Reviews for Wisdom of the Psyche Depth Psychology After Neuroscience

The average rating for Wisdom of the Psyche Depth Psychology After Neuroscience based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-05 00:00:00 John Goodlord Wisdom of Psyche reads like a farewell address from a seasoned sage. It's intentionally a fairly jargon-free overview of depth psychology. Very accessible. She doesn't hold back, allowing her personal stories—specifically, using a dramatic head injury which put her into a coma—to hold together her observations about the general state of Depth Psychology. Or, maybe humanistic psychologies of the 21-century, integrating the force that has become Neuroscience. She criticizes, praises, challenges dogma, questioning anybody who might be a devotee of the great depth psychologists, the way only an close but loving family member can. She offers her own guesses as to what is coming from the new psychologies, apart from the more objective, or scientifically based disciplines like Neuroscience. She asserts, "The next evolution of psychology will be concerned less with pathology—leaving it to neuroscience—and will become more like a philosophical training, capable of preparing the person for the voyage in the country of pain and joy—depth psychology as the art of not wasting the joy of life." "The basic task of psychotherapy," she argues, is "to go back and give the inner child what he or she needs to grow up." Further, like other depth psychologies, it is less about fixing a person, and more about enriching their experience, giving them a deeper ability to feel, imagine, engage with life, and to take a full acceptance for their existential freedom. She challenges the notion of therapy as a medical model for healing: "Scientific modeling works beautifully for scientists, but fails miserably when trying to 'explain' the psyche as one would explain the night sky with current findings in cosmology. Psychological constellations are unstable because they are based on one's personal myth, which is always replaceable by another myth." Science demands a static notion of truth, but depth psychologies offer a dynamic and invigorating access to psychological truth. She credits others like Sartre, Foucault, Szasz, and Laing for criticizing the medical approach to the soul, calling out the many failings of the DSM, a pseudo-scientific system of morality (the DSM's interpretation of homosexuality as a sickness is just one of many blunders). She points out, "The standards of normality have all been elaborated just as the DSM was elaborated. One evening, if you are a homosexual, you got to bed resigned to the fact that you are a sick person. The next day, when you wake up, a vote by the members of those who establish the DSM, following a change in social values, makes you normal! Oops!... The range from acceptable to unacceptable for a 'normal personality' is inextricably linked with history, belief, and cultural evolution. It has little to do with clinical categories or abnormal behaviors." When criticizing therapy as an economic model, she misunderstands some key economic concepts, but one insight stands out: "I have used cognitive approaches to teach basic communication skills, most of which are lacking in our educational system. The term 'depth psychology' is also often presented in opposition to a behavioral-cognitive approach, which is mainly concerned with the possibilities of modifying conscious behavior, thus completely bypassing the notion of the unconscious. Cognitive-behavioral therapists will hold the prejudice that the depth perspective calls for too long an inner voyage, with the consequent danger of getting lost in too vast a territory. Depth psychologists will hold the reciprocal prejudice, depicting cognitive-behavioral therapies as a fix-it-quick-back-to-work approach dictated by managed care [another reason why it is so popular with insurance companies]...Like the choice between two areas of study, choosing between a behavioral-cognitive approach or an archetypal-imaginal approach depends on whether one wants to accomplish the long pilgrimage that is the search for a new self to take a course in communication to improve relationships." On and on she goes, showing the deficiencies of therapy as a legal model and as a model for redemption. Paris is a more bombastic atheist than most depth psychologists I've encountered, so her jabs in this section—a complete rejection of the notion of redemption—come off as a bit angry and too dismissive of religious experience. On the question of where psychology belongs, she places it firmly in the humanities camp, contrasting it with the pathology-obsessed orientation of medical and neuroscience fields. I welcome and appreciate that, deeply. From her decades of experience practicing the art of depth psychotherapy, she concludes that "the more one has a choice of images, myths, narratives, scenarios, stories, paradigms, virtual scripts—call them what you like—to live by, the richer the life...Nothing determines our quality of life in the future more than the myths in which we place the events of our lives."

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-18 00:00:00 Duann Bambi Folk This week, I had a beautiful spiritual, intellectual love affair with Ginette Paris’ Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience. The book is a requirement for a summer course I am taking with Dr. Paris in a couple weeks. I really knew nothing about the text or her when I sat down with it. The preface took me by surprise: this was not just another academic venture. This book comes from her absolute being, written in the aftermath of surviving a fall that caused her brain to hemorrhage. This is a profound exploration of the human psyche, ardently written and informed by her academic career. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested at all in the human condition, mind, and spirit. Paris has a wonderful way of combining the academic with the personal, even including other voices in her text by discussing former patients and providing personal writing samples on both her personal experiences and theirs. She really lets the reader in, allowing a transformative reading experience. At the core of the text, she is, of course, examining psyche. She also provides numerous accessible definitions for depth psychology. And, within that, here’s just some of the potent ideas she discusses: racism, homosexuality, feminism, consumerist culture, archetypes, storytelling, parenting, pain, family, conflict, education, language, soul, redemption, religion, history, globalization, love, soma, relationships, identity, adulthood, anxiety, fear, and depression. I just finished the book a little while ago, and my head is just buzzing with a million thoughts. I can’t wait to start delving into them more, especially when I get to attend her lectures!