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Communication Skills Global Bookstore
self-help books & documents on the topic of...

violence:  origins and prevention

Books available in USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Germany, France, and Japan through HDB's Global Find-A-Book Service. This selection of books is brought to you by Human Development Books, Berkeley, CA, publisher and bookseller, creator of the www.NewConversations.net web site and publisher of The Seven Challenges Workbook.

The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness

by Arno Gruen.  One of the most insightful books ever written about violence
is now available in a paperback reprint of the 1992 edition.       

In The Insanity of Normality, the psychoanalyst Arno Gruen challenges the assumption, made popular by Freud in the twentieth century, that humans are born with an innate tendency to destruction and violence.  Gruen argues instead that at the root of evil lies self-hatred, a rage originating in a self-betrayal that begins in childhood, when autonomy is surrendered in exchange for the "love" of those who wield power over us. To share in that subjugating power, we create a false self, a pleasing-to-others image of ourselves that springs from powerful and deep-seated hopes of being loved and fears of being injured and humiliated.   

  

The Betrayal of the Self:
The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women
by Arno Gruen       

Love or power -- these are the opposing poles of a choice every child is compelled to make, very early in its life, in a drama that sets it irrevocably on its path through life. This startling new insight into a formative experience fundamental to our development is the subject of Dr. Arno Gruen's pathbreaking contribution to the psychoanalytic view of the human soul, and what distorts it into pathology.  

Preventing Violence -- Prospects for Tomorrow
 by James Gilligan, MD.     

In this controversial and compassionate book, the distinguished psychiatrist James Gilligan proposes a radically new way of thinking about violence and how to prevent it. Violence is most often addressed in moral and legal terms: "How evil is this action, and how much punishment does it deserve?" Unfortunately, this way of thinking, the basis for our legal and political institutions, does nothing to shed light on the causes of violence. Violent criminals have been Gilligan's teachers, and he has been their student. Prisons are microcosms of the societies in which they exist, and by examining them in detail, we can learn about society as a whole.  

Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
by James Gilligan, MD.     

Drawing on firsthand experience as a prison psychiatrist, his own family history, and literature, Gilligan unveils the motives of men who commit horrifying crimes, men who will not only kill others but destroy themselves rather than suffer a loss of self-respect. With devastating clarity, Gilligan traces the role that shame plays in the etiology of murder and explains why our present penal system only exacerbates it. Brilliantly argued, harrowing in its portraits of the walking dead, Violence should be read by anyone concerned with this national epidemic and its widespread consequences. "Extraordinary. Gilligan's recommendations concerning what does work to prevent violence...are extremely convincing...A wise and careful, enormously instructive book."--Owen Renik, M.D., editor, Psychoanalytic Quarterly

 

 

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