1st Edition
The Psychoanalysis of Overcoming Suffering Flourishing Despite Pain
The Psychoanalysis of Overcoming Suffering: Flourishing Despite Pain offers a guide to understanding and working with a range of everyday causes of suffering from a psychoanalytic perspective.
The book delineates some of the underappreciated, everyday facets of the troubling and challenging psychological experiences associated with love, work, faith, mental anguish, old age, and psychotherapeutic caregiving. Examining both the suffering of the patient and therapist, Paul Marcus provides pragmatic insights for changing one’s way of being to make suffering sufferable.
Written in a rich but accessible style, one that draws from ancient wisdom and spirituality, The Psychoanalysis of Overcoming Suffering provides an essential guide for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and their clients, and will also appeal to anyone who is interested in understanding how we suffer, why we suffer and what we can do about it.
Chapter One: Introduction: Making Suffering Sufferable
Chapter Two: The Suffering of Love
Chapter Three: The Suffering of Faith
Chapter Four: The Suffering of Mental Anguish
Chapter Five: The Suffering of Old Age
Chapter Six: The Suffering of Work
Chapter Seven: The Suffering of the Psychoanalyst
Postface
Index
Biography
Paul Marcus is a training and supervisory analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City and the author/editor of nineteen books.
What a beautiful book on suffering. Is it incongruous to link beauty with suffering? Paul Marcus writes about our suffering aspects from many viewpoints, turning the fact of suffering around, opening it, bringing out ways it can lift us and we lift ourselves to dimensions of experience our being and soul is hungry for. A book to learn from and practice with.
Michael Eigen, PhD. Author of Contact with the Depths, Faith and The Sensitive Self.
Paul Marcus has written a tour de force on the problem of enduring, if not prevailing over, intense personal suffering connected to those domains of everyday experience that ‘really matter’, like love, faith, anxiety/depression, old age, work and professional caregiving. Brilliantly drawing from the great Axial philosophers and religious thinkers, and the Freudian oeuvre, he provides life affirming insights and pragmatic suggestions into the perennial problem of ‘making suffering sufferable.’
William B. Helmreich, Ph,D. Author of Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives they made in America.
