Healing Yourself

I've just been asked to comment on a list of self-help books I tweeted about.  I pulled a few I've recommended before off the shelf and discovered that none of them were on the list!  Here they are (Goodreads better come through for me):
How to Meditate by Lawrence LeShan
Destructive Emotions by Goleman and the Dalai Lama
the books for kids by Dawn Huebner
Peg Dawson and Richard Guare's books on executive functioning
The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
If Only You Would Change by Luciano and Merris
The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
books about how those medicines work
Finding Flow by Csikszentmihalyi
Darkness Visible by William Styron
Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron
Kay Redfield Jamison's books
The Center Cannot Hold by Saks
In Her Wake by Nancy Rappaport
When Someone You Love is Depressed by Rosen and Amador
Mark Vonnegut's memoirs
imagining Robert by Jay Neugeboren
and the classic...
I like the books by individuals who have been through it and relatives because they combine good information and something you want to read.

Healing Relationships

The Spontaneous Gesture is a collection of letters from D.W. Winnicott.  As collections of letters go, it is good but not great.  It is certainly a good enough collection of letters.  Winnicott worked with such ideas as transitional objects and the good enough parent.  He worked with Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.  Along with these letter recipients, there are James Strachy, Edward Glover, Ernest Jones, David Rapaport, Harry Guntrip. Joan Riviere, Jacques Lacan, A.R. Luria and Wilfred Bion.  There aren't letters to Winnicott, which I think makes such a book much more engaging.  Many of the letters are reactions to papers and presentations by the person who got the letter.  There is a little bit of personal information, but not much.  From a letter to B.J. Knopf, who had reacted to a letter of his in the Observer: "Perhaps you will do best to give up trying to work at all this, and just go on naturally enjoying your experiences.  Later you may like to go back over what you experience with a book or two to guide you, but while you are having a child I think you may do best to follow your natural feelings."  Here's a good biography of Winnicott: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791141.Winnicott

Healing the Self

Constructing The Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy deserves to be on your reading list.  In the book, Philip Cushman (on this list of providers) covers a lot of areas.  He advocates a hermeneutic stance in therapy, in which the social/political status quo is given its due.  He gives some examples of his own patients, who he helped to broaden the "clearing" which they could view, and construct their world in ways which were more positive for them.  He also talks about the changing role and nature of healers and healing over time.  Our current situation is seen as one in which consumerism is the response to the empty self.  Several past times and therapies are explained.  One is the social forces present in the 1960s, and the therapies which stemmed from that.  It is, of course, interesting the read history and compare it to what you experienced when you were there (ouch)!  Mesmerism is covered well, as is the controversy surrounding Melanie Klein.  Cushman explains self and object relations theories in ways that help with an overall understanding.  Winnicott and Sullivan are also covered quite extensively.  From the philosophy side, Gadamer gets his say.  This book provides some perspective for anyone who functions as a healer.

A Pre-Healer

Although Wilhelm Dilthey is seen more as a Philosopher than a Psychologist, he stressed interdisciplinary cooperation.  In Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies, H. P. Rickman lists nine ideas on Psychology that were apparent in Dilthey's (early) work.  Many of these are relevant to how we function as helpers.  He anticipated mind-body medicine and psychotherapy, in his understanding of people as psycho-physical beings.  He stressed the expression of mental life through facial expressions, gestures, and postures.  His stress on the importance of analysis of writing and other similar expressions has led to use of journaling, diaries and other such methods in therapies.  Dilthey thought a lot about the ways in which people fit into their social relationships and cultures.  Rickman mentions that he anticipated Freud's idea that factors that are not within our awareness can help to produce our meaningful expressions.  He knew that we, as researchers and therapists, needed to understand behavior and reactions in terms of the meaning that situations have for the person themselves.  All in all, this was an impressive analysis for someone who was born in 1833.

Healing Depression

Incredible as it may seem, I'll share another book that I picked up at the dump Swap Shop.  There was a copy of The Noonday Demon there, and I picked it up.  Rather than reading it, I'm listening on Audible (almost 24 hrs. worth!).   So far, it is a strong combination of literature and science.  The subject of the book is depression.  The first sentence in Chapter I is, "Depression is the flaw in love."  The author is writing a book now (Far From the Tree...) about when children are different from their parents and from other people.  There is a Newsweek article about his nontraditional family.  He is in a program now, according to his Wikipedia page, to learn to be a healer, " working on attachment theory under the supervision of Prof. Juliet Mitchell."  I get the impression that both this book and the upcoming one can be very useful and supportive for people.

Healing Society

In addition to working with individuals and trying to help them, healers also learn about characteristics that people have in common, and try to draw conclusions that will help everyone.  In the fifty or so years since Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment, it has been widely discussed and conclusions have been drawn about ways in which the dangers of blindly following authority can be avoided.  The Psychology textbook I used in college, written about five years after the experiment, focused on the pressure from the peer group (even though the pressure seems to have come from one person) as a factor in causing subjects to (as far as they knew?) inflict an electric shock on another person. About a decade later, Milgram's book (including further experiments) was out, and a textbook from that era focused on the factors that reduced the obedience to authority (proximity of the victim, status of the victim, etc,).  In 1991, Thomas Blass wrote a paper discussing personality factors and their interaction with situations in determining level of obedience.  The early 2000's saw Blass's book about Stanley Milgram and a book by Lauren Slater detailing her investigations about several famous psychology experiments.  She interviewed two of the subjects in the original study.  One stopped shocking the "learner" fairly early and the other did not.  Given the circumstances of their lives, it would have seemed like they would have done the opposite of what they had done.  Slater focused on the effects that the study may have had on the participants.  I'll mention two recent developments.  Jerry Burger did a partial replication the original study and produced similar results.  Within the past month, Sam Sommers cited the study as an indication that starting off with a small lapse can lead progressively to larger and larger ones.  Stanley Milgram lived about fifty years; fifty years after his death, people are still trying to use what he learned to help others.

A Healer's Story

I picked up The Man With the Beautiful Voice, along with Foucault's The Order of Things, at the dump Swap Shop this morning (no kidding; in this UNH student and professor bedroom town we have a very cultured dump).  In TMWTBV, Lillian B. Rubin gives a good picture of how she works as a therapist.  For her, the relationship is most important.  She talks about being responsive to your own feelings, as well as those of the person with whom you are working.  She talks about teaching skills for self-awareness and managing ourselves and our world more effectively.  She gives examples from the therapy experiences of herself, her brother, and several people with whom she has worked.  For her, a diagnosis only tells part of the story.  There are good discussions of forgiveness, insight, and the limits of what therapy can be expected to do.  If you see people for therapy, you should read this, even if you can't find it for free at your local dump.