objective description. By triangulating between the Greeks, Freud, and Wittgenstein, Lear helps us recover a sense of what it is to be open-minded in our inquiries into the human soul.
Author: Francis J. Kaklauskas
Publisher: University Professors Press
ISBN: 1939686792
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 868
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Book Description
Brilliant Sanity: Buddhist Approaches to Psychotherapy and Counseling (Volume 1: Revised and Expanded Edition) brings together influential scholars and practitioners who have studied and practiced at the intersection of Buddhism, psychotherapy, and counseling, including Karen Wegela, Mark Epstein, Han F. de Wit, Ed Podvoll, Jeff Fortuna, Robert Walker, Farrell Silverberg, Chuck Knapp, Dale Asreal, and others. Brilliant Sanity draws particularly from the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions that emphasize the importance of individuals being of benefit to others and the world. This revised and expanded edition comes 13-years after the release of the widely successful first edition and includes four new chapters. The majority of the original chapters have been updated drawing upon advances in theory and research. In this new volume, increased attention is given to multicultural and social justice perspectives as well. The introduction and 24 chapters in this new edition are essential reading for students and experienced practitioners interested in Buddhist psychotherapy and counseling.
Author: Søren Askegaard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317233964
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory is the first work to compile the contributions of the greatest social thinkers in the global conversation about consumption and consumer culture. A prestigious reference work, it offers original chapters by the world's most prominent thought leaders and surveys how the work of historical theorists has influenced and shaped consumption theory, both through history and at the cutting edge of research. Consumption is at the core of contemporary lifestyles, of political successes and failures and of discussions around sustainability and environmental change. Contemporary consumer culture shapes modern identities, and is the engine of the globalizing capitalist economy. Still, most social theorizations over the last century and a half have addressed production processes rather than consumption processes. This is about to change. Studies of consumption play an increasing role as a topic and a domain of study in marketing, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Currently, there is no single compilation that systematically links scholarly work published by the greatest social thinkers of the last 150 years to the understanding of contemporary consumer society. This book provides a solid framework for understanding the relevance of these canonical authors in social theory to facilitate analysis of consumer culture, and to act as a comprehensive reference point for consumer researchers, doctoral students and practitioners.
Author: Richard Seaford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191083046
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Selfhood and the Soul is a collection of new and original essays in honour of Christopher Gill, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. All of the essays in the volume contribute to a shared project - the exploration of ancient concepts of self and soul, understood in a broad sense - and, as in the work of the honorand himself, they are distinguished by a diversity of approach and subject matter, ranging widely across disciplinary boundaries to cover ancient philosophy, psychology, medical writing, and literary criticism. They can be read separately or together, taking the reader on a journey through topics and themes as varied as money, love, hope, pleasure, rage, free will, metempsychosis, Roman imperialism, cookery, and the Underworld, yet all committed to examining central issues about the experience of being a person and the question of how best to live. The international line-up of contributors includes many established figures in the disciplines of classical literature, ancient philosophy, and ancient medicine, as well as several younger scholars. All have been inspired by Christopher Gill's contributions to scholarly research in these fields and their collective work aspires to honour through imitation his remarkable combination of range with focus.
Author: Bruno Bettelheim
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0394710363
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
Has Sigmund Freud been seriously misunderstood? The author of The Uses of Enchantment argues that mistranslation has distorted Freud's work in English and led students to see a system intended to cooperate flexibly with individual needs as a set of rigid rules to be applied by external authority. This provocative argument cuts through the myths to reveal a greater, more compassoinate and also far more disturbing figure. "VITAL...an eloquent attempt to reclaim Freud's reputation in America." —THE NEW YORK TIMES "Lucid and provocative." —THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Author: Scott Stossel
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385351321
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.
Author: Bernard Burgoyne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042989872X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This book presents essays that consider the status and significance of the 'pictures of the mind', in Freud, and also in the work of the major psychoanalytic thinkers. It offers an unparalleled chance to compare and contrast the fundamental ideas and assumptions of key figures in psychoanalysis.
Author: Frederick August Rauch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
"The principal object of the author in writing this book, was to render this noble and delightful science accessible to all classes of readers. A second object of the author was to give the science of man a direct bearing upon other sciences, and especially upon religion and theology. Psychology and theology are connected by their common subject, which is man. The present work is, as far as the author knows, the first attempt to unite German and American mental philosophy. This design has not been executed by bringing together two separate systems or by forming an eclectic compound, which is neither the one nor the other, and the parts of which do not grow forth from one spirit, but are brought together from different sources and united by the writer--a real sphinx in the sphere of science"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).
Author: Neal O. Weiner
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438423586
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The Harmony of the Soul creates a naturalistic grounding for ethics and a moral grounding for psychotherapy. It is an original and startling synthesis of the ideas of mental health and moral virtue based on neglected affinities between classical Greek ethics, contemporary virtue ethics, sociobiology, and the basic presuppositions of psychotherapy. A central thesis of the book is that we can assume "the worst" about what science tells us about the human animal without having to sacrifice any of the things that are of most importance to ethics: virtue and the good life, harmony of the soul, freedom, conscience, and moral knowledge.
