The Evolving Self

Download or read book The Evolving Self written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Evolving Self written by Robert KEGAN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Work and the Evolving Self written by Steven D Axelrod and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities) written by Gibbs A. Williams and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities): The Evolving Self, the Personal Unconscious, and the Creative Process offers an original theory of the nature of meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) and their practical use from a naturalistic (nonsupernatural and non-Jungian) perspective. The findings are the outgrowth of Gibbs A. Williams's forty-year investigation, both as a professional observer of some of his synchronicity prone patients receiving psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well as of his own intimate experience of these intellectually challenging and emotionally powerful occurrences. His naturalistic perspective is in marked contrast to the findings of Jung and his followers, who view these odd events as 'channeled' messages from a transcendent realm of spiritual reality. Instead, Williams concludes that meaningful coincidences are the surface manifestations of an individual's unique creative process, accommodating the 'best' available resolution of a problem for a person initially feeling 'stuck' in a seemingly intractable dilemma. While his analysis robs the magic associated with only reacting to the 'numinous uncanny aura' associated with synchronicities, it nevertheless affirms a wondrous appreciation for the creative capacities of each person to order his or her own chaos. Readers are treated to a rich mine of historical data, novel concepts, and theoretical insights drawn from speculative philosophy, depth psychology, and esoteric occult and spiritual traditions, and they are shown how to decode their own synchronicities in order to be able to use their embedded 'messages' for increased self-awareness, cohesiveness, and expanding consciousness.

Download or read book In Over Our Heads written by Robert Kegan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Evolutionary Swarm Robotics written by Vito Trianni and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-05-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Immunity to Change written by Robert Kegan and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.