Anger Madness And The Daimonic

Explores the links between anger, rage, violence, evil, and creativity and describes a dynamic therapeutic approach that can help channel anger and violent impulses into constructive and creative activity.

In this book, clinical psychologist Stephen A. Diamond determines where anger and rage originate and explores whether these powerful passions are - as most people believe - purely negative, pathological, and evil or can be meaningfully redeemed and rechanneled into constructive activity. What is the psychobiological significance of such feelings? And what is the psychological link between anger, rage, violence, evil, and creativity? Drawing on the discoveries of depth psychologists such as Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Reich, and Rollo May, as well as the work of other contemporary psychotherapeutic pioneers, Diamond examines these timely yet eternal questions.

Stressing the positive, creative aspects of power and innocence, Rollo May offers a way of thinking about the problems of contemporary society. Rollo May defines power as the ability to cause or prevent change; innocence, on the other hand, is the conscious divesting of one's power to make it seem a virtuea form of powerlessness that Dr. May sees as particularly American in nature. From these basic concepts he suggests a new ethic that sees power as the basis for both human goodness and evil. Dr. May discusses five levels of power's potential in each of us: the infant's power to be; self-affirmation, the ability to survive with self-esteem; self-assertion, which develops when self-affirmation is blocked; aggression, a reaction to thwarted assertion; and, finally, violence, when reason and persuasion are ineffective.

Revises the traditional free will defense regarding the existence of evil in the world of a loving God.

Images of violence enjoy a particular privilege in contemporary continental philosophy, one manifest in the ubiquity of violent metaphors and the prominence of a kind of rhetorical investment in violence as a motif. Such images have also informed, constrained, and motivated recent continental feminist theory. In Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann V. Murphy takes note of wide-ranging references to the themes of violence and vulnerability in contemporary theory. She considers the ethical and political implications of this language of violence with the aim of revealing other ways in which identity and the social bond might be imagined, and encourages some critical distance from the images of violence that pervade philosophical critique.

The Soul in Everyday Life argues that modern psychology has given up on dealing with the idea of soul (or psyche), even though the field is named after it. If psychology wishes to be truly satisfying, it needs to be more than behavioral science, according to Daniel Chapelle. He concludes that psychology can only satisfy the deepest human needs when it can offer a sense of soul in everyday life. He explores ways of restoring this sense of soul to everyday life by examining how talk about something as elusive as the soul is possible and by reanimating a sense for what the notion of soul can mean. Working in the tradition of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Jung's student James Hillman, Chapelle reaches back into millennia of Western thought to reanimate the dying sense of soul in everyday life and put the "psyche" back in "psychology."

Rollo May (1909-1994), internationally known psychologist and philosopher, came from modest roots in the small town Protestant Midwest intending to do 'religious work' but eventually became a psychotherapist and author. During the 1950s and 1960s, his books combined existentialism and other philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, and a spiritual-philosophy to interpret the damage bureaucratic and technocratic aspects of modernity and their inability of individuals to understand their authentic selves. 'Psyche and Soul in America' deals not only with May's public contributions but also to his turbulent inner life as revealed in unprecedentedly intimate sources in order to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and public in a figure who wrote about intimacy, its loss, and ways to regain an authentic sense of self and others.--

"This study provides some of the first empirical information about the self-reported crimes of adults with genius-level IQ scores. The study combines quantitative data about 72 different offenses with qualitative data from 44 follow-up interviews to describe nine different types of offending: violent crime, property crime, sex crime, drug crime, white-collar crime, professional misconduct, vehicular crime, justice system crime, and miscellaneous crime"--Provided by publisher.