By The Irish Times — 1999
The cynical backlash against the success of the personal growth movement is both frustrating and painful for John Bradshaw, the psychologist and author who coined the term “inner child” and popularised the phrase “dysfunctional family.”
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CLEAR ALL
Mr. Bradshaw found fame with books and television shows proposing that emotional and psychological damage experienced in childhood was the root of adult ills.
As neuroscience, the scientific study of the nervous system, has revolutionized understanding of how the brain works, the implications for the understanding of our minds are immense.
Why are Buddhist concepts and techniques so popular lately?
How should we read psychoanalysis? Many of its great theorists – Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan – trained as doctors, and their successors tend to follow the rigid formulae of academic papers.
James Hillman, who has died aged 85 from the complications of cancer, has been hailed as the most important US psychologist since William James.
When Hillman questions some of the basic tenets of psychology, audiences turn to him to come up with answers. Hillman retorts to such pleas in his dry New England style, "I don't have answers. I have questions."
The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.
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It's normal for human beings to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Some of the ways in which we seek to avoid pain are adaptive or healthy.
The diagnosis and the treatment fit the era in which they occurred. It was the early 1950's, and the field of psychosomatic medicine — based on the notion that many diseases have their origins in emotional distress — was in its heyday.
Alexander was a rare psychoanalytic pioneer who, despite a thorough grounding in classical Freudian theory, had the courage, vision, and flexibility to modify his thinking in the light of newer knowledge.