Books

The psychosomatic pain of heartbreak and mourning shows neurobiological evidence of stress similar to being submitted to torture. With time, the intensity of the pain may lessen, yet it is false to think that time heals all wounds! Many live the rest of their life with a captive heart, alone in the emotional desert of psychic numbness. The first challenge is to become aware of the instinctual fear that makes us say "if you leave me, I'll-die". This fear poses a logical problem because to overcome it, you must learn to survive without the partner, which is precisely what you fear! You are like a patient who has been shot by an arrow? Cupid's arrow ?but is afraid to let the doctor pull it out. Living with an arrow sticking out from your chest makes life impossible. Recovery is not, as so many popular self-help books suggest today, an ego decision to move on. Recovery is the opposite of a willful decision, the opposite of an emotional shutting down which only mimics detachment. At the beginning of heartbreak, the brain reacts like that of a drug addict suddenly deprived of his or her drug. The behavior of the love-crazy is similar to that of the addict desperately searching for a fix. Hooked on hope, your brain is in a panic mode. Love is at the core of depressive, suicidal and murderous states. For the brain, lack of love, lack of food, lack of sleep, or a pit bull jumping at you are all kinds of threats. How you respond impacts not only your health but your destiny as well. In other words, either emotional suffering turns on the evolutionary switch, or your emotional shutting will destroy your capacity to love. This book summarizes what you need to learn, and to do to turn on that switch. I wrote from three different points of view. First, as a teacher and researcher in psychology, I spent most of my adult life studying the symptoms of lost love, tortuous love, smothering love, condemning love, controlling love, insufficient love, betrayed love, compulsive love, codependent love. This text is my report from the field: which theories are validated and which are not. Second, I am writing as a therapist who, for many years, listened to the stories of courageous individuals free falling from the summit of love, crashing down into the relational desert of mourning, grief, and loss. While witnessing their despair, I admired their courage. Love, its presence and absence, quality and quantity, form and essence, nurturing and toxic effects, its bitterness, and sweetness, is at the core of every therapy because love is fundamentally liberating. Love is also easily corrupted. Love develops the brain, but heartbreak transforms an otherwise functional adult into a cognitive dimwit. Love attaches itself to our neurotic traits, which then develop like barnacles on the hull of a boat. And last, I am writing as an individual who has suffered her fair share of heartbreaks. As a young woman, I plunged into the cavernous mouth of that mythical beast we call Love, like a frog jumping into the path of a lawnmower. This humbling experience taught me the contrast between the sweetness of love and the tragedy of remaining innocent about its power.

The art of living the "good life" requires skilful attunement to the lovely presences in everyday life. Lodged in a psychoanalytic sensibility, and drawing from ancient and modern religious and spiritual wisdom, this book provides the details, conceptual structures, and inner meanings of a number of easily accessible, everyday activities, including gardening, sport, drinking coffee, storytelling, and listening to music. It also suggests how to best engage these activities, to consecrate the ordinary in a way that points to experiential transcendence, or what the author calls "glimpsing immortality", a core component of the art of living the "good life".

This thesis describes the theory and methods of an original somatic approach to movement education. Based on the five Elements of ancient philosophical tradition, Elemental Movement integrates somatic and alchemical principles, processes, and practice. It employs movement as the primary vehicle for a wide range of personal explorations, using the Elements both as a framework and as a set of symbolic tools.

What if someone told you that you could discover the source of all your problems and address them head on in fewer than five minutes a day? How about if they told you that reconstructing your attitude would actually change your life? Jude Bijou's comprehensive blueprint will teach you to:

cope with family members' unsolicited advice

cure indecision with your intuition

deal with fear by expressing it physically

create closeness by truly talking and listening

improve your social life

increase staff morale in just five minutes a day

handle sarcasm by visualizing it flying by

carve out more time for yourself by clarifying your priorities

ask for a raise and get it

stop fighting via two easy steps

cure kids' tantrums constructively

You can integrate Attitude Reconstruction into your daily routine, regardless of your spiritual path, cultural background, age, or education. With practical tools and real-life examples, this book can help you stop settling for sadness,

Insight, attentiveness, and transformative experience are central in both Buddhism and psychotherapy. An "intimate dialogue" that examines the interplay of emotional and spiritual development through the lens of Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy, this book artfully illuminates the intrinsic connections between the two practices, and demonstrates how these traditions can be complementary in helping to live a truly fulfilled and contented life. As this book deftly explores, integrating the two streams of Zen and psychotherapy can help us to better grasp our conscious and unconscious experiences and more fully develop the fundamental capacities of the self. Bobrow shows how the major themes of trauma, attachment, emotional communication, and emotional regulation play out in the context of Zen and psychotherapeutic practice, and how, in concert, both provide a comprehensive, interactive model of fully functioning human life.

