Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. –R. D. Laing I begin this writing shortly after learning of the unexpected death of John Forbes Nash, Jr. and his wife, Alicia. John Nash was a Nobel… Read more »
This essay is the second of two, comprising an article that began with my essay posted on May 1, 2015. The prior essay initiated a consideration of the spiritual aspects of existential psychology and psychotherapy, endeavoring to show that what is commonly understood to be transpersonal psychology expands, enhances, and enriches the Existential-Humanistic paradigm for… Read more »
This essay is the first of two, comprising an article that will be concluded in my next contribution to the New Existentialists. In my Existential-Humanistic Psychotherapy courses, upon encountering concepts of existential philosophy and psychology for the first time, some of my more religious students become ensnared in and troubled by their perception that existentialism… Read more »
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 »
“It’s all in your head. You just don’t know how big your head really is.” –Lon Milo DuQuette I write this essay two days before the start of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Society for Humanistic Psychology (APA Division 32), held this year at the school where I teach. I have spent most of… Read more »
I haven’t seen the doctor. Snowpocalypso 2015 was suggesting a non-driving weekend, and they’d only want me to take a narcotic painkiller. I’m not so keen on the idea. The last time they suggested it, I was agreeable. But the pills did little for the first pain I was feeling, and also inspired a second—a… Read more »
Just in case you value such things, spoiler alert. Although what I have to say shouldn’t actually come as much of a surprise. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is an end-of-the-world movie in which the world actually ends. There are actually a number of complicated love stories in this romantic comedy… Read more »
In Chicago, as is usual for this time of year, winter’s clutch is still a tight fist. Yet, the blue of the sky is creeping into the jewel tones. This very morning I caught with deep satisfaction my first glimpse of a flock of wild geese arrowing unerringly and urgently northward toward their home, the… Read more »
What if we’re completely wrong about the reason America suffers from an epidemic of mass shootings? That’s the powerful question recently asked by the psychiatrist Joseph Pierre in Aeon magazine. (W)hat if the reality is that the underlying cause of mass murder lies not in something external to ourselves, but rather something at the root… Read more »
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 »
