Illusions and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

ISBN-13: 9781782202851 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 192 str.

David Smail

Opis

This work challenges the notion that anxiety and depression amount to a mental illness denoting that something is wrong with the individual sufferer. Instead, anxiety and depression are described as perfectly rational responses to difficulties in the sufferer's world, experienced subjectively by that person.

The book's primary purpose is to explain the meaning of anxiety as experienced by the sufferer. These insights also lead to a view, by way of secondary purpose, that the role of the therapist is not in -curing- the individual, but rather to negotiate demystification and to provide insight into the effects of the problems in the sufferer's world, based on the sufferer and the therapist's shared subjective understanding. The curative claims of other models of -treatment- are evaluated.


Whilst David Smail's training in psychology and philosophy shines through his analysis, the primary source for his views is his experience as a clinical psychologist working in the NHS in Nottingham seeing patients from all walks of life.

Spis treści

Preface to Constable edition , The Myth of Normality , The Reality of Threat , Shyness and the Self as Object , The Domination of Words , The Language of Anxiety , The Magic of the Machine , The Experts , The Possibility of Undeception , The Confrontation of Reality

O autorze

David Smail