Thursday, June 5, 2014

"The Last Psychoanalyst"

Now available at Amazon, my new book: The Last Psychoanalyst. In it you will learn how a pseudo-science became a pseudo-religion:


Posted by Stuart Schneiderman at 11:43 AM

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Stuart! I will buy your new nook immediately.

Tip

June 6, 2014 at 4:22 AM
Ares Olympus said...

I see no reviews yet. Maybe Tip will offer one when he gets his copy.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Psychoanalyst-Stuart-Schneiderman/dp/1499745532/ref=sr_1_1

I'd like to read the book, but I'm in a sad state now, prefer to hear new authors with their 30 minute book tour readings and questions on youtube than take the time to read a book.

Myself, I've always been more interested in Jung than Freud, but I admit I don't know how they are different in therapeutic process.

I read Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul back in the 1990's, and it was my first experience of the mythological/archetypal approach to understanding self.

Jung and Joseph Campbell helped me see mythology as a doorway to the awareness of the irrational interior, and it allowed me to break out of my otherwise desired pure objective/materialistic world view coming out of a science degree.

I have no doubt that psychology is at best a pseudo-science since it is necessarily dealing with subjective things that are beyond concrete analysis. And Jung perhaps would agree with pseudo-religion as well, although perhaps all religions end up as pseudo-religion after the fundamentalist/literalists take over?

Jung wrote "Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church."

So what is a "religious outlook"? Basically believing what is hidden is more important than what can be seen, controlled, and fully known.

It is interesting to think that crisis is what sends people into therapy or into religion, but what do you do once you're there, and what can you take out of it when the crisis ends?

Part of what makes me look inward is because I can't make sense of other people, so when I see something inexplicable in someone else, and later find it in myself, I think maybe I know something new, by seeing it from at least two points of view.

Anyway, please give a nice review Tip!

June 6, 2014 at 3:20 PM
Rune Moelbak said...

Congratulations on your new book! Always interesting to hear your perspective...

July 2, 2014 at 1:46 PM

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