Book Description

One of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century, Erik H. Erikson was the architect of the "identity crisis" and the "life cycle" -- concepts that are now a familiar part of today's culture. Identity's Architect is the first comprehensive and authorized biography of Erikson, postwar America's most influential psychoanalyst, who acutely reshaped our views of human development.

Drawing on private materials and extensive interviews with Erikson's family, students, and closest colleagues around the world, award-winning historian Lawrence J. Friedman illuminates the relationship between Erikson's personal life and his groundbreaking ideas. This book lays bare the identity crisis that was at the root of this remarkable man's lifelong quest to discover who his father was.

Friedman insightfully shows how Erikson's famous eight-stage model of the human life cycle grew from the birth of his third son, who was born developmentally handicapped. Even Erikson's acclaimed studies of Luther, Gandhi, Jefferson, and Jesus were inseparable from his life circumstances.

The writing and ideas of Erik Erikson have had a remarkably lasting influence on our culture. Erikson's fascination with India and with Gandhi earned him the Pulitzer Prize for his book Gandhi's Truth and foreshadowed the contemporary West's growing interest in Eastern thought. His students at Harvard in the 1960s have gone on to great prominence -- Carol Gilligan, Robert Coles, Mary Catherine Bateson, and Howard Gardner to name a few. Trained in Vienna by Sigmund and Anna Freud, Erikson came to depart from psychoanalytic orthodoxy in deeply innovative ways -- insisting that social circumstances were no less important than the inner psyche in determining human personality.

This exhaustively researched, compelling biography, which has been ten years in the making, is indispensable for anyone who hopes to fully understand one of the most significant intellectual figures of our time. ... Read more

Book Description

A uniquely revealing biography of two eminent twentieth century American women. Close friends for much of their lives, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met at Barnard College in 1922, when Mead was a student, Benedict a teacher. They became sexual partners (though both married), and pioneered in the then male-dominated discipline of anthropology. They championed racial and sexual equality and cultural relativity despite the generally racist, xenophobic, and homophobic tenor of their era. Mead’s best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), Race (1940), and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), were landmark studies that ensured the lasting prominence and influence of their authors in the field of anthropology and beyond.

With unprecedented access to the complete archives of the two women—including hundreds of letters opened to scholars in 2001—Lois Banner examines the impact of their difficult childhoods and the relationship between them in the context of their circle of family, friends, husbands, lovers, and colleagues, as well as the calamitous events of their time. She shows how Benedict inadvertently exposed Mead to charges of professional incompetence, discloses the serious errors New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman made in his famed attack on Mead’s research on Samoa, and reveals what happened in New Guinea when Mead and colleagues engaged in a ritual aimed at overturning all gender and sexual boundaries.

In this illuminating and innovative work, Banner has given us the most detailed, balanced, and informative portrait of Mead and Benedict—individually and together—that we have had. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (2)

Wilhelm Reich... Half-way and Sort-of
This book does a reasonable job to overview Reich's life and most of his early work, though it fails to be as thorough as for example Sharaf's "Fury on Earth". The author gives his impressions of Reich's work, a philosopher's discourse and comparative review of Reich's behavioral findings as they relate to modern ideas in psychiatry and psychology... and on that matter he does a reasonable job. However, what bothered me was the terrible misrepresentation of Reich's biophysical research. Corrington either does not know about, or knows but for some reason fails to discuss, the multitude of controlled studies undertaken both during Reich's lifetime and after his death, which have verified the more controversial aspects of his biological and orgone energy discoveries. So, for example, the reader will learn nothing about: 1) DeMeo's 1970s University of Kansas replication of Reich's cloudbuster research, showing positive results, nor DeMeo's global cross-cultural study "Saharasia" which used standard anthropological evidence to prove the global accuracy of Reich's sex-economic findings on the origins of violence. 2) The double-blind and controlled studies of S. Mueschenich and R. Gebauer at the University of Marburg in the early 1980s, "The Psycho-Physiological Effects of the Reich Orgone Accumulator", verifying exactly Reich's original findings on the human physiological response to the orgone accumulator. Also not mentioned, the additional replication study of the orgone accumulator by G. Hebenstreit at the University of Vienna. (both of these are fully cited in DeMeo's "Orgone Accumulator Handbook") 3) The large number of replication studies on the orgone accumulator's effects upon plants and cancer mice by Richard Blasband, Courtney Baker, Robert Dew and others as published in many articles in the Journal of Orgonomy, Annals of the Institute for Orgonomic Science, Pulse of the Planet and (German) Emotion journals, from c.1965 up into the present. 4) Replication studies on Reich's bions, as made by biologists from R. duTeil in France, who presented his results to the French Academy of Science in 1938, to B. Grad in Canada to Dew, Blasband, and a whole list of others who made replications of Reich's biogenesis and bion experiments -- none are mentioned except in a single passing footnote (p.280, n.10) The recent issue of Pulse of the Planet (subtitled "Heretic's Notebook") shows color photos of protocells and bionous forms well on the path to life made from completely sterile and previously "dead" preparations, following or building upon Reich's original protocols, by Grad, Snyder and DeMeo, equal to anything published by NASA in the nature of contemporary "origins of life" research. 5) Also not mentioned, clinical studies from German physicians, where "Orgone Accumulator Therapy" has shown dramatic help to cancer patients and against other immune-system disorders. Unlike the USA, where the FDA uses policemen and the courts to assure a pharmaceutical monopoly, in Germany the orgone accumulator has a legal status similar to acupuncture and homeopathy, as an accepted form of "energetic medicine" which is even recommended to the EU by the German government for harmonization of medical practices. And so on. Corrington is an academic, sympathetic to Reich, and so he should have dug into and explicitly reported on these matters. He also apparently got the ear of Roger Straus, head of Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishers, who is intimate with the Wilhelm Reich Museum and also claims to be sympathetic to Reich -- so both the author and editor are in the "Reich circles" sufficiently to know about these studies, or at least to have been asking some questions. Why are the "friends of Reich" so systematically oblivious to these facts, or unwilling to mention them in new books such as this one? I know for a fact, that Straus was approached to publish other books which gave these facts on Reich's biophysical work, but those books were politely refused. Why? Why is it that those who are interested in Reich's therapeutic work, often denigrate and ignore his biophysical work. Why? A half-dozen emails by author Corrington to senior researchers following up on Reich's work over the years would have provided him with an abundant list of such replication studies -- the orgonelab.org website has an entire lengthy "Bibliography on Orgonomy" online and available to anyone, with an entire separate list of citations to Reich's work and the many replication studies. Nearly none of it is mentioned in the Corrington book, save for the materials on Reich's early work. Why? This is a glaring omission, a "condemning with faint praise" of his later biogenesis, cancer and orgone energy discoveries, and it stands out like a sore thumb. This book will help the dishonest "skeptics" to once again sit comfortably with their long-time disinformation and outright lies about Reich, which were responsible for his death in prison, for the burning of his books, and for the contemporary academic distortions and black-out on his important discoveries. This book will be a frustrating and upsetting read for those who know the facts.

