Description
Book SynopsisSuffering and Psychology challenges modern psychology''s concentration almost exclusively on eradicating pain, suffering, and their causes. Modern psychology and psychotherapy are motivated in part by a humane and compassionate desire to relieve many kinds of human suffering. However, they have concentrated almost exclusively on eradicating pain, suffering, and their causes. In doing so psychology perpetuates modern ideologies of individual human freedom and expanding instrumental control that foster worthy ideals but are distinctly limited and by themselves quite self-defeating and damaging in the long run.
This book explores theoretical commitments and cultural ideals that deter the field of psychology from facing and dealing credibly with inescapable human limitations and frailties, and with unavoidable suffering, pain, loss, heartbreak, and despair. Drawing on both secular and spiritual points of view, this book seeks to recover ideals of character and compassion
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Stories of Suffering
2. The Denial of Suffering in Psychology
3. Disguised Ideology
4. Early Religion and the Axial Age
5. Modern Approaches
6. Toward a "New Wisdom of Limits"
7. Transforming Suffering
