Open to Desire PDF Download

Author: Mark Epstein, M.D.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101216670
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
“A masterpiece. . . . It teaches us how not to fear and repress, but to rechannel and harness the most powerful energies of life toward freedom and bliss.” —ROBERT THURMAN It is common in both Buddhism and Freudian psychoanalysis to treat desire as if it is the root of all suffering and problems, but psychiatrist Mark Epstein believes this to be a grave misunderstanding.In his controversial defense of desire, he makes clear that it is the key to deepening intimacy with ourselves, each other, and our world. Proposing that spiritual attainment does not have to be detached from intimacy or eroticism, Open to Desire begins with an exploration of the state of dissatisfaction that causes us to cling to irrational habits. Dr. Epstein helps readers overcome their own fears of desire so that they can more readily bridge the gap between self and other, cope with feelings of incompletion, and get past the perception of others as objects. Freed from clinging and shame, desire’s spiritual potential can then be opened up.

Author: Walpola Rahula
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802198104
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
“A terrific introduction to the Buddha’s teachings.” —Paul Blairon, California Literary Review This indispensable volume is a lucid and faithful account of the Buddha’s teachings. “For years,” says the Journal of the Buddhist Society, “the newcomer to Buddhism has lacked a simple and reliable introduction to the complexities of the subject. Dr. Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught fills the need as only could be done by one having a firm grasp of the vast material to be sifted. It is a model of what a book should be that is addressed first of all to ‘the educated and intelligent reader.’ Authoritative and clear, logical and sober, this study is as comprehensive as it is masterly.” This edition contains a selection of illustrative texts from the Suttas and the Dhammapada (specially translated by the author), sixteen illustrations, and a bibliography, glossary, and index. “[Rahula’s] succinct, clear overview of Buddhist concepts has never been surpassed. It is the standard.” —Library Journal

Author: Mark Epstein, M.D.
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN: 0307830098
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
An intimate guide to self-acceptance and discovery that offers a Buddhist perspective on wholeness within the framework of a Western understanding of self. For decades, Western psychology has promised fulfillment through building and strengthening the ego. We are taught that the ideal is a strong, individuated self, constructed and reinforced over a lifetime. But Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein has found a different way. Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart shows us that happiness doesn't come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. Weaving together the accumulated wisdom of his two worlds--Buddhism and Western psychotherapy—Epstein shows how "the happiness that we seek depends on our ability to balance the ego's need to do with our inherent capacity to be." He encourages us to relax the ever-vigilant mind in order to experience the freedom that comes only from relinquishing control. Drawing on events in his own life and stories from his patients, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart teaches us that only by letting go can we start on the path to a more peaceful and spiritually satisfying life.

Author: Barry McCarthy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135919291
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
For over a decade Rekindling Desire has helped to restore and restructure sexuality in thousands of lives. This expanded edition continues the exploration of inhibited sexual desire and no-sex relationships by the author, who brings decades of knowledge and the expertise that comes from having treated almost 3,000 couples for sexual problems. Contained within are suggested strategies and exercises that help develop communication and sexual skills, as well as interesting case studies that open the doors to couples’ sexual frustrations. The shame, embarrassment, and hesitancy that individuals feel with themselves, and the resentment and blame they can feel towards their sexual partners, are explored and put into context. Whether you are married, cohabitating, or dating, or if you are 25, 45, or 75, reading this book will help renew your sexual desire and put you on the path towards healthy, pleasure-oriented sexuality.

Author: David Webster
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415346528
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
David Webster explores the notion of desire as found in the Buddhist Pali Canon. Beginning by addressing the idea of a 'paradox of desire', whereby we must desire to end desire, the varieties of desire that are articulated in the Pali texts are examined. A range of views of desire, as found in Western thought, are presented as well as Hindu and Jain approaches. An exploration of the concept of ditthi(view or opinion) is also provided, exploring the way in which 'holding views' can be seen as analogous to the process of desiring. Other subjects investigated include the mind-body relationship, the range of Pali terms for desire, and desire's positive spiritual value. A comparative exploration of the various approaches completes the work.

Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542216
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Author: Allucquère Rosanne Stone
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262691895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Human communication has traditionally revealed important aspects of identity such as gender, age and race. However, such information is now often masked by computer-mediated communications. This text examines the various ways modern technology is challenging conventional notions of gender identity.

Author: Lauren Gail Berlant
Publisher: Dead Letter Office, BABEL Working Group
ISBN: 9780615686875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love. In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives. Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.

Author: Joan Copjec
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781688885
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines—psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan’s explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is “literate in desire,” and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

Author: Gabriel Tupinambá
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014283X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The Desire of Psychoanalysis proposes that recognizing how certain theoretical and institutional problems in Lacanian psychoanalysis are grounded in the historical conditions of Lacan’s own thinking might allow us to overcome these impasses. In order to accomplish this, Gabriel Tupinambá analyzes the socioeconomic practices that underlie the current institutional existence of the Lacanian community—its political position as well as its institutional history—in relation to theoretical production. By focusing on the underlying dynamic that binds clinical practice, theoretical work, and institutional security in Lacanian psychoanalysis today, Tupinambá is able to locate sites for conceptual innovation that have been ignored by the discipline, such as the understanding of the role of money in clinical practice, the place of analysands in the transformation of psychoanalytic theory, and ideological dead-ends that have become common sense in the Lacanian field. The Desire of Psychoanalysis thus suggests ways of opening up psychoanalysis to new concepts and clinical practices and calls for a transformation of how psychoanalysis is understood as an institution.