|
|
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Required reading for understanding anger and creativity., June 9, 1998
By A Customer
You hear of it almost daily, the mayhem. A building is dynamited in the name of some high-sounding cause. A gang sprays a street corner with bullets. Children bring hunting rifles to school. A comic's wife kills him, then herself.For a country drenched in violence I can't imagine a book more timely than "Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity" (SUNY Press, 1996). Having counseled violent men and teens court-referred for mandatory therapy, I can state my reaction to the book in two words: read it. Building on the work of Rollo May, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and other well-known theorists, Dr. Stephen A. Diamond has brought to the exploration of our violence epidemic his experiences as a psychotherapist and forensic psychologist. He also draws on art, literature, philosophy, and comparative religion to reveal the roots of rage. Those roots are, to use the classical expression, daimonic, a term also favored by James Hillman. Anger is a natural, dynamic reaction to woundedness, injustice, violation, powerlessness. When repressed and denied, however, anger ferments into a neurotic, narcissistic rage, which itself gets repressed until it explodes. You cannot banish a vital facet of yourself without suffering consequences. The executive who jumps out a window, the postal worker who comes to work with a pistol, the celebrity who one day massacres a mate are not necessarily insane: we all cast shadows, and everyone who stuffs down anger for too long is at risk. (My work with violent men has repeatedly shown me that the passive, "it doesn't bother me" gentlemen in denial of how angry they really are routinely reviolate and return to jail.) And what are psychotherapists doing about the rage epidemic? In some cases unknowingly boosting its virulence. By medicating or misinterpreting anxiety, irritability, conflict, or other symptoms of repressed anger, a symptom-oriented psychotherapy-increasingly the only kind p! aid for by insurance companies --can actually become one more weapon for banishing the daimonic from consciousness, thereby rendering it incapable of transformation. Dr. Diamond is clear that a model of persons that focuses only on growth, healing, and wholeness but not on passivity, irresponsibility, or victim-thinking does all of us a disservice and reinforces the widespread denial and false optimism that help turn daimonic anger into demonic destructiveness. Dr. Diamond points out that managing our anger and rage involves respecting and relating consciously to our daimonic impulses, acting creatively rather than acting out. Creativity is not a skill or a gift, however, but a way of being that is open to everyone with the courage to make constructive use of the dark side-within. For the daimonic, as Rollo May and Paul Tillich and the ancient Greeks well knew, is by nature also creative, and only by tapping its vitality can we humanize its destructive potential, brother to the mayhem all around, into what Nietzsche referred to as "light and flame." How do we do it? Read the book and find out. Craig Chalquist, M.S.
|
by Richard H. Cox
by Raymond J. Corsini
by Rollo May
See all Editorial Reviews
