Whether he’s conscious of it or not, a man’s mother is the model for just about every relationship with a woman he has for the rest of his life. Sometimes it’s obvious (just ask his wife or girlfriend), sometimes it’s more subtle, but when you see it, it becomes crystal clear. For fifteen years, this book has helped men understand their mothers’ pervasive influence over the way they relate to women—both the positive and negative aspects of it. But more than that, it has helped thousands of men break free of old relationship patterns. Gurian gives men a wealth of practical exercises and meditations they can use to recognize their mothers’ influence in relationships, and to establish a healthy and rewarding new basis for relationships that will benefit themselves and the women in their lives as well. This new edition of the book formerly titled Mothers, Sons, and Lovers includes a new preface and study questions by the author.

This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine – prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since.

An analysis of Shelley's fiction, poetry, and letters covers the topics of narcissism, gender identity, and self-idolotry.

A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare’s Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak,seeks to identify in Shake-speare’e sonnet sequence the structural and thematic features of the satirical tradition born in Plato’s Symposium. Through this study, Zak traces the power of an idea to endure, re-animate, and enrich itself through time: Plato’s discrimination of the true nature of love in The Symposium. Born anew in its medieval reincarnations (The Romance of the Rose, The Vita Nuova, and The Canzoniere of Petrarch), the tradition begun in Plato’s Symposium was then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably in Shake-speare’s Sonnets. With extended examination of all the texts in the Q manuscript, A Mirror for Lovers makes a case for the mutually illuminating relationship among the sonnets to the fair young man and the dark lady, “A Lover’s Complaint,” and the mysterious dedication that until now have never received attention as an integral symbolic matrix of meaning.

Of all human inventions, the mirror is perhaps the one most closely connected to our own consciousness. As our first technology for contemplation of the self, the mirror is arguably as important an invention as the wheel. Mirror Mirror is the fascinating story of the mirror's invention, refinement, and use in an astonishing range of human activities -- from the fantastic mirrored rooms that wealthy Romans created for their orgies to the mirror's key role in the use and understanding of light. Pendergrast spins tales of the 2,500year mystery of whether Archimedes and his "burning mirror" really set faraway Roman ships on fire; the medieval Venetian glassmakers, who perfected the technique of making large, flat mirrors from clear glass and for whom any attempt to leave their cloistered island was punishable by death; Isaac Newton, whose experiments with sunlight on mirrors once left him blinded for three days; the artist David Hockney, who holds controversial ideas about Renaissance artists and their use of optical devices; and George Ellery Hale, the manic-depressive astronomer and telescope enthusiast who inspired (and gave his name to) the twentieth century's largest ground-based telescope. Like mirrors themselves, Mirror Mirror is a book of endless wonder and fascination.

What if you were to discover that you were only one half of a whole—that you had a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, Charles Stang shows, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, offering a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms down to the present.

Current cultural practices have impoverished the true meaning of human love. This book provides a point of reference on human passion and sexuality with pristine clarity. It aims to promote the dignity of marital love, clarify human sexuality based on self-giving love and achieve perpetuity of marriage and happiness in life. Through analogy of theory and practical examples, the book offers solutions to a spectrum of marriage difficulties.