Returning to Reich
Few important thinkers have been as marginalized as the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Critics tend to focus on Reich's late, almost mystical writing, at the expense of his early breakthroughs in the analytic field. Indeed, Reich's critical ostracize repeats his personal and professional isolation from the 1930s onward. Rejected by the psychoanalytic community, and separated from his children, Reich ended his life in a federal prison on a charge, from of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. Robert Corrington's new book seeks to restore Reich's rightful place among other important twentieth century thinkers. A professor of theological philosophy at Drew University, Professor Corrington, places Reich's late work in a theological framework. More importantly, Corrington writes about Reich's work as a unified oeuvre whereby the later visions emerge logically from an earlier, more noted foundation.

Orgasm theory is the lynchpin of Reich's thinking. More Freudian than Freud, Reich's devotion to a biological model emerges in the 1923 essay, "Concerning the Energy of Drives," which Corrington discusses in a detailed chapter on Reich's early writings and case studies. Reich refused Freud's postulation about a death drive stressed a life affirming philosophy at the time Freud turned toward ego psychology draining psychoanalysis of its radical core. Other early papers feature the seeds of character analysis delineated in 1925's study of the impulsive character. Corrington nicely outlines Reich's focus on the somatic core of illness and the significance of negative transference. Further, Corrington points out Reich's use of active intervention in the therapy session. Although Sandor Ferenczi also stressed an active engagement with the patient, Reich's work brought him into contact with the patient's social world and an understanding of how health requires not just individual emotion adjustment, but the transformation of social institutions. Chapter three focuses on The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Chapter four on Character Analysis. Each of these texts is classic and Corrington illuminates the works in a careful, balanced fashion. Sadly, therapy today continues to neglect the social dimension. Psychiatry's reliance on medication, which attacks only the symptom, rarely understands the dilemma of patients who cannot even afford the medication proscribed for them. Reich's sensitivity to the working class deserves the credit this book accords him.

The text, as mentioned earlier, reads Reich's late work, in the context of the analyst's overall development. On one hand, Reich's preoccupation with orgone energy and his use of primitive technology like the "orgone accumulator" are difficult to take seriously
Certainly, Reich lacked Einstein's theoretical genius and, consequently, could never formulate a reasonable account for his alleged findings. On the other hand, the super string theories of contemporary physicists also lack confirmation. What brings disparate thinkers together is a commitment to a unified theory of the universe and Corrington admirably outlines Reich's devotion to solving life's mystery, whether in failure (orgone energy) or triumph (the significance of social intervention in the therapeutic process). The book is highly recommended and should help return Reich's work to circulation. Dr. David Seelow, R.P.I. ... Read more

Book Description

In this marvelously researched and moving biography closely grounded in Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's work, Gail Hornstein brings back to life the maverick psychiatrist who accomplished what Freud and almost everyone else thought impossible: successfully treating schizophrenics and other seriously disturbed mental patients with intensive psychotherapy, not lobotomy, shock treatment, or drugs.

To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World tells the extraordinary life story of the German-Jewish refugee analyst, who was the first wife of Erich Fromm. Written with unprecedented access to a rich archive of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's clinical work at the legendary Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, and using newly discovered family records and documents from across Europe and the United States, this is the definitive biography of a remarkable woman.

