Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind proposes that the optimal goal of psychotherapy lies in cultivating a free mind with integrity that will not seek to do major harm to one's life or to the lives of others. This book looks at a wide range of psychiatric disorders, including classic conditions of neurosis, personality disorders and psychoses, through a different lens. Rather than simply enumerating symptoms, namely, how a person is addressing the opportunity of his/her life and the lives of others and whether a person is doing harm to themselves and/or others. This book proceeds to grapple with several critical life experiences and styles: tragedy, violence and evil, all of which often have posed insurmountable problems in therapy.
Foreword, by Douglas Sprenkle Preface Acknowledgments Part I: Some Old-Fashioned Plus Some Newly Fashionable Psychiatric Syndromes and Relationship Disorders Chapter 1: Some Old and New Psychiatric Disorders Chapter 2: Intimacy and Relationship Disorders Democratic Mind Versus Fascist Mind in Intimacy and Relationship Disorders in Marriage, Parenting and Family Life What's It All About: Being Real along with a Discipline of Decency Family Enmeshment and Disengagement: Reasonable Ideas for Family Life Taken Too Far The Inevitable Imperfection of `Perfect Marriages,' Victimization in Families in Everyday Life: Violence and Sexual Abuse, Abandoning, Exploiting, Scapegoating and Sacrificing Members of One's Family 'I'm Alright Jack Personalities': People Who Seemingly Don't Have Any Problems and Assign All the Burden to Someone Else in the Family A Need to Give to Others but Not to Receive for Oneself: Big Givers who Take Away the Others' Strength Unquestioning Loyalty to One's Family as a Basis for being Abused Sexual Dysfunctions: How Certainties Can Get in the Way of Making Love Well Genuine Communication for Genuine Relationships: The Give-and-Take of Real Clarification of Needs, Criticism, Anger and Love Chapter 3: Disorders of Neurosis, Depression and Suicide Revisited Chapter 4: Personality and Character Disorders of Self-Entitlement Chapter 5: Old-Fashioned Plus Newly Fashionable Disorders Old-Fashioned Psychotic Abdications of Reality Affective Psychoses-Mania and Depression Paranoid Psychoses-Paranoid Schizophrenia and Paranoia, including Paranoid Thinking in a Political Context Paranoid Thinking in a Political Context A Newer `Hit' Disorder of Our Time: Anorexia Some Miscellaneous Unrecognized Bedeviling Syndromes The `Orphan Syndrome' or Self-Made Person A New Syndrome of Grown Kids Who Live at Home Forever and Often Rule their Parents Absolutely Strange, Crazy Criminal Behaviors including `for the Thrill of it All,' Cases of `Perfect' and `Normal' Kids Who Murder Someone-Sometimes Their Parents-Unexpectedly The Unsavory Suicide-Killers of Our Era, Including Some Cases of Nice and Quiet `Good Guys'-or Women-Who Become Suicide-Killer Terrorists Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome (SUNDS) The New `American Way' of Mass Killing at Columbines, Shopping Centers and Other Public Places People of the Lie-Invisible Destroyers of Others' Lives Part II: Developing New Psychotherapy for a Democratic Mind: Including Overcoming and Treating Some Conditions of Violence and Evil Chapter 6: Ultimate Choices: To Be For Life or Not To Be Chapter 7: Treating Violence and Evil Chapter 8: Author's Voice: What is Going to Happen to All of Us? What Can I Do with My Time? Appendix Bibliography About the Author
