The Love of Nature and the End of the World

The Love of Nature and the End of the World PDF Author: Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262250436
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
A psychological exploration of how the love of nature can coexist in our psyches with apathy toward environmental destruction. Virtually everyone values some aspect of the natural world. Yet many people are surprisingly unconcerned about environmental issues, treating them as the province of special interest groups. Seeking to understand how our appreciation for the beauty of nature and our indifference to its destruction can coexist in us, Shierry Weber Nicholsen explores dimensions of our emotional experience with the natural world that are so deep and painful that they often remain unspoken. The Love of Nature and the End of the World is a gathering of meditations and collages. Its evocations of our emotional attachment to the natural world and the emotional impact of environmental deterioration are meant to encourage individual and collective reflection on a difficult dilemma. Nicholsen draws on work in environmental philosophy and ecopsychology; the writings of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, and D. W. Winnicott; and ideas from Buddhist and Sufi traditions. She shows how our emotional responses to the vulnerabilities of the natural world range from intense caring and compassion, through grief and outrage, to diffuse depression. Individual chapters focus on silence and the process whereby we move from the unspoken to the spoken, the love of nature, the "perceptual reciprocity" with the natural world to which we might mature, beauty in the human and natural realms, the psychological impact of the destruction of the natural world, and reflections on the future.

The Love of Nature and the End of the World

The Love of Nature and the End of the World PDF Author: Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262250436
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
A psychological exploration of how the love of nature can coexist in our psyches with apathy toward environmental destruction. Virtually everyone values some aspect of the natural world. Yet many people are surprisingly unconcerned about environmental issues, treating them as the province of special interest groups. Seeking to understand how our appreciation for the beauty of nature and our indifference to its destruction can coexist in us, Shierry Weber Nicholsen explores dimensions of our emotional experience with the natural world that are so deep and painful that they often remain unspoken. The Love of Nature and the End of the World is a gathering of meditations and collages. Its evocations of our emotional attachment to the natural world and the emotional impact of environmental deterioration are meant to encourage individual and collective reflection on a difficult dilemma. Nicholsen draws on work in environmental philosophy and ecopsychology; the writings of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, and D. W. Winnicott; and ideas from Buddhist and Sufi traditions. She shows how our emotional responses to the vulnerabilities of the natural world range from intense caring and compassion, through grief and outrage, to diffuse depression. Individual chapters focus on silence and the process whereby we move from the unspoken to the spoken, the love of nature, the "perceptual reciprocity" with the natural world to which we might mature, beauty in the human and natural realms, the psychological impact of the destruction of the natural world, and reflections on the future.

The Nature and Nurture of Love

The Nature and Nurture of Love PDF Author: Marga Vicedo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602055X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The notion that maternal care and love will determine a child’s emotional well-being and future personality has become ubiquitous. In countless stories and movies we find that the problems of the protagonists—anything from the fear of romantic commitment to serial killing—stem from their troubled relationships with their mothers during childhood. How did we come to hold these views about the determinant power of mother love over an individual’s emotional development? And what does this vision of mother love entail for children and mothers? In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo examines scientific views about children’s emotional needs and mother love from World War II until the 1970s, paying particular attention to John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. Vicedo tracks the development of Bowlby’s work as well as the interdisciplinary research that he used to support his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s studies of imprinting in geese, Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of children and mothers in Uganda and the United States. Vicedo’s historical analysis reveals that important psychoanalysts and animal researchers opposed the project of turning emotions into biological instincts. Despite those substantial criticisms, she argues that attachment theory was paramount in turning mother love into a biological need. This shift introduced a new justification for the prescriptive role of biology in human affairs and had profound—and negative—consequences for mothers and for the valuation of mother love.

Why We Love

Why We Love PDF Author: Helen Fisher
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466829443
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
A groundbreaking exploration of our most complex and mysterious emotion Elation, mood swings, sleeplessness, and obsession—these are the tell-tale signs of someone in the throes of romantic passion. In this revealing new book, renowned anthropologist Helen Fisher explains why this experience—which cuts across time, geography, and gender—is a force as powerful as the need for food or sleep. Why We Love begins by presenting the results of a scientific study in which Fisher scanned the brains of people who had just fallen madly in love. She proves, at last, what researchers had only suspected: when you fall in love, primordial areas of the brain "light up" with increased blood flow, creating romantic passion. Fisher uses this new research to show exactly what you experience when you fall in love, why you choose one person rather than another, and how romantic love affects your sex drive and your feelings of attachment to a partner. She argues that all animals feel romantic attraction, that love at first sight comes out of nature, and that human romance evolved for crucial reasons of survival. Lastly, she offers concrete suggestions on how to control this ancient passion, and she optimistically explores the future of romantic love in our chaotic modern world. Provocative, enlightening, and persuasive, Why We Love offers radical new answers to the age-old question of what love is and thus provides invaluable new insights into keeping love alive.

