This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the "new wounded" (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.
Time Out Chicago, Top 10 Book of 2005 Winner of the 2006 PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction Training horses is dangerous—a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more important, patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of intolerance. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Wounded by Percival Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.
First published in 1989, Dan Allender's The Wounded Heart has helped hundreds of thousands of people come to terms with sexual abuse in their past. Now, more than twenty-five years later, Allender has written a brand-new book on the subject that takes into account recent discoveries about the lasting physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual ramifications of sexual abuse. With great compassion Allender offers hope for victims of rape, date rape, incest, molestation, sexting, sexual bullying, unwanted advances, pornography, and more, exposing the raw wounds that are left behind and clearing the path toward wholeness and healing. Never minimizing victims' pain or offering pat spiritual answers that don't truly address the problem, he instead calls evil evil and lights the way to renewed joy. Counselors, pastors, and friends of those who have suffered sexual harm will find in this book the deep spiritual guidance they need to effectively minister to the sexually broken around them. Victims themselves will find here a sympathetic friend to walk alongside them on the road to healing.
Educators today are facing challenges and demands like never before. The tensions between an educator’s calling and the reality of the profession can create a growing sense of compassion fatigue, burnout, and job dissatisfaction. In light of this context, this book brings firsthand knowledge alongside research to encourage, equip, and empower teachers and other K-12 educators to find relief and hope. Taking a trauma-sensitive approach, this important resource will help you navigate the pressures of being an educator, whether you entered into your profession carrying wounds with you, have felt wounded from your work environment, or you are simply someone trying to support others. Packed with doable strategies and suggestions for personal and professional self-care, this book will help you discover a personal journey towards holistic health, job satisfaction, and most importantly, hope!
A radically fresh interpretation of how we can best serve others from the bestselling author of The Return of the Prodigal Son, hailed as “one of the world’s greatest spiritual writers” by Christianity Today “In our own woundedness, we can become a source of life for others.” In this hope-filled and profoundly simple book, Henri Nouwen inspires devoted men and women who want to be of service in their church or community but who have found traditional outreach alienating and ineffective. Weaving keen cultural analysis with his psychological and religious insights, Nouwen presents a balanced and creative theology of service that begins with the realization of fundamental woundedness in human nature. According to Nouwen, ministers are called to identify the suffering in their own hearts and make that recognition the starting point of their service. Ministers must be willing to go beyond their professional, somewhat aloof roles and leave themselves open as fellow human beings with the same wounds and suffering as those they serve. In other words, we heal from our wounds. The Wounded Healer is a thoughtful and insightful guide that will be welcomed by anyone engaged in the service of others.
Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines—European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience—Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.
Updated second edition: “A bold and imaginative book which moves our thinking about narratives of illness in new directions.” —Sociology of Heath and Illness Since it was first published in 1995, The Wounded Storyteller has occupied a unique place in the body of work on illness. A collective portrait of a so-called “remission society” of those who suffer from illness or disability, as well as a cogent analysis of their stories within a larger framework of narrative theory, Arthur W. Frank’s book has reached a large and diverse readership including the ill, medical professionals, and scholars of literary theory. Drawing on the work of such authors as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known—Gilda Radner’s battle with ovarian cancer—to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: They abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. In this new edition Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written. His new afterword extends the book’s argument significantly, discussing storytelling and experience, other modes of illness narration, and a version of hope that is both realistic and aspirational. Reflecting on his own life during the creation of the first edition and the conclusions of the book itself, he reminds us of the power of storytelling as way to understand our own suffering. “Arthur W. Frank’s second edition of The Wounded Storyteller provides instructions for use of this now-classic text in the study of illness narratives.” —Rita Charon, author of Narrative Medicine “Frank sees the value of illness narratives not so much in solving clinical conundrums as in addressing the question of how to live a good life.” —Christianity Today
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal. "Chapter after chapter, it's like one shattered myth after another." - NPR "An informed, moving and kaleidoscopic portrait... Treuer's powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation's past.." - New York Times Book Review, front page A sweeping history—and counter-narrative—of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to the present. The received idea of Native American history—as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee—has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear—and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence—the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.
The war against child abuse has become a war against children. Every year, hundreds of children die, thousands more are forced to live with strangers, and countless American families are torn apart. This is called a "child-protection system." While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse - in fact, hurting the very children that they were intended to help. Wexler reinforces his arguments with horrifying descriptions of children summarily removed from their homes, of families shattered because of false reports, and of children whose parents are guilty of nothing more than poverty being thrust into the maelstrom of the chaotic foster-care program. He writes of severly abused children - those needing the most help - whose cases are ignored because the system diverts scarce resources to trivial or unfounded cases, and who are reinjured, sometimes fatally after their plight has been called to the attention of authorities. Wounded Innocents illustrates how well-meaning efforts to help children have gone terribly wrong and how the current child-protection system desperately needs to be replaced with one that offers real help and real hope to abused and neglected children.