What might you discover about male-female relationships if you took a mixed group into the wilderness to live together for several days and explore their gender differences? That's what authors Aaron Kipnis and Elizabeth Herron wanted to know. So they organized just such a trip. This book tells you what happened. As exciting as a fast-paced novel, WHAT WOMEN AND MEN REALLY WANT takes you along to the centre of their camp as the participants encounter runaway horses and a group of macho hunters . But when neat and well-ordered sociological norms collapse, unexpected harsh realities emerge. You will find this both an entertaining read and also a suggestion of how we can all enjoy more whole and fulfilling relationships.

Why were we born? We are here on this earth to experience the fullness, the sweetness of life with all it has to offer. Imagine the possibilities! Right now, regardless of what is or is not happening in your life, where could you go from here? Turtle Wisdom Turtle Wisdom : You get You! Coming Home to Yourself is an endearing book of comfort, encouragement, inspiration, and strategies for empowered living. Delightfully illustrated, Turtle Wisdom offers a reminder that when all else seems lost, you carry with you what is most precious and essential. You! Drawing on many great wisdom traditions, Donna DeNomme has presented practical insights. Above all, she urges a conscious choice to celebrate your uniqueness, creating a masterful life. Turtle Wisdom has empowered seekers of all ages. This precious book is spreading, like a warm hug, from friend to friend. Truly, a treasured companion. Meeting yourself on the road of life. Unearth your authentic self. No-one else can do it. The world is waiting for your puzzle-piece... Coming of Age: Recognizing all that you are. The alchemy of your troubles - yes, there is a point! I m stuck with me. Making the shift from ordinary to extraordinary. Exposing your soft belly and connecting with others. May the shell be with you! Practical ways to energetically safeguard yourself in a chaotic world. Like the turtle, you can't get anywhere if you don't stick your neck out. Embrace your greatest success. It is never too late to be who you might have been or even who you never dreamed was possible. Open to the very best of who you are...

Psychoanalysis has transformed our culture. We constantly use and refer to ideas from psychoanalysis, often unconsciously. Psychology, philosophy, politics, sociology, women's studies, anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines have been permeated by the competing schools of psychoanalysis. But what of psychoanalysis itself? Where is it going one hundred years after Freud's own speculations took shape? Does it still have a role to play in cultural debate, or should it perhaps be abandoned?
Speculations After Freud confronts the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis by bringing together some of the most influential and best known writers on psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. The advocates and critics of psychoanalysis, both institutional and theoretical, critically appraise the powerful role psychoanalytic speculation plays in all areas of culture.

By examining the private correspondence of a circle of German psychoanalyst emigrés that included Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, and Edith Jacobson, Russell Jacoby recaptures the radical zeal of classical analysis and the efforts of the Fenichel group to preserve psychoanalysis as a social and political theory, open to a broad range of intellectuals regardless of their medical background. In tracing this effort, he illuminates the repression by psychoanalysis of its own radical past and its transformation into a narrow medical technique. This book is of critical interest to the general reader as well as to psychoanalytic historians, theorists, and therapists.

Does art connect the individual psyche to history and culture?

Psyche and the Arts challenges existing ideas about the relationship between Jung and art, and offers exciting new dimensions to key issues such as the role of image in popular culture, and the division of psyche and matter in art form.

Divided into three sections - Getting into Art, Challenging the Critical Space and Interpreting Art in the World - the text shows how Jungian ideas can work with the arts to illuminate both psychological theory and aesthetic response. Psyche and the Arts offers new critical visions of literature, film, music, architecture and painting, as something alive in the experience of creators and audiences challenging previous Jungian criticism. This approach demonstrates Jung's own belief that art is a healing response to collective cultural norms.

This diverse yet focused collection from international contributors invites the reader to seek personal and cultural value in the arts, and will be essential reading for Jungian analysts, trainees and those more generally interested in the arts.

In his new play, Rosa, inspired by C.G. Jung and James Hillman, takes on a millennia of literary tradition and a century of psychoanalytic theory by casting Oedipus in a bold new light, finding the source of his fate not in incest but in the forgotten crime of Oedipus' father Laius, who abducted and seduced Pelops's son Chrysippus. He weaves together a number of contemporary issues, including homosexuality, homophobia, transgendering, and same-sex unions. With a Foreword by Susan Rowland (Reader in English and Jungian Studies, the University of Greenwich, UK), and Essays by Christine Downing and Marvin Carlson (Distinguished Professor, The City of New York Graduate Center, New York).