Best known to millions as the courageous therapist in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg's bestselling chronicle of madness and recovery, Fromm-Reichmann (1889-1957) is a fascinating and controversial figure in twentieth-century psychiatry. To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World traces the story of her life and education, from a loving childhood as the eldest of three daughters in an Orthodox Jewish family to medical school at seventeen, as one of the first women admitted to study at a Prussian university.

During World War I, Fromm-Reichmann took charge of a military hospital in Königsberg, transforming it into a pioneering center for the treatment of brain injury. By her mid-thirties, she had opened her own psychiatric sanitarium in Heidelberg, where she and her staff put into practice a unique and hopeful integration of psychotherapy and tikkun, the Jewish ethical principle that every person is worth saving. At thirty-six, she had an affair with and then married her patient, Erich Fromm, later the celebrated author of Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, and other psychological classics. Her close friends and colleagues in pre-World War II Germany included some of the most visionary intellectuals and therapists of the era: Martin Buber, Karen Horney, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Georg Groddeck, among others.

Hornstein recounts Fromm-Reichmann's dramatic escape from Nazi Germany, exile in France and Palestine, and her flight to the United States, where she found asylum at a tiny hospital outside Washington, D.C. Over the following decades, Fromm-Reichmann would emerge as the most distinguished figure at Chestnut Lodge, a mental hospital unlike any other -- intellectually radical, yet filled with warm family feeling and deeply respectful of individual difference. Fromm-Reichmann was not only pivotal in creating a beacon of hope at Chestnut Lodge, which stood alone as the place where the sickest patients could go to be cured. She was also a maverick in her field -- the only prominent woman analyst of her day to write about schizophrenia, not femininity or children. And she had little interest in the arcane theoretical disputes that obsessed most of her colleagues; curing patients was her consuming goal.

As the pendulum swings back from psychiatry's addiction to drugs as the sole treatment for mental illness, Fromm-Reichmann's breadth of vision makes this biography of a heroic, yet all-too-human, woman a timely and compelling work. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Great!
the author gave insight into the politics of the mental health field, from the philosopy of running private and public institutions to the competition between psychoanalysts, and competition beween the differant professions. From Reichman's story is written in the context of world history and the history and development of mental health treatment in the U.S.. All this plus the Freida Fromm-Reichman's philosopy and approach to analysis. The author provides a rich portrait embracing both the strengths and weaknesses of Fromm-Reichmann

IF YOU'VE READ "ROSE GARDEN," YOU'LL WANT TO READ THIS...
This is a fascinating, well-written, well-researched biography of the psychotherapist who cured Deborah Blau, the patient in the best selling novel, I Never Promised you a Rose Garden (c1977). Even recent reviews of "Rose Garden" indicate confusion about Hannah Green (a pseudonym) and Joanne Greenberg (the author of this autobiographically-based novel). This book straightens it all out while exploring the fascinating life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. ... Read more

Book Description

Awesome! Inspiring! Surprising is Shawn Regan's spontaneous and emotional journey propelling him back into another time and into the life of John Williams. These baffling excursions, augmented by the hypontic and psychological intervention of his therapist, Dr. Field, ultimately transform the life of Shawn Regan. Through returns to John's miserable existence, Shawn conquers his "stormy" fears, his avoidance of intimacy and sex, and an array of physical problems.

This is a true, shocking story writen by the patient from his own subjective first person account and enriched by the objective and professional perspectives of his therapist in the second portion of each chapter.

Writen like a novel, Brain Storms!, with it's inescapable conclusion, is a thrilling revelation of a therapeutic process, triggered by an unsought, unexpected and spontaneous past life regression. Your emotions will be shaken by the captivating struggles of war, love, and sex. ... Read more

Reviews (5)

An Grand Adventure both popular and professional
Shawn Regan and Eleanor Field have pulled off something close to a coup
in this interesting book. There are precious few books that provide
us both the person's inside experience of hypnotic regression that includes
past-life references as well as the professionals perspective on these events.
It is a stunning journey for both popular audiences and professionals
wanting to be exposed to different hypnotic techniques and a clinical
perspective of the process. The story itself is a healing journey on the level
of solving a personal mystery impacting this life for Shawn Regan as well as
one of redemption, resolution and celebration for him, his psychologist and
the reader.

Offers therapeutic revelations and insights
Co-written by award-winning writer Shawn Regan and licensed clinical psychologist and family therapist Eleanor S. Fields, Brain Storms! is a true story of a patient's harrowing journey as he learns from the turbulent experiences of his past life. A work of non-fiction presented with the reading fluency of a novel, Brain Storms! offers therapeutic revelations and insights worthy of the best of the self-help book. Brain Storms! is a compelling and recommended journey taking the reader through phases of life, eras of time, and the depths of the human mind.

Fascinating Journey
This well-written book is a fascinating journey into the human mind.

Don't miss this amazing book!
Brain Storms is an amazing book you won't be able to put down! It is expertly written around the concept that perhaps we all may have lived another life (or lives) before this one.

