Author: Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiPublisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780062842589
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
The Evolving Self
Author: Robert KEGANPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039416
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
The Evolving Self focuses upon the most basic and universal of psychological problems—the individual’s effort to make sense of experience, to make meaning of life. According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the internal experience of growth and transition, its costs and disruptions as well as its triumphs. At the heart of our meaning-making activity, the book suggests, is the drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other. Using Piagetian theory in a creative new way to make sense of how we make sense of ourselves, Kegan shows that each meaning-making stage is a new solution to the lifelong tension between the universal human yearning to be connected, attached, and included, on the one hand, and to be distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other. The Evolving Self is the story of our continuing negotiation of this tension. It is a book that is theoretically daring enough to propose a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex and clinically concerned enough to suggest a variety of fresh new ways to treat those psychological complaints that commonly arise in the course of development. Kegan is an irrepressible storyteller, an impassioned opponent of the health-and-illness approach to psychological distress, and a sturdy builder of psychological theory. His is an original and distinctive new voice in the growing discussion of human development across the life span.
Work and the Evolving Self
Author: Steven D AxelrodPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135828431
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
In Work and the Evolving Self, Steven Axelrod begins to remedy this serious oversight by setting forth a comprehensive psychoanalytic perspective on work life. Consonant with his analytic perspective, Axelrod sets out to illuminate the workplace by examining the psychodynamic meaning of work throughout the life cycle. He begins by exploring the various dimensions of work satisfaction from a psychoanalytic perspective and then expands on the relationship between work life and the adult developmental process. This developmental perspective frames Axelrod's central task: an examination of the typical work-related problems encountered in clinical practice, beginning with a psychodynamic definition of a "work disturbance." Moving on to treatment issues, Axelrod elaborates on the manner in which assessment, supportive, and exploratory interventions all enter into the treatment of work disturbances. Axelrod concludes by considering issues of career development that emerge in individual psychotherapy and exploring the psychological implications of dramatic changes now taking place in the workplace. As such, Work and the Evolving Self is an impressive contribution to the task with which psychoanalytic therapists are increasingly engaged: that of broadening their identities and treatment approaches in a world that increasingly demands flexibility and innovation.
Evolutionary Swarm Robotics
Author: Vito TrianniPublisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540776117
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
In this book the use of ER techniques for the design of self-organising group behaviours, for both simulated and real robots is introduced. The book tries to mediate between two apparently opposed perspectives: engineering and cognitive science. The experiments presented in the book and the results obtained contribute to the assessment of ER not only as a design tool, but also as a methodology for modelling and understanding intelligent adaptive behaviours.
In Over Our Heads
Author: Robert KeganPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674265017
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 411
Book Description
If contemporary culture were a school, with all the tasks and expectations meted out by modern life as its curriculum, would anyone graduate? In the spirit of a sympathetic teacher, Robert Kegan guides us through this tricky curriculum, assessing the fit between its complex demands and our mental capacities, and showing what happens when we find ourselves, as we so often do, in over our heads. In this dazzling intellectual tour, he completely reintroduces us to the psychological landscape of our private and public lives. A decade ago in The Evolving Self, Kegan presented a dynamic view of the development of human consciousness. Here he applies this widely acclaimed theory to the mental complexity of adulthood. As parents and partners, employees and bosses, citizens and leaders, we constantly confront a bewildering array of expectations, prescriptions, claims, and demands, as well as an equally confusing assortment of expert opinions that tell us what each of these roles entails. Surveying the disparate expert “literatures,” which normally take no account of each other, Kegan brings them together to reveal, for the first time, what these many demands have in common. Our frequent frustration in trying to meet these complex and often conflicting claims results, he shows us, from a mismatch between the way we ordinarily know the world and the way we are unwittingly expected to understand it. In Over Our Heads provides us entirely fresh perspectives on a number of cultural controversies—the “abstinence vs. safe sex” debate, the diversity movement, communication across genders, the meaning of postmodernism. What emerges in these pages is a theory of evolving ways of knowing that allows us to view adult development much as we view child development, as an open-ended process born of the dynamic interaction of cultural demands and emerging mental capabilities. If our culture is to be a good “school,” as Kegan suggests, it must offer, along with a challenging curriculum, the guidance and support that we clearly need to master this course—a need that this lucid and richly argued book begins to meet.
Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities)
Author: Gibbs A. WilliamsPublisher: Jason Aronson
ISBN: 0765707047
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities) is an original naturalistic theory of meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) as well as a blueprint for identifying, decoding, interpreting, and utilizing their embedded self-generated 'messages' in ways that are intellectually innovative and experientially useful. Interested readers are promised an experience that will unquestionably stimulate their self-awareness and, in so doing, expand their consciousness.
The Self-evolving Cosmos
Author: Steven M. RosenPublisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812771735
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
This unique book offers an original way of thinking about two of the most significant problems confronting modern theoretical physics: the unification of the forces of nature and the evolution of the universe. In bringing out the inadequacies of the prevailing approach to these questions, the author demonstrates the need for more than just a new theory. The meanings of space and time themselves must be radically rethought, which requires a whole new philosophical foundation. To this end, the book turns to the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Their insights into space and time bring the natural world to life in a manner well-suited to the dynamic phenomena of contemporary physics.In aligning continental thought with problems in physics and cosmology, the book makes use of topology. Phenomenological intuitions about space and time are systematically fleshed out via an unconventional and innovative approach to this qualitative branch of mathematics. The author's pioneering work in topological phenomenology is applied to such topics as quantum gravity, cosmogony, symmetry, spin, vorticity, dimension theory, Kaluza-Klein and string theories, fermion-boson interrelatedness, hypernumbers, and the mind-matter interface.
Immunity to Change
Author: Robert KeganPublisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422129470
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 359
Book Description
Unlock your potential and finally move forward. A recent study showed that when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through successfully. Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive. Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations? In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us. This persuasive and practical book, filled with hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.
Living Systems, Evolving Consciousness, and the Emerging Person
Author: Louis SanderPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136871578
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
This collection of previously published papers can be viewed as a story of the gradual emergence of an overarching idea through the course of a life’s work. The idea concerns the way emerging knowledge of developmental processes, biological systems, and therapeutic process can be integrated in terms of basic principles that govern the living system as an ongoing creative process – a process in which there is a continuing impetus, both energizing and motivational, that moves the living system toward an enhanced coherence in its engagement with its surround as it achieves an ever-increasing inclusiveness of complexity. The papers have been selected in a roughly chronological order from a career of early developmental research within the background of psychoanalytic thinking. The biological underpinnings of psychoanalysis can be extended by systems thinking. Our notions of the evolution of consciousness can also be extended from this simple level of a neural machinery essential for adaptation and survival to the capacity for the awareness of one’s own inner state within the flow of one’s engagement with one’s surround. From this enrichment of inner experiencing through evolving self-awareness, the unique organization of the "person" emerges within the developmental process – from expectancies and emotions, to values, meaning, purpose, goals, and "direction". The title of the book has been chosen to capture this sequence. Further evolution of conscious organization will enable the human species to achieve the state of being "together-with" and yet "distinct-from" as the system as a whole, on a wider, more global level, gains increasing coherence as it complexity increases. Hopefully, the implications of this idea will emerge in the reader’s thinking, as the chapters move from the level of adaptation to recognition.
Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods
Author: E. Fuller TorreyPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544863
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution. Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Torrey marshals evidence that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging from ancient skulls and artifacts to brain imaging, primatology, and child development studies, this book traces how new cognitive abilities gave rise to new behaviors. For instance, autobiographical memory, the ability to project ourselves backward and forward in time, gave Homo sapiens a competitive advantage. However, it also led to comprehension of mortality, spurring belief in an alternative to death. Torrey details the neurobiological sequence that explains why the gods appeared when they did, connecting archaeological findings including clothing, art, farming, and urbanization to cognitive developments. This book does not dismiss belief but rather presents religious belief as an inevitable outcome of brain evolution. Providing clear and accessible explanations of evolutionary neuroscience, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods will shed new light on the mechanics of our deepest mysteries.
