Here, in this straightforward, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life.The twelve steps Armstrong suggests begin with “Learn About Compassion” and close with “Love Your Enemies.” In between, she takes up “compassion for yourself,” mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and “concern for everybody.” She suggests concrete ways of enhancing our compassion and putting it into action in our everyday lives, and provides, as well, a reading list to encourage us to “hear one another’s narratives.” Throughout, Armstrong makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two.From the Hardcover edition.

    With a Foreword by John P. McGovern. "Ours is a world that has multiplied in complexity beyond anything dreamed in Osler's day. Tension and anxiety, uncertainty and stress are the inevitable result of our civilizations' rapid advance, mental and emotional ills its hallmarks . . . contemporary man desperately needs to learn the lesson of 'sufficient unto the day.' A Way of Life offers an antidote, in the form of a life style. But is the goal attainable? Osler's own life, marked by brilliant achievement in many spheres, testifies to the efficacy of sound habits of work and discipline, established early and followed strictly within 'daytight compartmentsÂ�."Â�From the Foreword by John P. McGovern.

    Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for whom he is a ‘mentally ill person’ suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.Speaking from his own ‘mutant’ cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline’s complicity with the ideology of sexual differencedating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Further, Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological andpsychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing heteropatriarchal and colonial violence.Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, ended up published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated and published with noregard for exactitude. Eighteen months on, Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

    It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

    The respected philosopher and author of The American Soul embarks on his most gripping and broadly appealing work, asking the ultimate question of human nature: Why do we repeatedly violate our most deeply held values and beliefs?

    Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.

    His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

    Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more.Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

    thought-provoking and meditative, Lingis's work is above all touching, and offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic antidote to the idle talk that so often passes for philosophical writing." --Radical Philosophy..". striking for the clarity and singularity of its styles and voices as well as for the compelling measure of genuine philosophic originality which it contributes to questions of community and (its) communication." --Research in PhenomenologyArticulating the author's journeys and personal experiences in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, Alphonso Lingis launches a devastating critique, pointing up the myopia of Western rationalism. Here Lingis raises issues of undeniable urgency.

    Laing is at his most wickedly iconoclastic in this eloquent assault on conventional morality. Unorthodox to some, brilliantly original to others, The Politics of Experience goes beyond the usual theories of mental illness and alienation, and makes a convincing case for the "madness of morality." Compelling, unsettling, consistently absorbing, The Politics of Experience is a classic of genuine importance that will "excite, enthrall, and disturb. No one who reads it will remain unaffected." (Rollo May, Saturday Review)

    His book is a fresh look at the questions that occur to anyone who thinks deeply about these matters, questions about free will, self-determination, destiny, choice, and who are we anyway. I believe this is a “breakthrough book.” Robert’s style of writing about such ephemeral and difficult subjects as awareness and consciousness is honest, concise, and accurate. His ability to describe his experiences of living in a reality quite different from conventional ways of thinking is brilliantly unusual. On first encountering Robert Saltzman’s work, I am reminded of the same feelings of discovery, delight and excitement that I remember from meeting Alan Watts’ “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Krishnamurti’s “Freedom from the Known,” and Chögyam Trungpa’s “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.” His clarity of mind shines brightly through every sentence in this book. His skill at making clear the most difficult ramifications and subtleties of awakened consciousness is so free of conventional cluttered thinking, so free of habitual phrases, so free of the taint of religious dogma and the conventional ways of speaking of such difficult matters, that this book stands out for me as an entirely fresh and illuminated exposition of awakened consciousness: an awakened understanding of what it is to be human. —Dr. Robert K. Hall

    Lacan for Beginners introduces readers to a largely chronological development of Lacan's theories and their relation to clinical practice.

