Main description:

Suffering and Psychology challenges modern psychology's concentration on almost exclusively on eradicating pain, suffering, and their causes to examines the ideological commitments of this vision of the discipline and offer a counter-vision.

This book explores theoretical commitments and cultural ideals that deter the field of psychology from facing and dealing credibly with inescapable human limitations and frailties and with unavoidable suffering, pain, loss, heartbreak, and despair. Drawing on both secular and spiritual points of view, Frank C. Richardson seeks to recover ideals of character and compassion and to illuminate the possibility of what Jonathan Sacks terms "transforming suffering" rather than seeking mainly to eliminate, anesthetize, or defy these dark and difficult aspects of the human condition.

Suffering and Psychology will be of interest to academic and professional psychologists and philosophers.

Contents:

Introduction

1. Stories of Suffering

2. The Denial of Suffering in Psychology

3. Disguised Ideology

4. Early Religion and the Axial Age

5. Modern Approaches

6. Toward a "New Wisdom of Limits"

7. Transforming Suffering