Healing and the mind

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Daniel Goleman, Richard J. Davidson

"En los últimos veinte años, la meditación y la atención plena se han convertido en una especie de solución para todo, tanto para bajar de peso como para mejorar las relaciones personales o para lograr mayor eficiencia. Pero, ¿qué hay de realidad en esto? ¿De qué manera se distorsionan datos para vender métodos de entrenamiento mental? ¿Qué pueden ofrecernos verdaderamente las técnicas de meditación? ¿Cómo obtener el mayor beneficio para nuestra mente, nuestro cerebro y nuestro cuerpo?. En este libro se describen las investigaciones más avanzadas sobre el tema, que aplicadas a desarrollar una variedad más amplia de prácticas permitirán lograr los mejores resultados. No obstante, para alcanzar ese altísimo nivel de transformación positiva no bastan pequeñas dosis diarias de meditación. Es necesaria una dedicación prolongada, que incluye ingredientes fundamentales -como la guía experta de un maestro y una actitud de menor apego al "yo"- que las versiones de entrenamiento mental más difundidas pasan por alto. Con el objetivo de erradicar las falsas ideas y la neuromitología, Daniel Goleman y Richard Davidson nos muestran que -más allá de los estados placenteros que los ejercicios mentales provocan- el auténtico resultado beneficioso de estas prácticas reside en que de ellas pueden surgir rasgos perdurables de la personalidad. Y nos invitan a imaginar qué sucedería si, transformando nuestra mente, mejoraran no solo nuestra salud y nuestro bienestar, sino también los de nuestra comunidad y los del mundo entero."--

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John S. Rolland

When a family member is diagnosed with cancer or faces challenges from living with a disability, the impact reverberates throughout the family, leaving no one untouched. How should a clinician help the parents of a child who is critically ill? How can a marital relationship be skewed and a child's well-being compromised when a parent becomes permanently disabled - and how can a clinician best intervene in such cases? In presenting his clinically powerful Family Systems Illness Model, John Rolland addresses these and other vital questions of importance to families in which there is a member with a major illness or disability. Rolland's integrative treatment model is based on his experience with more than five hundred families, first as Founding Director of the Center for Illness in Families while at Yale University and currently at the University of Chicago. He applies it to a broad range of disorders that affect adults and children over the entire course of an illness and at all stages of the life cycle. Richly illustrated with varied case examples, Families, Illness, and Disability is unique both in describing this comprehensive model and in providing a highly practical guide to effective intervention. Through a normative, preventive lens, the book's useful framework shows how the biopsychosocial demands of different illness and disabilities create particular strains on the family, how the stages of an illness affect the family, how family legacies of loss and illness shape their coping responses, and how family belief systems play a crucial role in the ability to manage health and illness. Practitioners will learn how to help families live well despite physical limitations and the uncertainties of threatened loss, how to encourage empowering rather than shame-based illness narratives, how to rewrite rigid caregiving scripts, how to encourage intimacy and maximize autonomy for all family members. With its superb integration of individual and family modalities, this outstanding book is ideal for all health and mental health professionals and students who work with illness, disability, and loss in a wide variety of clinical settings.

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Peter H. Klopfer

Politics and People in Ethology: Personal Reflections on the Study of Animal Behavior is the memoir of a man who has spent his life among animals and academics: observing, studying, playing, and thinking about them. From a childhood in southern California to years spent at Yale, Cambridge and Duke Universities, Peter Klopfer has always made connections between his academic work with animals, his political convictions, and his wide-ranging intellectual interests. Rather than a straightforward history of a discipline that grew up along with his own academic career, Klopfer offers personal and candid insights into ethology (the study of animal behavior). He offers reminiscences about the "fathers" of the field - Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and others. Klopfer details the ways in which he has changed his mind on the causes of species diversity in songbirds, mother-infant attachments (and the connection to the hormone oxytocin) in goats, mechanisms that control aggression, as well as observations in exotic places inhabited by elephant seals and lemurs. He also explains the work of others, such as the contribution to the study of behavior of his teacher, Yale's famed G. E. Hutchinson; his close friend and field companion Robert MacArthur and his role in the development of behavioral ecology. Klopfer provides an analysis of the possible connections between Konrad Lorenz and the National Socialist Party, as well as a polemical attack on the part of the field known as sociobiology. The book closes with a meditation on the state of the discipline, including the problems facing young scientists today.

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Ava Torre-Bueno, LCSW

This is the first psychological self-help book for the 10% of women who have significant emotional distress after an abortion. Terry Beresford, former Director of Counseling at Planned Parenthood of Maryland says, "Peace After Abortion is a well written, practical and compassionate book, designed to help that small but important group of women who are troubled after an abortion to deal with their feelings. It will also be an invaluable aid to health care professionals who may be working with tose women, and to anyone interested in a self-help approach to issues of guilt, depression, and shame. So far as I know, it is the only book available of its kind, and it is hard to imagine how a beeter one could be found."