This book presents strategies for not just maximizing the quality and impact of one's own research, but also evaluating and responding to the research of others.

Originally published in 1977, the chapters in this volume derive from a conference on Perceiving, Acting and Knowing held by the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota in 1973. The volume was intended to appeal, not just to the specialist or the novice, but to anyone sufficiently interested in psychology to have obtained a sense of its history at the time. Through these essays the authors express a collective attitude that a careful scrutiny of the fundamental tenets of contemporary psychology may be needed. In some essays specific faults in the foundations of an area are discussed, and suggestions are made for remedying them. In other essays the authors flirt with more radical solutions, namely, beginning from new foundations altogether. Although the authors do not present a monolithic viewpoint, a careful reading of all their essays under one cover reveals a glimpse of a new framework by which theory and research may be guided.

Providing an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers, this book investigates positive psychology and relationships theory and research across a range of settings and life stages—intimate, work, educational, senior/retirement, and in the context of diversity. Nearly universally, relationships are a key source of what we all seek in life: happiness, fulfillment, and well-being. The experts who contributed to this novel volume apply the framework of positive psychology to the findings of relationships research across a variety of practical contexts. What actions create and sustain respectful, caring, joyous, stimulating, and loving relationships? How do people rich in friendship, intimacy, and interpersonal skills think and behave? How do they unconsciously cultivate positive relationships? This book brings together authoritative reviews, cutting-edge research, and thoughtful scholarship that serve to answer these questions and document the benefit of positive relationships in a variety of settings and across the human life span. Following a comprehensive introduction, the book addresses positive intimate relationships, positive relationships at work, positive relationships during different stages of life (in youth, in adolescence, and among older adults), and positive relationships intersecting with diversity. The chapters underscore the simple concept that relationships are central to what makes life worth living and are fundamental to well-being across all life domains as they play out at home, in school, at work, in retirement homes, and in the community at large.

Since trauma is a thoroughly relational phenomenon, it is highly unpredictable, and cannot be made to fit within the scientific framework Freud so admired. In Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis, Doris Brothers urges a return to a trauma-centered psychoanalysis. Making use of relational systems theory, she shows that experiences of uncertainty are continually transformed by the regulatory processes of everyday life such as feeling, knowing, forming categories, making decisions, using language, creating narratives, sensing time, remembering, forgetting, and fantasizing. Insofar as trauma destroys the certainties that organize psychological life, it plunges our relational systems into chaos and sets the stage for the emergence of rigid, life-constricting relational patterns. These trauma-generated patterns, which often involve denial of sameness and difference, the creation of complexity-reducing dualities, and the transformation of certainty into certitude, figure prominently in virtually all of the complaints for which patients seek analytic treatment. Analysts, she claims, are no more strangers to trauma than are their patients. Using in-depth clinical illustrations, Dr. Brothers demonstrates how a mutual desire to heal and to be healed from trauma draws patients and analysts into their analytic relationships. She recommends the reconceptualization of what has heretofore been considered transference and countertransference in terms of the transformation of experienced uncertainty. In her view the increased ability of both analytic partners to live with uncertainty is the mark of a successful treatment. Dr. Brothers’ perspective sheds fresh light on a variety of topics of great general interest to analysts as well as many of their patients, such as gender, the acceptance of death, faith, cult-like training programs, and burnout. Her discussions of these topics are enlivened by references to contemporary cinema and theatre.

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

Publisher description

Our story is changing. The Universe has given our species everything we need to actualize our potential. Evolution is knocking at our doors. The connected life is here. We are being fed this minute with the very nutrients that can assure the we live the lives that fulfill us and that serve the greater whole. Our natural inheritance, combined with the pattern that connects us with the rest of Life, calls us to be fully ourselves. This has always been the case, but now it is becoming more evident. Our lives are Life's life. The details unfold within.