Search results for ""author sophie leighton""

After the global economic collapse, creative entrepreneurs are once more seen as the solution to the business of making commerce pay, and there is no doubt that one of the most capable and successful of them all is Nicolas G. Hayek. But how did this self-made man's flamboyant career begin? How did he go about the challenge of achieving his extraordinary success? What precisely is his relationship with the Swatch Group? All these questions, and more, are explored in a biography by Jurg Wegelin that is as critical as it is entertaining. Hayek has the Midas touch. He is considered the wunderkind of free enterprise; Franco Cologni, former head of luxury-goods brand Richemont, called him the god of the watch Industry; he is a living legend about whom, on average, at least two articles are published each day in the Swiss press. But his public image is largely Hayek's own creation. Important chapters in his life have remained a mystery until now: his birth and upbringing in the Lebanon, his ascent from penniless immigrant to in-demand managerial consultant, his true role in the success of Swatch. Jurg Wegelin has kept track of Hayek's business affairs for thirty years. He has travelled to the Lebanon, interviewed many of his competitors, along with politicians and former colleagues, and has closely examined Hayek's public relations machinery and leadership style. The result is the first comprehensive biography of one of the most charismatic entrepreneurial personalities of our times.

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This book explores the importance of the philosophical dimension of emotions, turning the traditional relationship between emotions and philosophy upside down: instead of being one of many objects of philosophical thought, an emotion contains an inherent philosophical truth. For this thesis, the author refers to Kierkegaard’s groundbreaking discovery of ‘anxiety’ as an emotional experience that is totally different from fear. This allows a deeper understanding of the emotions, and reveals the philosophical primacy of emotions over thoughts, which always convey a meaning. Part I explores the three aspects of anxiety (anxiety about ‘nothing’, guilt-anxiety, shame-anxiety) that are distinguished by their capacity to disclose the human condition in its naked thatness, which is generally for most of us too hard to bear. Parts II and III then discuss the basic human need for protection from being overwhelmed by the ontological-emotional experience of anxiety. Part II examines the protection given by negation of this intolerable truth in its direct emotional repudiation in nausea, envy and despair. Part III addresses the protection by the two positive feelings of love and trust, which claim to be stronger than anxiety and therefore to be able to overcome it. Only sympathy cannot be categorised here. It belongs in a psychoanalytic therapy guided by existential perspectives, where the analyst listens with a philosophical ear and recognises his patients as ’reluctant philosophers’ who are especially sensitive to the ontological truth disclosed in anxiety and therefore suffer not only ‘from reminiscences’ (Freud), but also from their own being.

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Daseinsanalysis - the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic school of thought founded by Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss in the 1940s - had a huge impact on the development of existential therapies in the English-speaking world. This highly stimulating and lucid book gives a critical overview of the daseinsanalytic concepts of Binswanger and Boss and explains their key differences despite the common reference to Freudian psychoanalysis and the Heideggerian philosophy from which daseinsanalysis took its name. The author gives a systematic account of a new approach to mental suffering based on Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre that never loses sight of Freud's fundamental insight into the hidden meaning of apparently senseless neurotic symptoms. She goes on to demonstrate that mental suffering is a 'suffering from our own being' and the mentally suffering patient is an individual overwhelmed by frightening experiences of the finitude and frailty of the human condition that can neither be suppressed nor tolerated. Finally, the author considers the therapeutic implications of the existential view of mental suffering and concludes that Freud's three technical rules provide the optimal conditions for understanding and engaging with these baffling existential experiences.

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In this book Claudia Frank discusses how Melanie Klein began to develop her psychoanalysis of children. Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalyses of Children offers a detailed comparative analysis of both published and unpublished material from the Melanie Klein Archives.By using previously unpublished studies, Frank demonstrates how Klein enriched the concept of negative transference and laid the basis for the innovations on both technique and theory that eventually led not only to changes in child analysis, but also to changes in the analysis of adults. Frank also uncovers the influence that this had on Klein's later theories of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and on her understanding of psychotic anxieties.The first seven chapters in the book provide an explanation of the essence of Klein's approach to child psychoanalysis covering topics including: the inevitability and usefulness of negative transference development of play early conscious and unconscious phantasies. Part two provides a translation of Klein's unpublished notes on the treatments of four of the children she analysed in Berlin: 7-year-old Grete, 2-year-old Rita, 7-year-old Inge and 6-year-old Erna.Melanie Klein in Berlin is the first text to make extensive use of Klein's unpublished papers, clinical notes, diaries and manuscripts. It will appeal to anyone involved in child psychoanalysis and the development of Melanie Klein's thinking.

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Is today's thinking conditioned by body-mind dualism? A rebellion against the biological order seems to have silently infiltrated our world view. Suicide bombers appear to share the fascination with destruction, of writers such as Mishima, Pasolini and Foucault. A liberation from the body to reestablish a - possibly mystical - union of soul and cosmos and an assertion of the mind's omnipotence appear to be common features of forms of behaviour that seem to be taken for granted in contemporary thought. Is the new misogyny, which rejects motherhood in the name of feminism, contributing in any way to these trends? This review of our society by a woman psychoanalyst - a non-medic and graduate of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris - presents a sharp and rigorous analysis of the strange and violent mechanisms that are erupting in the world today.

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