Customer Reviews

In praise of madness;: Realness therapy--the self reclaimed,

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Paul Stern's book is a remarkable exploration of the variety of ways in which persons, whose emotional life is blocked, try to break out to create a connection to their inner emotional center. The primary defect is the emotional block: the inability to connect to and feel one's own emotions. This renders the sufferer a prisoner in a "black-and-white" world, compared to the full "color" world of the person with a healthy emotional life.

What Stern does is look at a variety of ways that people break through the wall (originating in the rejection of the child's emotional life by the parent) that blocks them from their feelings. One such way is psychosis, where the blocked feelings pour out in a psychotic break, so intense that it seems to come from someone else. Another person may resort to violence: in the midst of a barroom fight, an intense emotional attachment, or an experience of vividness of life may emerge, whereas at other times life reverts to the black-and-white tedium of emotional deadness. Others may use LSD to break through this wall and feel more vivid aliveness.

Stern explores how these, and other, forms of madness may actually be beneficial, a way in which the unconscious is forcing the conscious mind to acknowledge and deal with these hidden, rejected and lost feelings. It is a remarkable and novel way of looking at the inner emotional terrain and "solutions" the psyche uses to solve this particular type of problem.