The author, Eleanor S. Field, Ph.D, a noted and known psychologist and hypnotherapist, weaves the commentary of one of her patients who, under her guidance, was able to revivify and relive his past life experiences, along with documentation of Dr. Elly's insightful commentary and observations.

The recounting of this journey certainly transformed my thinking about life, death and the hereafter. Read it and allow it to inspire you and shine a measure of light and lessons upon your life, as well! Thank you Dr. Elly for writing this beautiful book!

Jean Krueger, author of: Why the Weight? Dare To Be Great! ISBN:0972208607

Don't miss this amazing book!
Brain Storms is an amazing book you won't be able to put down! It is expertly written around the concept that perhaps we all may have lived another life (or lives) before this one.

The author, Eleanor S. Field, Ph.D, a noted and known psychologist and hypnotherapist, weaves the commentary of one of her patients who, under her guidance, was able to revivify and relive his past life experiences, along with documentation of Dr. Elly's insightful commentary and observations.

The recounting of this journey certainly transformed my thinking about life, death and the hereafter. Read it and allow it to inspire you and shine a measure of light and lessons upon your life, as well! Thank you Dr. Elly for writing this beautiful book!

Jean Krueger, author of: Why the Weight? Dare To Be Great! ISBN:0972208607 ... Read more

Book Description

In 1970, Unica Zürn, the companion and lover of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, threw herself from the sixth floor window of their apartment in Paris. Her suicide was the culmination of thirteen years of mental crises which are described with disarming lucidity in The Man Of Jasmine, subtitled Impressions from a Mental Illness.

Zürn’s mental collapse was initiated when she encountered in the real world her childhood fantasy figure "the man of jasmine": he was the writer Henri Michaux, and her meeting him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to "reality" was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods. Zürn’s compelling narrative also reveals her uneasy relationship with words and language, which she attempted to resolve by the compulsive writing of anagrams. Anagrams allowed her to dissect the language of everyday, to personalise it, and to make it reveal hidden at its core astonishing messages, threats and evocations. They formed the basis of her interpretation of the split between her inner & outer lives and underpin the texts included in this selection.

The Man of Jasmine is certainly one of the greatest descriptions of mental collapse, but it is much more. Zürn’s familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche, and her extraordinary self-possession during the most alarming experiences are allied to vivid descriptive powers which make this a literary as well as a psychological masterpiece. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

a moment in madness
The Man of Jasmine works completely as a spell inside the mind of someone in the throes of psychosis: the obsessions, the delusions, the hypno-poetics; all the mental movements with which Surrealism only experiments. Unica Zurn is the real thing! If you like this, try her other difficult-to-find volume, The House of Illnesses, Leonora Carrington's Down Below, or Janet Frames' Faces In The Water. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

an extended study in idealization
The author, who is one of THE most under-rated and under-written-about female theorists who studied under Jung (where is there a substantial biography for her??), is always brilliant to read, her work packed with fascinating insights and an almost superhuman erudition. This book is no exception.

At the same time, however, it gets nowhere near the quality of her other books. Propped up by endless quotes from Jung's supposedly autobiographical MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS, a book I often go back to but always with the knowledge that it's been heavily censored, von Franz sustains a justificatory tone throughout that is embarrassing to read.

At one point, for instance, she deals with the accusation that Jung had anti-Semitic tendencies, perhaps because he had some shadow issues to work on. She quashes this notion strenuously and puts it all down to Jung's "optimism" and tendency to say too much (not to mention his opponents' projections...always a good place to go when defending one's allies). God forbid that Jung should cast a shadow!

It saddens me that von Franz so seldom struck out on her own without checking in with Jung first or crediting him with the tremendous innovations she brought to his thinking. But nowhere is her unwillingness to question Jung more evident here, where scarcely a paragraph escapes the praise piled high on the Great Man's head.

That he was a great man, a truly daimonic genius who gave us the golden key to transpersonal symbolism, does not change the fact that he was a human being who could be narcissistic, irritable, arrogant, impatient, misogynistic, intolerant, racist, bad-tempered, and downright cruel to the women he supposedly loved.

When I write I often refer to teachers who've impacted my insights about human nature; ordinarily, it would be inconsiderate for me to bring in their human flaws and blind spots. But were I to undertake a biography of any of them once they had shuffled off the mortal coil, it would be incumbent upon me not to whitewash them. You will find many interesting observations about Jung's life in this book; but the picture it offers of him is thoroughly one-sided.

An inspiring and personal biography of a great man.
This is Jung from the inside, by one of his most talented and most authentic followers. It is not just the dry facts but deep personal experience. All life is story and this is Marie-Louise von Franz's story of Jung as she knew him. An invaluable work.

Unbelievable.
It's astonishing that one could present a biography of Jung and not deal with the many allegations of unprofessional, irresponsible, and certainly bizarre behaviors that have been advanced about this man. For shame! ... Read more

Book Description

This volume presents the first full-scale biography of Daniel Jones. A preeminent scholar, Daniel Jones (1881–1967) was the leading British phonetician of the early twentieth century, and the first linguist to hold a chair at a British university, and he and his colleagues at University College London soon established a reputation worldwide.

