Wisdom of the Psyche

This revised edition adds new neuroscience references, revisits the idea of wisdom and explores avoidance of adulthood in modern culture.

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The first edition of Wisdom of the Psyche engaged with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. In this revised edition, Ginette Paris re-focuses her attention on the modern lack of desire to become adult and updates the book with brand new neuroscientific research.

Paris uses cogent and passionate argument, as well as stories from patients, to demonstrate that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. She makes clear that the way out of those destructive states does not start with an upward, positive, wilful effort of the ego, but with an opening of the imagination, and aims to foster the dialogue between psychotherapists and neuroscientists. In clear and accessible language, Paris describes how depth psychology can be seen as a subject of the humanities rather than the sciences, and explains how gaining an understanding of neuroscience will not necessarily make us psychologically wiser.

A unique and powerful book, Wisdom of the Psyche will be fascinating reading for Jungian and depth psychologists, psychotherapists, analysts and others in the helping professions, as well as students and those in training, and readers with an interest in psychology and neuroscience who want to create an inner life worth living.