    It just isn't very cool anymore. Enter Full Frontal Feminism, a book that embodies the forward-looking messages that author Jessica Valenti propagated as founder of the popular website, Feministing.com.This revised edition includes a new foreword by Valenti, reflecting upon what’s happened in the five years since Full Frontal Feminism was originally published. With new openers from Valenti in every chapter, the book covers a range of topics, including pop culture, health, reproductive rights, violence, education, relationships, and more.Chapters include:You’re a Hardcore Feminist. I Swear.Feminists Do It Better (and Other Sex Tips)Pop Culture Gone WildThe Blame (and Shame) GameIf These Uterine Walls Could TalkMy Big Fat Unnecessary Wedding and Other Dating Diseases“Real” Women Have BabiesI Promise I Won’t Say “Herstory”Boys Do CryBeauty CultSex and the City Voters, My AssValenti knows better than anyone that young women need a smart-ass book that deals with real-life issues in a style they can relate to. No rehashing the same old issues or belaboring where today's young women have gone wrong. Feminism should be something young women feel comfortable with. Full Frontal Feminism is sending out the message to readers—yeah, you're feminists, and that's actually pretty frigging cool.

    & if you are froward, you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again & a small dose lifted me to the heights." This lurid encomium to cocaine wasn't penned by an immature drug addict. It was written by Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, to his fiancee Martha Bernays. He frequently got kicks from cocaine. But as is clear from his newly compiled Cocaine Papers, his interest in the drug was scientific, not sensual. He sought for a miracle drug to benefit patients & make his reputation. He thought he'd found it in cocaine. Freud's study of cocaine has been shrouded in myths, half-truths & speculation. Cocaine Papers sets the facts straight. Annotated by his daughter Anna, it presents the complete authoritative versions of his own writings on the drug, including several pieces never before published, along with the work of other early experimenters. He's revealed as not only a driven &, ultimately, tragic seeker for a panacea, but also as one of the pioneers of psychopharmacology, the science of using drugs to treat mental illness. In 1884, before beginning studies leading to the development of psychoanalysis, Freud was 28, a fledgling physician with a fiancee but without funds to wed. He'd been searching for a way to establish himself & gain the respect of colleagues. A paper by German physician Theodor Aschenbrandt seemed to provide the way. Conquistadores had noted the stimulant effect of coca leaves on Andean Indians. Aschenbrandt tried the drug on Bavarian soldiers & reported that it suppressed their hunger while increasing mental powers & capacity to endure strain. Aschenbrandt's paper triggered Freud's studies. He obtained samples & tried it. It gave him an emotional lift, producing what he described as "normal euphoria." After that he used cocaine frequently with the same results. He coolly summarized his experiences in his notes: "You perceive an increase of self-control, possess more vitality & capacity for work. This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant aftermaths which accompany exhilaration thru alcoholic means." Freud continued to study cocaine's effects on himself & patients. He found it not only useful in overcoming depression but effective against some purely physiological complaints. He used it to treat stomach disorders & persistent coughing. He didn't administer it indiscriminately. Tho he initially believed it wasn't habit-forming, he found its effects on patients too unpredictable to justify widespread use. Tho he & some American physicians reported initial successes in treating morphine addicts, fellow physician Adolf Albrecht Erlenmeyer warned that cocaine was itself addictive, the "3rd scourge of mankind"—after morphine & alcohol. Freud realized Erlenmeyer was correct. His friend & patient, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, became the 1st morphine addict in Europe to be cured by cocaine. He was also one of the 1st to become dependent on it. This development dampened Freud's interest & helped turn his attention to the psychological theories that eventually won him fame. Freud's studies are considered basic to psychopharmacology. But they didn't lead to the discovery of its most effective clinical use. He abandoned his interest in cocaine just after he suggested that a colleague, Karl "Coca" Roller, experiment with its use in easing the pain of eye surgery. It was Koller & not Freud who invented local anesthesia.--Time (edited)

    Stephen Cox, professor of literatureat the University of California at San Diego, spoke on "The LiteraryAchievement of The Fountainhead" and David Kelley, executive director of TheObjectivist Center, discussed "The Code of the Creator." This commemorativemonograph contains the text of both lectures and other material about AynRand's classic novel.