This book, richly illustrated with partly unpublished material, traces Jones's life and career, including his contacts with other linguists, and with figures outside the linguistic world, notably Robert Bridges and George Bernard Shaw. Daniel Jones's work is assessed in terms of its historical significance and its current status. ... Read more

Book Description

The decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris some fifty years ago is the equivalent in the humanities of Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA. Today it belongs in the same rare class as Champollion's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the nineteenth century. The earliest European writing system that we can understand, Linear B dates from the middle of the second millennium BC. It was rediscovered by Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who excavated clay tablets bearing this ancient script at Knossos in Crete in 1900. Obsessed with cracking Linear B, Evans kept the tablets to himself for some forty years but made little progress. After his death, other scholars tackled the decipherment, but it wasn't until 1952 that the secret was penetrated. Linear B was not an unknown language such as Minoan or Etruscan but actually an archaic dialect of Greek, more than five hundred years older than the Greek of Homer. Michael Ventris's later collaborator, the Cambridge classicist John Chadwick, told the story in his famous book, The Decipherment of Linear B (1958). But what of the man behind the decoding? Here Chadwick's book is exceptionally reticent, because in truth he hardly knew Ventris. Based upon hundreds of unpublished letters and other sources, including Chadwick's papers, Andrew Robinson's biography is the first book to tell the story of both the decipherment of Linear B and the man who broke the code. His research reveals a most intriguing person: a dazzling polyglot with an unorthodox upbringing and socialist tendencies who was also extremely private and lacking in confidence, and who died in a mysterious car crash in 1956 at the age of thirty-four. Ventris trained successfully as an architect, and his design methods shaped his decipherment work. But it was his hobby, Linear B, that would make him immortal. 20 b/w illustrations. ... Read more

Reviews (7)

The archictec who cracked the code
The Man who deciphered Linear B - the story of Michael Ventris, by Andrew Robinson, is a book about the monumental task involved in the decoding and understanding what was written in the 1.200 BC clay tablets found by sir Arthur Evans in 1900 in the island of Crete, the home of the fabled character Minotaur. Many were the obstacles imposed on the many scholars who ventured to crack down the code, to no avail to the great majority of them. The most conspicuos hindrance was the fact that, contrary to what happened in the case of the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs by the French mathematician Jean-François Champollion, there was not a handy Rosetta Stone with bilinguals, that is, with texts to be confuted both in the language to be decoded as in an already known language (Greek, in the case of the Rosetta Stone). To add to the difficulty, the discoverer of the first tablets, Mr.Arthru Evans, was not the team-work type of man, preferring to work alone and hiding from the others scholars almost all the pertinent tablets.

So, the deciphering of the so-called Minoan Linear B scripts was a task compared in its difficulty to the first escalation of Mount Everest and to the discovery of the structure of DNAs, all of them happened in the very same year the professional architect and amateur scholar Michael Ventris announced having first cracked the Minoan code, in 1953. The fundamental enigma was what was the language beneath the Linear B sillabary (different from an alphabet, a sillabary represents pictorally sometimes in just one design syllab sounds, e.g, me, fe, ra, etc.). To everyone's amazement , and even to Michael Ventris himself, who had for a long time contended that the hidden language was Etruscan, a Greek ancient dialect was there all the time, masquaraded by a somewhat similar Cypriot sillabary.

The book has all the ingredients of a best-seller and it is a case in point for the preponderance of group work as against the work of mavericks as Arthur Evans. It is also a proof that Natura non facit saltum and that the Eureka cry not always comes from the ones who are in the front line of research, coming instead from people at the second rank as was the case of Ventris, an architec by formation and practice, who now and then made a dive in that type of reserch. His mixture of intuition and knowledge of the many areas involved proved to be the right one to the cracking of the code. Also, the premature death of Michael Ventris at the age of 34 is a mysterious event that to some people repeats the death by suicide of his depressive Polish and beloved mother ; one has also to remember that the Greek alphabet used today was only used since circa 800 BC, surrounded by the many uncertainties regarding the oral background of Homer works like the Odissey and the Illiad. Was the discovery of such material in Crete and afterwards in mainland Greece to expand the range of research of Greek antiquity?

This is a very good book to anyone interested in the peculiarities of genial men like Michael Ventris and in the origin of languages.

None is so blind ...
Ancient Egyptians were not secretive. They carved their story in stone, using a sylllabary because the alphabet hadn't been invented, A syllabary is a set of symbols for each of the numerous sylllables; Japanese and Koreans today write mainly in syllabaries; for example, Japanese has one symbol for "KA," a different symbol for "NA" and another for "DA." There are 50-some in Japanese, which is more than the 26 letters we find it convenient to read. Syllabaries are basically phonetic; Egypt's ancient writing system was forgetten for centuries, until a clever Frenchman realized that it was not picture-writing. He discovered the symbols for "CLE" "O" "PA" and "TRA" - and voila, the past came alive!

Ventris realized that "secret" writing found in ancient Crete was actually Greek, using a forgotten sylllabary. Sadly, academic blindness (jealousy) darkened his short life. He wanted to be an architect.

