Psyche and Soul in America

Psyche and Soul in America
Author: Robert H. Abzug
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199754373

Rollo May (1909-1994), internationally known psychologist and philosopher, came from modest roots in the small town Protestant Midwest intending to do 'religious work' but eventually became a psychotherapist and author. During the 1950s and 1960s, his books combined existentialism and other philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, and a spiritual-philosophy to interpret the damage bureaucratic and technocratic aspects of modernity and their inability of individuals to understand their authentic selves. 'Psyche and Soul in America' deals not only with May's public contributions but also to his turbulent inner life as revealed in unprecedentedly intimate sources in order to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and public in a figure who wrote about intimacy, its loss, and ways to regain an authentic sense of self and others.--

Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America

Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America
Author: Thomas Singer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000067661

Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America explores many of the cultural complexes that comprise the collective psychic-filtering system of emotions, ideas, and beliefs that possess the United States today. With chapters by an international selection of leading authors, the book covers ideas both broad and specific, and presents unique insight into the current state of the nation. The voices included in this volume amplify contemporary concerns, linking them to themes which have existed in the American psyche for decades while also looking to the future. Part One examines meta themes, including history, purity, dominion, and democracy in the age of Trump. Part Two looks at key complexes including race, gender, the environment, immigration, national character, and medicine. The overall message is that it is in wrestling with these complexes that the soul of America is forged or undone. This highly relevant book will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, politics, sociology, and American studies. It will also be of great interest to Jungian analysts in practice and in training, and anyone interested in the current state of the US.

Crazy Like Us

Crazy Like Us
Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2010-01-12
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1416587195

“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson). In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

Closing of the American Mind

Closing of the American Mind
Author: Allan Bloom
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2008-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1439126267

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

Dancing Between Two Worlds

Dancing Between Two Worlds
Author: Fred Gustafson
Publisher: Paulist Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1997
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780809136933

In this thought-provoking and sensitive book, a noted Jungian scholar explores the deepest elements in the American psyche that need healing to bring forth the best in both of the worlds we walk in: the highly differentiated and technologically developed Western civilization and the indigenous native "soul" that is the essence of each human being. The author demonstrates that this soul is forcefully represented in America in the experience of the Native American peoples and their relationship to the land and to the ancient "indigenous one" at the heart of our human rights.The author explores not only the best of Native American spiritual thought to rediscover that soul, but also the terrible psychic damage done to later settlers by five hundred years of violence against the original peoples. He sketches positive directions that will create a partnership between the two worlds of our past and bring them together in a "dance" that will encourage a more redemptive spiritual order+

Psyche & the City

Psyche & the City
Author: Thomas Singer
Publisher: Analytical Psychology & Contem
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781935528036

This book is a collection of psychologically oriented articles about nineteen great cities of the world: Bangalore, Berlin, Cairo, Cape Town, Jerusalem, Kyoto, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montreal, Moscow, New Orleans, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney, and Zurich. It explores each city's unique identity in terms of such hard-to-define qualities as psyche, soul, and spirit through history, geography, and anecdotes from the authors' personal experiences. Contributors, all Jungian analysts who live in the cities they write about, are: Murray Stein, John Beebe, Christopher Hauke, Luigi Zoja, Kusum Dhar Prabhu, Jörg Rasche, Antonio Lanfranchi, Astrid Berg, Erel Shalit, Toshio Kawai, Nancy Furlotti, Jackie Gerson, Tom Kelly, Elena Pourtova, Charlotte Mathes, Beverley Zabriskie, Viviane Thibaudier, , Gustavo Barcello, Heyong Shen, and Craig san Roque.

From Vision to Folly in the American Soul

From Vision to Folly in the American Soul
Author: Thomas Singer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000296385

In From Vision to Folly in the American Soul Thomas Singer collates his investigations into soul both in its personal and collective manifestations. With selected essays from twenty years of writing about American politics in the context of contemporary cultural trends, the book as a whole depicts an ongoing exploration of the complex relationships between individual and collective psyche in which reality, illusion, vision, and folly get all mixed up in overlapping political, cultural and psychological conflicts. This text is a valuable resource for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, politics, sociology, and American studies as well as for anyone interested in the current state of the US.

My Beautiful Psychosis

My Beautiful Psychosis
Author: Emma Goude
Publisher: Aeon Books
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781912807956

"Emma manages to bring the reader into the experience in a way I have never seen before."-- Dr. Russell Razzaque, Consultant Psychiatrist, author Breaking Down Is Waking Up and founder of Peer Supported Open Dialogue Through seven episodes, author Emma Goude takes readers on a journey to make sense of psychosis. As a troubled twenty-something, she experienced the harsh landscapes of psychiatric wards before eventually becoming the respected documentary filmmaker she is today. In this personal journey, Goude campaigns for a new perspective on mental health and well-being. My Beautiful Psychosis has a powerful message to convey and turns on its head the idea that psychosis is a debilitating illness, caused by a brain chemical imbalance, which requires medication for life. Whilst medication is sometimes useful, it doesn't really attend to the deeper need: for validation, compassionate holding, skillful navigation and most of all grounding. This book will inspire others who have been given a label that has severely restricted their lives, and act as a beacon of light for them to reclaim the power of their own innate healing ability.

Re-Visioning the American Psyche

Re-Visioning the American Psyche
Author: Ipek S. Burnett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2023-11-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000982491

The United States is at a crossroads: Moving away from the stalemate of political polarization and culture wars requires reflection, critical thinking, and imagination. This book of collected essays brings together leaders in Jungian and archetypal psychology to forge this path by offering a comprehensive look at the American psyche. Re-Visioning the American Psyche examines the myths, images, and archetypal fantasies ingrained in the collective consciousness and unconscious in the United States. The volume tends to manifest symptoms in political institutions, social conflicts, and cultural movements. Using various interpretative processes—from psychoanalytic to literary and to participatory—it reflects on the meaning of democratic participation, the psychological cost of wars and violence, intergenerational trauma due to racism, the emotional dimensions of political polarization, deep-seated oppositional thinking in patriarchal structures, frailty of the American Dream, and more. With its rich scope, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical engagement with historical and current affairs, this book will be of great interest to those in Jungian and depth psychology, as well as sociology, politics, cultural studies, and American studies. As a timely contribution with an international appeal, it will engage readers who are invested in better understanding psychology’s capacity to respond to social, cultural, and political realities.