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Psychology
Sunbeams
August 2012Life is bitter and fatal, yet men cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.
Sunbeams
July 2012No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, . . . and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
Conversations With A Remarkable Man
Honoring The Late James Hillman
Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.
July 2012
James Hillman Never Said Hello To Me
All of which is to say: James Hillman loved and embodied paradox — not only the play of opposites but also the effluvia that attach to the play of opposites. For James nothing was quite as it seems, except in those highly improbable moments when things are exactly as they seem. (He would have insisted on that exception.)
July 2012
excerpted from
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.
July 2012Citizens Of The Dream
You might very well be lazy, afraid of failure, and undisciplined and still write. You might lack the urge and still write. You might not be “a writer” and still write. . . . You are both obliged to develop your talent and free not to develop it. That is, you are free to acknowledge obligations but still say no to them.
June 2012The Unspeakable Things Between Our Bellies
I don’t identify with most other mothers — the conversations about clothes and music lessons and camps and milestones in development. The only mothers I truly feel OK around are the ones whose kids have something different about them. Something odd. Or wrong. Or worse.
June 2012
excerpted from
Happiness Revisited
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
June 2012
Side Effects May Include
Christopher Lane On What’s Wrong With Modern Psychiatry
There are more than a hundred more mental disorders in the DSM today than we had in 1968, including incredible new ones such as “sibling-relational problem” and even “partner-relational problem.”
March 2012
Sunbeams
March 2012We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