Great book
This is a very good book. Buy it and enjoy.

A mysterious man who solved a mysterious puzzle
Linear B was a script of unknown language that appeared in bits and pieces in archaelogical digs in an around Greece. Nobody could decipher it; in fact, they couldn't even agree on what language the script represented. Andrew Robinson tells the fascinating story of Michael Ventris, the architect/amateur linguist who 'cracked' the code of Linear B and proved to the world that it contained an ancient form of Greek.

The story unfolds with the same drama as a murder mystery or detective story. Robinson makes what could have been a complicated story eloquent and clear.

Although I recommend this book highly, at the end of it I still felt in the dark about Ventris himself. He seems to have been a great eccentric and very private individual. His sudden death at the age of 34 seems to have occurred under a cloud of deep depression that Robinson does not really explain. Linear B may be deciphered, but Ventris is still a mystery.

Surprisingly gripping mystery of language
Andrew Robinson's "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B" should be dry and academic in the worst possible senses of those words. It is, to the contrary, an utterly fascinating mystery and linguistic puzzle which Robinson lays out methodically for his readers--even those who had little previous interest in linguistic puzzles.

Michael Ventris, the man at the heart of this book, was a rather shy, somewhat diffident man who had trained as an architect and married young. Instead of leading the staid life it seems fate had laid out for him, he spent most of his short adult years working on the Linear B--a tablet found at a Mediterranean archaeological dig, and a tablet which had all but been pronounced indecipherable by many scholars with better credentials than Ventris's. Ventris ignored their conclusions and did eventually decipher the tablet. The story is filled with surprises and sudden discoveries, with disappointments and fortuitous guesses, and so on. It is quite a ride. There is even the occasional spot of humor--as when Ventris was stopped by a suspicious Customs agent who said, "These Pylos Tablets--exactly what ailment is it that they're supposed to relieve?"

I learned a great deal from this book. Among the more memorable nuggets was the fact that an alphabet generally contains between 20 and 40 characters--if there are more than 40 characters, it is probably a syllabary (meaning, a system by which each character represents an entire word rather than just one letter or other element WITHIN a word). I highly recommend this for any student of lost language--and anyone who enjoys a twisty-turny thriller! ... Read more

Book Description

In a society such as ours, when doing good is the stuff of legend and hagiography, Freedmans meticulous description of the constant struggle to be a good person and to do good for others is refreshing and bracing. It shows how good can triumph in spite of everything and should serve as an inspiration to all of us who would also wish to be good people and do good unto others. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Medieval Mama's Boy
Beyond the dry second- and third-hand tellings of history are the real stories told by the real people-and it doesn't get much realer than Guibert of Nogent. He's arrogant, condescending, socially inept and has a weird fixation on his mother. Proof positive that men were messed up way before women's liberation hit the scene. I don't claim to be a historian. I've never read St. Augustine's Confessions, on which Guibert modeled his own work. I can't say for certain that Guibert wasn't your typical Medieval French monk, but I find it hard to believe that most monks had mothers who spent the latter part of their lives trying to recapture their virginity. But that's what's great about reading first-hand accounts, no "typicals" get in your way. For instance: How many third-hand historical texts would have a chapter that begins: "Since hardly anyone passed the bishop's corpse without casting at him some insult or curse and no one thought of burying him. . .?" Believe it or not, this type of image seems to be common in the literature of the time. Now if only we could work it into the popular conception of history, maybe we'd have a few less romanticizers telling us how society is falling to pieces. ... Read more

Book Description

A new volume in the acclaimed Past Masters series, this is the most lucid and up-to-date introduction to the thought of Carl Gustav Jung available.Though he was a prolific writer and an original thinker of vast erudition, Jung lacked a gift for clear exposition and his ideas are less widely appreciated than they deserve to be.In his extremely readable introduction, Anthony Stevens--one of Britain's foremost Jungian analysts--clearly explains the basic concepts of Jungian psychology: the collective unconcious, complex, archtype, shadow, persona, anima, animus, and the individuation of the Self.He examines Jung's views on such disparate subjects as myth, religion, alchemy, "synchronicity," and the psychology of gender differences. He also devotes separate chapters to the stages of life, Jung's theory of psychological types, the interpretation of dreams, the practice of Jungian analysis, and to the unjust allegation that Jung was a Nazi sympathizer. Finally, he argues that Jung's visionary powers and profound spirituality have helped many to find an alternative set of values to the arid materialism prevailing in Western society.

A small masterpiece of insight and concision, this volume offers the perfect introduction to one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Phenomenal Introduction to Jung
This is probably the best introduction to Jung on the market. It is simple, concise, and VERY reader-friendly. It is very current as well including a short introduction to all the major aspects of his work and life. I can't recommend this one highly enough! ... Read more

Reviews (3)

A luminous inner journey.
The Diamond Approach to human potential teaches us that when we "learn how to invite our true nature to reveal itself, it will guide us toward realizing our spiritual ground and, at the same time, actualize our potential in all walks of life" (A. H. Almaas, SPACECRUISER INQUIRY, p. xiv). In LUMINOUS NIGHT'S JOURNEY, Almaas describes the self-discovery of his own true nature, and his integration of that realization into his personal life. "The thread I follow in this book," he writes, "sheds light on the obscure process of how the soul, the individual consciousness, becomes integrated into this absolute nature, as and after the source of all experience is realized" (p. ix). This book may appeal more to Almaas's students than to those readers new to his Diamond Approach teachings.

