Wisdom Won from Illness brings into conversation two fields of humane inquiry—psychoanalysis and moral philosophy—that seem to have little to say to each other but which, taken together, form a basis for engaged ethical thought about how to live. Jonathan Lear begins by looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for insight into what constitutes the life well lived. Socrates said the human psyche should be ruled by reason, and much philosophy as well as psychology hangs on what he meant. For Aristotle, reason organized and presided over the harmonious soul; a wise person is someone capable of a full, happy, and healthy existence. Freud, plumbing the depths of unconscious desires and pre-linguistic thoughts, revealed just how unharmonious the psyche could be. Attuned to the stresses of modern existence, he investigated the myriad ways people fall ill and fail to thrive. Yet he inherited from Plato and Aristotle a key insight: that the irrational part of the soul is not simply opposed to reason. It is a different manner of thinking: a creative intelligence that distorts what it seeks to understand. Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a whole conception of the flourishing, fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. Wisdom Won from Illness illuminates the role of literature in shaping ethical thought about nonrational aspects of the mind, offering rich readings of Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, and others.

Psychoanalysis and Wisdom applies psychoanalytic insights into one of the great examples of wisdom literature, the Ethics of the Fathers, an ethical tractate of the Talmud. Paul Marcus quotes key passages from the Ethics of the Fathers, providing a psychoanalytic commentary to enlarge and deepen our understanding of its contents, focusing primarily on what constitutes a flourishing life. Marcus then considers what psychoanalysis can provide in its engagement with this classic of the wisdom teachings, such as illuminating aspects of the Ethics that are overlooked or underappreciated, and how “pearls of wisdom” from the Ethics can be incorporated into psychoanalytic theory and practice. The book contains clinical material as well as the insights of philosophers like Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas. Psychoanalysis and Wisdom will appeal to readers interested in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and to academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, religious studies, Judaic studies and philosophy.

A simple yet sophisticated model of personal growth that can lead to lasting change, drawn from the truths of psychoanalysis.

In the quest for identity and healing, what belongs to the humanities and what to clinical psychology? Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses to see. In jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a metaphorical personal 'death'. If this kind of mortality is not attended to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can result. Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present, she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science and imagination.

This volume presents a rationale for a spiritually animated psychoanalysis. Classic world religious literature is analyzed in depth showing how Ecclesiastes, St. Augustine's Confessions, The Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and others can enhance psychoanalysis. Marcus argues that psychoanalysis is a theory and profession in crisis, partly due to its alienation from the spiritual and moral philosophies contained in ancient religious wisdom. This volume presents the spiritual as a core dimension of the psyche, and the quest for self-transcendence—meeting the glory of the Infinite—as a quest inherent in the human condition. Of special interest to those studying psychoanalysis, psychology, and religious studies, this volume may also intrigue those studying the philosophy of religion.

This book is an exploration of contemporary understanding from philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and metaphysical studies, which seem to verify the value of the Epicurean sentiments in terms of the wisdom of lived experience. It portrays the authoritarian culture of the Rome.