The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and the Life of the Spirit

By Herbert Fingarette

Book Overview

The cornerstone of psychoanalysis-and legacy of the landmark Freud/Breuer collaboration-featuring the classic case of Anna O. and the evolution of the cathartic method, in the definitive Strachey... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061311774
• ISBN13: 9780061311772
• Release Date: January 1965
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant, profound, illuminating, important, helpful

I agree with the prior reviewers. I would have to say that this is one of the ten greatest books I have read in my whole life. Fingarette's synthesis of psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and Hindu and Buddhist spiritual and religious doctrines and the use of each of these frameworks to help interpret the others is one of the most comprehensive and satisfying accounts I have encountered of the nature of psychological and spiritual development. Indeed it is the only satisfactory account I know of the nature of the kinds of change that people undergo in psychonalysis. It has always been a great sadness to me that this book is not more widely known and appreciated.

A Profound Study Written with Great Clarity

This extraordinary book, first published in 1963, deserves to be more widely known. Readers interested in psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, religious experience, practical spiritualities, and studies of mysticism would all find in this wonderful book a coherent, deeply thoughtful, and utterly lucid account of the range of what is possible for human consciousness of what is real and of the stages through which one journeys on the way to "spiritual illumination and the apprehension of the divine." Someone should do us all a favor and bring this book back into print!

Contains an unequaled discussion of mystical experience.

The final chapter of this book is the most enlightened discussion of mystical experience I have ever read. The goal of mysticism is identified as the elimination of intra-psychic conflicts and the attainment of a mature and natural state of mind, which is also the goal of psychoanalysis. I have never found any real exception to this in the teachings of Zen Masters. This chapter greatly illuminates all wisdom literature and is literally the best thing I have ever read by a Western philosopher. A work of exceptional maturity.