G. Merritt

Amazing Descriptions of Higher state of Consciousness
I have been reading about and studying higher states of consciousness for 30 years, and in all that time I have never read such personal, detailed, in depth descriptions of experiences of Unity Consciousness. Almaas has an amazing facility to describe profoundly subtle experiences. His descriptions are consistent with classical descriptions of that state, yet at the same time he adds an element of examining his own "ego structures" in the light of the Untiy experiences. If you are into this type of thing, this is a truely facinating book.

Awesome.
Accessible, profound and inspiring. Tastes like freedom to me. ... Read more

Book Description

This book discusses the landmarks of Piaget's personal and professional development that culminated in his seminal theory of genetic psychology. ... Read more

Book Description

In the swamps of Asmat in West New Guinea, Tobias Schneebaum-traveler, writer, painter, explorer-finds the way of life that suits him best. Secret Places reels readers into a world of storytellers and sorcerers, cannibals and carvers, a place where Schneebaum discovers his soulmates and his own soul.

Looking back at a life of wild adventure, Schneebaum seeks in Secret Places to intertwine the varied strands of his experience, pondering the parallel universes of his experience as a gay Jewish New Yorker and his years among the Asmat. The result illuminates both worlds-as when he juxtaposes the Asmat celebration of the spirits of the dead with a New York City plagued by AIDS and its own sad spirits.

"Once in a great while a truly original person like Tobias Schneebaum comes along. Everyone, including the primitive peoples he lives among, recognizes it instantly. Each new work is a demonstration of his remarkable spirit. May we all join in and celebrate his latest."-Edward Field, author of A Frieze for a Temple of Love

"Tobias Schneebaum's Secret Places is a wonderful, riveting memoir, filled with insight, startling honesty, and extraordinary glimpses into the spirit and life of the Stone Age-now almost vanished from the earth. It is a remarkable book."-Robert Klitzman, author of A Year-Long Night

"Schneebaum offers an entirely new and fresh form of ethnography-poetic, passionate, and personal. Secret Places distills his life's work into a compelling narrative and celebrates his love affair with Asmat. This is a gay ethnography that employs an artistic and forensic vision, as well as an excellent ear, in the creation of a fluent and complex account. What is so remarkable about the work is that Schneebaum manages to weave detailed and challenging anthropology and visual research into a tale of personal discovery. Few ethnographers can boast such an achievement."-Nick Stanley, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England

"Modest candor, forceful and lucid writing, extraordinary abundance of information-these are the qualities of Schneebaum's saga. And for once the term is exact: these voyages of exploration and discovery, both in the remote world and in the remote self, are on an heroic scale. They are indeed fascinating, and to my mind indispensable."-Hayden Carruth, author of Beside the Shadblow Tree

"Schneebaum's compelling memoir seamlessly intertwines the life of an extraordinary anthropologist with the extraordinary art and culture of the Asmat of New Guinea."-Serena Nanda, author of Neither Man nor Woman ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Increased My Sense of Awe
In travels through faerie sanctuaries and other exotic lands, I've enjoyed the company of many unusual personalities. One of the most memorable is Tobias Schneebaum. Reading his latest book, Secret Places, has increased my sense of awe at the uniqueness of this man.

Toby's fame results largely from a brief encounter (an unpleasantly personal encounter) with cannibalism in the 1950s. His free-wheeling explorations of the Amazon region, searching for a life more meaningful than accumulating money and possessions, led to an extended visit with the little-known Akarama tribe. Toby bonded strongly with the indigenous tribal men, who had little or no experience of modern culture. He found himself embraced as a temporary memory of the tribe, and was included both in headhunting expeditions and same-sex celebrations of body and spirit. On one occasion, a traditional ceremony culminated in eating the heart of a captured warrior from a neighboring tribe; it would have been impolite (and probably dangerous) to decline.

His first book chronicling these and other adventures, Keep The River On Your Right, was published in 1969, and the book soon became a cult classic. Schneebaum became a rather unlikely, and somewhat notorious, celebrity. (Recently, the story has been retold and updated in a fascinating documentary film of the same name, now available on DVD and video - highly recommended.)
Toby's latest book, Secret Places, is one of a series of gay and Lesbian autobiographies from the University of Wisconsin Press. About half the book consists of detailed and fascinating stories of Toby's adventures with the Asmat people of New Guinea. It is probably no coincidence that he describes Asmat stories and myths as "not following any particular pattern. They do not have a beginning; they do not have an ending." My perception may be colored by the way I met the author a few years ago at a dinner party in New York, but to me, the book reads like a transcribed dinner conversation. Unlike any other autobiography I've read, the style is remarkably non-linear. For example, details are often repeated from prior pages as if brand new, as they might be in casual conversation. I found this loose approach unusual, and most enjoyable.

