Discusses the eight core pleasures--primal pleasure, pain relief, the pleasures of play and humor, and mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual pleasure--and how they can enrich one's life
Emma is used to getting dragged into her twin sister's magical messes, but this time her predicament is more than a minor annoyance. She's chained to a cat shifter that her sister encased in a curse of stone. Worse, the unfortunate gargoyle's waking up. And her sister's not there to take the heat.
This book offers a fresh look at the often-censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of 'new economic criticism,' it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature-and-liberalism and Victorian liberalism-and-imperialism. It challenges a high-cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology-critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith-Benthamite; against the 'carceral' social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the 'dismal science.' But 'utility' has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favourable to freedom; and 'leveling' as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in works on Victorian literature-and-economics and Victorian literature-and-liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through 'liberal imperialism'.
Using data from infant observation, and child, adolescent, and adult analyses, the Novicks explicate a multidimensional, developmental theory of sadomasochism that has been recognized as a major innovation. According to the Novicks, each phase of development contributes to the clinical manifestations of sadomasochism. Painful experiences in infancy are transformed into a mode of attachment, then into an embraced marker of specialness and unlimited destructive power, then into a conviction of equality with oedipal parents, and, finally, into an omnipotent capacity to gratify infantile wishes through the coercion of others. By school age, these children have established a magic omnipotent system of thought which undermines alternate means of competent interactions with reality. In adolescence and adulthood it becomes increasingly hard for them to deny, avoid, or distort reality without resorting to escalating self-destructive behaviors. Sadomasochistic phenomena are the source of severe resistances and counterreactions in all phases of therapy. This book helps clinicians recognize and overcome these blocks to treatment progress and success. Here can be found an introduction to the Novicks' reformulation of the therapeutic alliance, and their distinctive contributions to the transformations of memory and the termination of treatment.
What is more significant to develop in life, your mind or your body? Both are nice to privilege, maintain, and develop, since they are both important. And if this is the case, then why do you see people taking care only of their bodies? Why are you always more desirable in society through your bodily appearance and through your social influence than through your intelligence, creativity, and other cognitive abilities? Why can you not find in the media, entertainment, and in society people engaged in a continuous development, but remaining preoccupied with addictions, bodily needs, continuous servitude, and social competition? And now, if you had the chance to develop as intensely as you could, what exactly would you enhance the most? Because throughout life, people neglect to develop important aspects related to their mind and bodies, while privileging other activities instead, only because these happen to render them happier, more popular, and therefore more successful, in a stereotypical manner. But how exactly do you know how to develop? How can you even tell what is pertinent to do in life? You already know all the legal, moral, social, and religious beliefs and tendencies of what to do and how to behave and develop, but you cannot even follow them, or not entirely, since you have other things to do, as everybody else. And now, by engaging in all addictions, entertainment, and other irrelevant activities, you take away from your own development and fulfillment. If you can even identify your own meaning and fulfillment in life, besides what you see around. What can you do? Reason, at the third intelligent human level, through the extraordinary human mind, if you can ever understand the human mind in the first place. Because all knowledge provided to you consensually by the current science stands at the first, servitude, ideological level, while all physiological tendencies coming from the human body are at the second, animal level, remaining incompatible. You may still reason and develop through your human mind, yet you have to be able to identify and remove all irrelevant and harmful beliefs, stereotypes, and entire ideologies in order to be able to reason accurately. We notice now a discrepancy between people’s meaningful, adequate development, and the consensual behavior demanded by others and meant for servitude, indoctrination, and social acceptance, coming for stereotypical purposes. However, can you even define the adequate, the meaningful, and the proper human development and how this should take place? You can always trace it, if you can ever identify the actual accurate human meaning in life and in this world. This book studies the human development at cognitive, social, higher, and physical levels, in order to help you learn how to develop your mind, body, and intelligences along with all their cognitive abilities. This study is done from objective, cognitive, and behavioral perspectives, at the levels of your mind, body, higher self, and much more.
The Coming Age of Psychosomatics covers the proceedings of the twenty-first Annual Conference of the Society for Psychosomatic Research. The title presents papers that detail the advancement in the understanding of psychosomatic. The coverage of the text includes the treatment of psychosomatic disorders related to birth trauma; minimal brain dysfunction and the treatment of psychoneuroses; and eclectic approach to regressional techniques. The selection also deals with the effect of beta-adrenoceptor blockade on the somatic manifestations of anxiety; and the reduction of somatic manifestations of anxiety by beta-blockade. The book will be of great use to students, researchers, and practitioners of behavioral science.
Postcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women's sexuality "haunt" contemporary postcolonial African scholarship which--by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women's sexuality--generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concept of "hauntology" and "ghostly matters" to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence about the sexual female body in postcolonial African scholarship, Postcolonial Hauntologies challenges hostile responses to critical and artistic voices that suggest the African female body represents sacred ideological-discursive ground on which one treads carefully, if at all. Coly demonstrates how "ghosts" from the colonial past are countered by discursive engagements with explicit representations of women's sexuality and bodies that emphasize African women's power and autonomy.
Sex, Desire, and Taboo in South Asia: Religion, Culture of Ability, and Patriarchy explores the intersection of religion, culture of ability, and patriarchy in relation to sex, desire, and taboo. Divided into six chapters, this book utilizes Western theorists such as Foucault and Freud in conjunction with Spivak’s theory of the subaltern to establish a theoretical context on sexuality. Through this lens, Acharya evaluates the intersection between religion, patriarchy, and gender and their impact on the perception of sex and desire as a taboo within a South Asian context. The book also examines how individuals contend with their sexual desires, using literature and social media to display the stark difference between the cultural promotion of antisexualism and existing ancient texts on the art of erotica, such as the Kamasutra. In doing so, Sex, Desire, and Taboo in South Asia expands on Eurocentric notions of sexuality and addresses the conditions of the subaltern to explore the complex dynamics of sex in South Asia.