The Nature of Love, Volume 1

The Nature of Love, Volume 1 PDF Author: Irving Singer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262258463
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
An analysis of concepts of bestowal, appraisal, imagination, and idealization followed by explorations into the writings of thinkers that include Plato, Ovid, and Martin Luther. Irving Singer's trilogy The Nature of Love has been called "majestic" (New York Times Book Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking [that] is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the first volume, Singer begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization. He then examines the contrasting views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ovid, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. After having described the nature of erotic idealization, Singer analyzes the religious idealization in Judeo-Christian concepts of eros, philia, nomos, and agape. Medieval Catholicism sought to combine these four ideas of love in the "caritas synthesis." Luther repudiated that attempt on the grounds that love exists only in God's agapastic bestowal of unlimited goodness upon humanity and all of nature. In relation to the different modes of theorizing, Singer explores the humanistic implications of each.

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love PDF Author: Marcus Nordlund
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124238
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.

The Nature of Love

The Nature of Love PDF Author: Laura Coe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578929064
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
There are two realities. The reality of living our soul's calling, and the reality of being human. Being human is hard, filled with ego, trivial problems, and plagued by emotional and cultural ideas that lead us astray from our eternal selves.??Living our soul's calling makes us feel alive, fully ourselves, and gives us the ability to heal, to grow, and to be who we were meant to be.??The Nature of Series is written from the Akashic Records-an energetic space that holds our soul's histories-and is designed to help us navigate the realities of being human, all while getting us back to what our soul is meant to be doing in this life.??Each book in this series sheds light on a topic that-when we get in right relation to it-changes the trajectory of our lives. Before, it was hard to understand. But now, with the Records, we can.??This book is about love.

Love and Its Place in Nature

Love and Its Place in Nature PDF Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300074673
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
"Jonathan Lear has shown us both Freud`s texts and his subject matter from a new angle of vision, one that renders much recent controversy about psychoanalytic theory irrelevant. For any student of those texts this book is indispensable."--Alasdair MacIntyre "Lear makes one understand how psychoanalysis works not only on the therapist`s couch but also as a condition of being alive. . . . Love and Its Place in Nature not only offers a form of spiritual nutriment for the self, it also defines that self with a clear profundity that few readers will have encountered before."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times "A brief and engaging philosophical perspective on Freudian psychoanalysis. The book is simply written, but important themes are profoundly investigated. . . . An important philosophic reading of Freud."--Don Browning, Christian Century In this brilliant book, Jonathan Lear argues that Freud posits love as a basic force in nature, one that makes individuation--the condition for psychological health and development--possible. Love is active not just in the development of the individual but also in individual analysis and indeed in the development of psychoanalysis itself, says Lear. Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human.

The Nature of Love, Volume 3

The Nature of Love, Volume 3 PDF Author: Irving Singer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262265230
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
The final volume of Singer's trilogy discusses ideas about love in the work of writers ranging from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy to Freud, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Shaw, and others in the contemporary world. Irving Singer's trilogy The Nature of Love has been called "majestic" (New York Times Book Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking [that] is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the third volume, Singer examines the pervasive dialectic between optimistic idealism and pessimistic realism in modern thinking about the nature of love. He begins by discussing "anti-Romantic Romantics" (focusing on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy), influential nineteenth-century thinkers whose views illustrate much of the ambiguity and self-contradiction that permeate thinking about love in the last hundred years. He offers detailed studies of Freud, Proust, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Santayana, and he maps the ideas about love in Continental existentialism, particularly those of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Singer finally envisages a future of cooperation between pluralistic humanists and empirical scientists. This last volume of Singer's trilogy does not pretend to offer the final word on the subject, any more than do most of the philosophers he discusses, but his masterful work can take its place beside their earlier investigations into these vast and complex questions.

The Home Place

The Home Place PDF Author: J. Drew Lanham
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571318755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

The Nature of Self-Love

The Nature of Self-Love PDF Author: Laura Coe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737369905
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
There are two realities. The reality of living our soul's calling, and the reality of being human.??Being human is hard, filled with ego, trivial problems, and plagued by emotional and cultural ideas that lead us astray from our eternal selves.??Living our soul's calling makes us feel alive, fully ourselves, and gives us the ability to heal, to grow, and to be who we were meant to be.??The Nature of Series is written from the Akashic Records-an energetic space that holds our soul's histories-and is designed to help us navigate the realities of being human, all while getting us back to what our soul is meant to be doing in this life.??Each book in this series sheds light on a topic that-when we get in right relation to it-changes the trajectory of our lives. Before, it was hard to understand. But now, with the Records, we can.??This book is about self-love.