Tag: Aging


Letter to my father on his 90th birthday

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Dad, I would like to say a few words on this occasion of your 90th birthday. Tolstoy begins his great novel Anna Karenina with this famous opening line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A couple of sentences you could spend a lifetime pondering without quite figuring… Read more »

Existential roundup

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Welcome to the Existential Roundup, where we bring you links to some articles currently trending that may be of interest to those in the existential-humanistic psychology community. Care for aging baby boomers is the subject of this week’s Existential Roundup. We begin with a news story that caught my eye and made me scratch my… Read more »

Optimistic mortality, my own life, and Oliver Sacks

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Today’s The New York Times bore out some sad news, at least to me. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, announced he has terminal liver cancer (Sacks, 2015). In his announcement, he followed the lead of his favorite philosopher, David Hume, in the… Read more »

Allan Combs and Stanley Krippner on Human Development

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Developmental psychology, primarily the history of child psychology and education, broadened to include theories of the stages of life and the lifespan, acknowledges a linear concept of growth, omitting a nonlinear axis representing self-actualization, which can occur at any stage in one’s development. Self-actualization is a life-long process marked by existential insights in moment to… Read more »

‘The Creative Landscape of Aging’: A book by Judith Zausner

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I could introduce this book by telling you it was written by a dear friend, I know some of the individuals interviewed, and I wrote the Forward—but I’d rather tell you it is inspiring reading for anyone who is interested in aging, creativity, and self-expression. A central theme of Judith Zausner’s career has been creativity…. Read more »

Existential Roundup

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Illustration by Genia Brodsky and Noam Sobel. Welcome to the Existential Roundup, where we bring you links to some articles currently trending that may be of interest to those in the existential-humanistic psychology community. If you have been paying attention to the smaller details of health news—the non-Ebola-related news—you might have come across this most… Read more »