Self Defense in a Narcissistic World explores in depth a new, basically unrecognized and highly prevalent everyday addiction: power trips. The disastrous consequences of this simple, but insidious, largely unconscious cultural and psychological phenomenon are candidly revealed by author Gerald Alper.

Power Games is a brilliant exploration of the psychodynamic strategies unconsciously enacted to spare the person the imagined pain and frustration of an authentic encounter. Although such strategic power operations can be characterological, they do not have to be: all people, even those rare individuals who are capable of ongoing intimacy, are forced at moments of fraility or interpersonal indecisiveness to play power games, and certainly the culture at large pervasively sponsors the enactment of opportunistic interpersonal strategies. In this new book, Gerald Alper, whose Portrait of the...

In this exciting and original work, Gerald Alper, illuminates the crucial elements that together constitute intimacy. Knowing If It's the Real Thing offers a radical departure from today's popular, yet mythological belief that if two people stay together, in an adaptive, productive, and moderately mutually enhancing way, they will achieve the most a relationship can offer. Some issues discussed in the book are the basic ingredients and rudimentary ground rules of "postmodern intimacy;" how to discover the arena in which one feels most comfortable in expressing intimate feelings; the many ways...

"Consistently showing sharply piercing acumen, New York City psychotherapist GERALD ALPER pierces the husk shielding the often-denied 'dynamic unconscious.' Equipped intellectually with a flashlight of the 'psychodynamic perspective, ' ALPER revealingly illumines nooks and crannies of the edifice of the dynamic unconscious. Readers' attention is focused psychodynamically on contextuality and subjectivity as integral components of the equation of real-world complexity. The deep psychodynamic digging of ALPER reaches to celebrated experiments, death in the afterlife, the mind, the interface of...