Errant selves

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Emmanuel Gobillot

Traditional organizational boundaries limit our ability to deliver results. The Connected Leader argues that many of the old leadership recipes are outdated and don't take into account changes in the work environment and informal social networks within the organization. Taking a new approach to leadership theory, the author (a senior director at Hay Group) argues that modern leaders engage with employees and improve performance by building on trust, giving meaning to workplace relationships and by creating dialogue within the organization. The Connected Leader provides diagnostic tools for readers to evaluate their own skills and directly relate the insights from the book to their own situation.

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T.M. Luhrmann

Psychological anthropologist Luhrmann offers an extended case study examining how believers come to have faith in an active, present God despite secular pressures in contemporary America. Drawing on extensive interviews and personal experience among Vineyard Movement members, Luhrmann focuses on the use of prayer among charismatic evangelical Christians. Her work combines personal narratives and excerpts from bestselling evangelical how-to guides with theories and data from psychology.

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Dan Merkur

In Relating to God: Clinical Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, and Theism, Dan Merkur conceptualizes religious discourse within psychoanalysis. He proposes that God be treated as a transferential figure whose analysis leads to a reduction of the parental content that is projected onto God. Merkur notes that religious conversion experiences regularly involve theological intuitions that are either rational or, owing to morbid complications, have undergone displacement into irrational symbolism. Analysis renders the religiosity more wholesome. Traditionally, psychoanalytic thought has been dismissive of religion. Freud is on record, however, as having called psychoanalysis a neutral procedure. He argued that religion, with its dependency on a providential God who punishes disobedience, imagines spirituality on the model of human parents and fails to approach spirituality in an appropriately scientific manner. He wrote little of spiritual phenomena, but mentioned both the rationality of the universe and the parapsychological occurrence of thought transference. Occasionally, later psychoanalysts used different language in order to contrast wholesome and morbid forms of religion. Erich Fromm distinguished authoritarian and humanistic religions, while D. W. Winnicott condemned fetishistic behavior while approving of playful illusions that require “belief-in.” These formulations constructed a middle position for clinicians, neither categorically opposed to religion as classical psychoanalysis was, nor do they embrace cultural relativity as “spiritually oriented” psychotherapists are currently advocating. What sorts of spiritual practices does psychoanalysis find unobjectionable? As examples of humanistic religion, Fromm named Zen Buddhism, Buddhist mindfulness meditation, and the via negativa or “way of negating” that some Christian and Jewish mystics have followed. Because the Bible-based approaches are little known, Merkur discusses their histories, procedures, and psychoanalytic understanding.--

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[Jane Clarke & John Nicholson

Resilience is a quality that helps you turn adversity into advantage and threat into opportunity. And the good news is, it's a package of skills and behaviours that you can learn or develop, whatever your age, circumstance or experience.