Jumping forward and backward in time and space, incorporating stories of his religious Jewish childhood, of New York friends succumbing to mid-80s AIDS, of aboriginal lovers in faraway lands, of missionaries bringing permanent change to ancient cultures, Toby regales the reader with episodes of his remarkable life. He is struck by the similarity between Catholic communion - eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ - and ritual cannibalism - eating the body and drinking the blood of conquered warriors. He chronicles a multinational company's bull-in-china-shop destruction of untouched wilderness among the Asmat, in an oblivious attempt to drill oil where only water exists. And he mourns the inevitable shift in artistic style among Asmat woodcarvers, from subtle hand-tooled techniques passed down from uncountable generations, to pretty but "soulless" items more easily sold to tourists for easy packing in their luggage or shipping home as excess baggage.
Toby's book is a small but generous gift, offering a glimpse into cultures and climes few will ever experience (and none will experience in the state of preservation that still existed at the time of his youth). It is thrilling to read about Toby's apparently fearless adventures, to enjoy them vicariously through his memoirs. Don't miss this book, and if you ever get the chance to hang out and chat with 80-something Tobias Schneebaum, it will be time well spent.

Reviewed By Mountaine in
White Crane Journal
A Journal on Gay Spirituality ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (2)

The Iron Road is Well Worth Traveling!
I first heard of James Mawdsley when he was interviewed on the program Worldview on NPR.Even though I had only read one book in the last year and a half previous to hearing the NPR interview, the experiences he recounted and the ways in which he handled them touched me so much I wrote down the name of his book and put in my first order to Amazon.com. I bought this book bracing myself for a hard, serious read (I had never voulunarily ventured into the realm of non-fiction before.) This book captured my attention from the first paragraph and proved to be the furthest thing from a "hard read" - I couldn't put it down! It was: touching, enlightening, sad, inspirational, but most of all unexpectedly FUNNY at times (thanks to James's often self-depricating sense of humor and his evolving "what matters most" outlook on life.) I can not recommend this book enough! It has turned me into a lover of non-fiction and more importantly it has made me aware of human rights abuses that are going on in Burma right now!

taut and well written autobiography
In 1988 though her democratic political party won the national elections in a romp, the military refused to let go of power and instead placed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, killed many of her supporters, and drove others into exile. When British citizen James Mawdsley learned about the incarceration of the Burmese Nobel Laureate, he became outraged. Mawdsley became a one-man band staging protests and distributing antigovernment paraphernalia and is finally arrested and sentenced for seventeen years for various crimes that will shock western sensitivities to learn the felonis he committed.

Mr. Mawdsley tells his story on why he chose an activist path to shake up more then just the Burmese government, but to wake up the western democracies. Most readers will have dual feelings about the author, as his fanatic behavior seems suicidal yet courageous making him a fascinating character. The autobiography is taut and well written, gripping the audience from start to finish and deserves a large readership as the lesson learned is don't sit passively by whining, take action even small steps matter.

Harriet Klausner ... Read more

Book Description

He was the rising star of psychoanalysis, an intimate associate of Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler, a member of the Freudian “inner circle” with unrestricted access to the Freud Archives. And then Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson threw it all away because he dared to break the psychoanalytic community’s deepest taboo: he told the truth in public. As he unmasks the pretensions and abuses of this elite profession, Masson invites us to eavesdrop on the shockingly unorthodox analysis he was subjected to in the course of his analytic training. But the more prestige Masson attained, the more he came to doubt not only the integrity of his colleagues, but the validity of their method. In the end, he blew the whistle–fully aware of the personal and professional consequences.

With wit, wonder, and unflinching candor, Masson brilliantly exposes the cult of psychoanalysis and recounts his own self-propelled fall from grace. A sensation when it first appeared, Final Analysis is even more provocative and engrossing today. Written with passion and humor, this is the book that revealed a revered profession for what it was–and launched Masson on his true career. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

EXCELLENT
Anyone even remotely associated with analysis, as either a patient, friend of a patient, or an analyst himself, should read this very informative and fascinating book. Clear and well-written, Masson does a wonderful job of exposing the clique of therapists who get rich by deceiving their patients, pretending to care and asserting knowledge they simply don't possess. A very engrossing book that explores a heretofore closed society.

Page turner...though not very significant
I found this book very interesting to read. I was very interested to hear a psychoanalyst's account of his training and membership in the psychoanalytic society. However, I found no news in the book; I wouldnt expect a circle that holds views which are Darwinian to refrain from acting like our prehistoric ancestors.

A wonderful expose! An eye opener.
Reading Masson's book, I was reminded time and again of the injustices and psychological abuse I experienced whilst undergoing Social Work training a number of years ago.

"Final Analysis", together with Masson's other treasures - "Against Therapy" and "Assault on Truth" provide, in my view, an accurate insight into the arrogance, self-righteousness and pretense to knowledge and care that often occurs both behind the scenes and quite openly in the world of Psychotherapy.

One of the better books I have read. ... Read more