Formless Infinity

Formless Infinity
Author: Riccardo Lombardi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2015-07-16
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317395131

In contemporary psychoanalysis, a key concept and aim of clinical practice is to distinguish the boundaries of any mental state. Without this boundary-setting, the patient has nothing but the 'formless infinite' of primitive mental states. Formless Infinity: Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion draws on the work of these two authors to explore how analysts can work with patients to reveal, understand and ultimately contain their primitive mental states. Riccardo Lombardi discusses the core concepts of the unconscious, the role of the body in analysis, time and death. He displays the clinical implications of Matte Blanco’s theoretical extension of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, presenting numerous clinical examples of working with psychosis and other severe pathologies. Formless Infinity, a stimulating teaching text for students, trainers and seasoned mental health practitioners, is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. It is particularly recommended to analysts interested in widening the scope of the analytic practice by exploring the functioning of the deep unconscious, primitive mental states, psychosomatic pathologies and psychotic conditions.

German Philosophy and the First World War

German Philosophy and the First World War
Author: Nicolas de Warren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2023-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108423493

A powerful exploration of how the First World War - 'the war to end all wars' - transformed German philosophy.

Meditation

Meditation
Author: Kamalashila (Dharmachari.)
Publisher: Windhorse Publications
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1996
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781899579051

"a truly practical guide to read, enjoy and use."--Yoga and Health Covers all you need to know to establish a meditation practice, with helpful advice and greater detail for those wishing to deepen their experience. A very valuable resource.

Infinity in Your Hand

Infinity in Your Hand
Author: William H. Houff
Publisher: Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
Total Pages: 254
Release: 1994
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781558963115

You will find in this book both a challenging personal story and a review of the great religious thinking of our time. -- Robert Fulghum, author of All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime

Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime
Author: Louis Schreel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350344893

What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation – a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within. Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way, Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime opens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.

The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst

The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst
Author: Robert Grossmark
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 131748181X

Psychoanalysts increasingly find themselves working with patients and states that are not amenable to verbal and dialogic engagement. Such patients are challenging for a psychoanalytic approach that assumes that the patient relates in the verbal realm and is capable of reflective function. Both the classical stance of neutrality and abstinence and a contemporary relational approach that works with mutuality and intersubjectivity, can often ask too much of patients. The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst introduces a new psychoanalytic register for working with such patients and states, involving a present and engaged analyst who is unobtrusive to the unfolding of the patient’s inner world and the flow of mutual enactments. For the unobtrusive relational analyst, the world and idiom of the patient becomes the defining signature of the clinical interaction and process. Rather than seeking to bring patients into greater dialogic relatedness, the analyst companions the patient in the flow of enactive engagement and into the damaged and constrained landscapes of their inner worlds. Being known and companioned in these areas of deep pain, shame and fragmentation is the foundation on which psychoanalytic transformation and healing rests. In a series of illuminating chapters that include vivid examples drawn from his work with individuals and with groups, Robert Grossmark illustrates the work of the unobtrusive relational analyst. He reconfigures the role of action and enactment in psychoanalysis and group-analysis, and expands the understanding of the analyst’s subjectivity to embrace receptivity, surrender and companioning. Offering fresh concepts regarding therapeutic action and psychoanalytic engagement, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Toward a New Council of Florence

Toward a New Council of Florence
Author: Nicolaus of Cusa
Publisher: Executive Intelligence Review
Total Pages: 689
Release: 2015-09-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

This is a book of English translations of the writings of one of the most important geniuses in history--Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464). He created ideas which had never been conceived before and which changed history for the better--up through our time and far, far into the future. His thinking processes are sometimes summed up in his concept of the “coincidence of opposites.” Instead of starting his thought process from accumulated sense perceptions and deducing law from observed appearances, Cusa starts with the hypothesis that there must be an original potential from which all multiplicity derives. By starting from the top, or “the Origin,” Cusa was able to solve previously insoluble problems. For example, his idea that the “right to govern comes from the consent of the governed” was not only the basis for solving clashes within the Catholic Church, and even the attempt to reunify all of the various Christian churches at the Council of Florence, but also lay at the heart of the experiments in government set up in the New England colonies of North America and the later creation of the United States Constitution. Besides the title work “On the Peace of Faith” which resolves the conflicts among the religions, 17 other papers are translated into English--14 for the first time. The ongoing renaissance in the study of Cusa worldwide is the basis for resolving the conflicts which still plague the world.

Bion

Bion
Author: Nicola Abel-Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2019-01-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429683782

This is a book of 365 quotes from the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Something of an enigma, Bion often doesn't write in the way one would expect of a psychoanalyst, but is being read ever-increasingly around the world, in and outside the psychoanalytic community. Certain of his comments are often quoted, whilst swathes of his work lie almost untouched. How to make some of the detail of this work available? What he writes is often dense in the way the structure of a poem can be, and the book has the format of a 'poem a day' collection – providing a way into his complete work one quote at a time. Alongside commentaries by Abel-Hirsch are thoughts on Bion's work drawn from papers by other analysts from the UK, the Americas, and Europe. The book is structured in a way that will inform and interest the general reader as well as giving something new to psychoanalysts and others who already know his work well.

Secrets

Secrets
Author: Jacob Vance
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2014-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004281258

In Secrets: Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre, Jacob Vance argues that Erasmus and French Evangelical humanists made secrecy central to their literary thought. They revived Scriptural, medieval, and early Renaissance notions of secrecy in their spiritual and profane literature to advance the reforms in church and society that they advocated. Erasmus, Briçonnet, and Marguerite expanded on Origenian, Augustinian, and pseudo-Dionysian concepts of divine mystery, as being secret, throughout their works. By developing the idea that the divine remains both transcendent and immanent in the world of creation, these humanists explored, through literature, how the human spirit can either accede, or fail to accede, to the secrets of Christian wisdom.