Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind

Treating Intimacy, Tragedy, Violence, and Evil

Israel W. Charny (Author) , Douglas Sprenkle (Foreword)

Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind

Treating Intimacy, Tragedy, Violence, and Evil

Israel W. Charny (Author) , Douglas Sprenkle (Foreword)

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Description

Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind proposes that the optimal goal of psychotherapy lies in cultivating a free mind with integrity that will not seek to do major harm to one’s life or to the lives of others. This book looks at a wide range of psychiatric disorders, including classic conditions of neurosis, personality disorders and psychoses, through a different lens. Rather than simply enumerating symptoms, namely, how a person is addressing the opportunity of his/her life and the lives of others and whether a person is doing harm to themselves and/or others. This book proceeds to grapple with several critical life experiences and styles: tragedy, violence and evil, all of which often have posed insurmountable problems in therapy.

Foreword, by Douglas Sprenkle
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part I: Some Old-Fashioned Plus Some Newly Fashionable Psychiatric Syndromes and Relationship Disorders

Chapter 1: Some Old and New Psychiatric Disorders
Chapter 2: Intimacy and Relationship Disorders
Democratic Mind Versus Fascist Mind in Intimacy and Relationship Disorders
in Marriage, Parenting and Family Life
What’s It All About: Being Real along with a Discipline of Decency Family Enmeshment and Disengagement: Reasonable Ideas for Family Life
Taken Too FarThe Inevitable Imperfection of ‘Perfect Marriages,’Victimization in Families in Everyday Life: Violence and Sexual Abuse, Abandoning, Exploiting, Scapegoating and Sacrificing Members of One’s Family'I'm Alright Jack Personalities': People Who Seemingly Don’t Have Any Problems and Assign All the Burden to Someone Else in the Family
A Need to Give to Others but Not to Receive for Oneself: Big Givers who Take Away
the Others’ StrengthUnquestioning Loyalty to One’s Family as a Basis for being AbusedSexual Dysfunctions: How Certainties Can Get in the Way of Making Love Well
Genuine Communication for Genuine Relationships: The Give-and-Take of Real Clarification of Needs, Criticism, Anger and Love
Chapter 3: Disorders of Neurosis, Depression and Suicide Revisited
Chapter 4: Personality and Character Disorders of Self-Entitlement
Chapter 5: Old-Fashioned Plus Newly Fashionable Disorders
Old-Fashioned Psychotic Abdications of Reality
Affective Psychoses—Mania and Depression
Paranoid Psychoses—Paranoid Schizophrenia and Paranoia, including Paranoid Thinking in a Political Context
Paranoid Thinking in a Political Context
A Newer ‘Hit’ Disorder of Our Time: Anorexia
Some Miscellaneous Unrecognized Bedeviling Syndromes
The ‘Orphan Syndrome’ or Self-Made Person
A New Syndrome of Grown Kids Who Live at Home Forever and Often Rule their Parents Absolutely
Strange, Crazy Criminal Behaviors including ‘for the Thrill of it All,’
Cases of ‘Perfect’ and ‘Normal’ Kids Who Murder Someone—Sometimes Their Parents—Unexpectedly
The Unsavory Suicide-Killers of Our Era, Including Some Cases of Nice and Quiet ‘Good Guys’—or Women—Who Become Suicide-Killer Terrorists
Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome (SUNDS)
The New ‘American Way’ of Mass Killing at Columbines, Shopping Centers and Other Public Places
People of the Lie—Invisible Destroyers of Others’ Lives

Part II: Developing New Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind: Including Overcoming and Treating Some Conditions of Violence and Evil

Chapter 6: Ultimate Choices: To Be For Life or Not To Be
Chapter 7: Treating Violence and Evil
Chapter 8: Author’s Voice: What is Going to Happen to All of Us? What Can I Do with
My Time?
Appendix
Bibliography
About the Author

Product details

Published	19 Jan 2018
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	400
ISBN	9781498566988
Imprint	Lexington Books
Illustrations	24 Tables
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Israel W. Charny

Foreword

Douglas Sprenkle

Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind presents a creative focusing of Israel W. Charny’s general concept of democratic and fascistic minds to a crucial field of application. An unusual blend of material from clinical psychology, personality theory, and political psychology, its core terms symbolize broad personality types. The result is a set of novel and thought-provoking ideas for clinical theory, diagnosis, and treatment.

Peter Suedfeld, University of British Columbia
Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind concludes with a brilliant summation of an extraordinary life spent grappling with the human condition. Truth is in essence dialectical, and this book is a twenty-first century embodiment of the rabbinic concept of yetzer hara/yetzer tov, the good impulse and the bad impulse. Israel W. Charny offers a profound understanding of the human story. There is so much substance, depth, and truth in Charny’s life perspective.

Samuel Karff, University of Texas Medical School
Israel W. Charny provides a captivating journey exploring a framework for therapy that charts a course for today's and tomorrow's mental health professionals. Charny's therapeutic wisdom and existential insight into the human condition, combined with his pioneering work on the Holocaust and genocide studies, informs his courageous approach to perplexing issues. He provides essential truths, including a prescription for therapists and patients alike, to achieve a ‘free mind’ that does no harm to one's own life or that of others. This book provides approaches to diagnosis and therapy that must be studied, savored, and implemented.

Robert Krell, MD, University of British Columbia
This is one of the most original psychotherapy books I have ever read. Israel W. Charny does not flinch when describing evil in the human experience. He calls on therapists to see psychological health as inclusive of how personal behavior affects the well-being of others, and to make the connection between political democracy and democracy in the mind and heart. There is an ethical consciousness at work on every page, which is much needed in today's world.

William J. Doherty, University of Minnesota Twin Cities