Dear Friends,Self & Society is the voice of the Association of Humanistic Psychology (AHP), It offers its global readership broad-ranging, challenging and provocative articles, poems and book revie...
The author sets out to explore the topic of eldership as an existential possibility for older adults. By drawing on the personal experience of being accompanied by an elder, the article explores the literature on the concept of eldership, the principles which underpin the role and its potential for orientating individuals in the later stage of life. The author offers eldership as an opportunity through which older adults might continue to be active agents in the nourishing of self and communities. Finally, the article invites readers to consider the possibilities for encouraging eldership in their own professional and personal contexts.
Heralded as a time of economic prosperity, the post-World War II period in America also experienced extraordinary religious awakenings of born-again evangelicalism, Prosperity Gospels, and an apocalyptic flare rendered palpable by atomic bombs and the Cold War. Postwar Christianity found itself reinforcing neoliberalism, sanctifying standardizations accompanying technological routinization, economic progress, and consumption-based lifestyles, resulting in alienating crises of spirit and culture. Amidst uncertainty and conformity, psychedelics offered sacramental means for bypassing postwar society's mechanisms by uncovering expressions of mutuality and compassion. Outlined within Alan Watts' work, psychedelics unveiled Buddhist wisdom, detailing existence not as a function of difference, but as an expression of absolute interconnection. Neither doctrinaire nor authoritarian, Watts' psychedelic engagement with Buddhism invites us to investigate beyond differences, toward moments in which the subjective self becomes an unselfish expression of the absolute 'other'.
This is the second of two Self & Society symposia celebrating Alan Watts’ (1915–1973) life and work. That the first symposium, published in December 2015, was not enough serves as testament to Watt...
How do we come to feel so separate from the world we know? What is the interrelationship between what we know and our mental setting at the time of knowing? Self is presented here as an opening that allows experience. This opening enables many aperture settings through which the light of awareness shapes and illuminates all that we know. With self as a variable opening, there is no 'thing' to protect, maintain, and perpetuate. Increased degrees of freedom and ease can be attained as an ever-present, knowing awareness is recognized as our true identity, thus liberating us from a fixed position and point of view.
Ageism largely remains a socially tolerated form of discrimination. From birthday cards to anti-ageing advertisements and comedy sketches, stereotypical ideas about older people and the ageing process abound. While generally trivialized in mainstream culture, this article argues that ageism is, in fact, a serious matter. Drawing from a growing evidence base, the article highlights the significant and largely detrimental impact that ageist stereotypes have on people's outcomes in later life. It then goes on to analyse some of the possible mechanisms through which stereotypes generate this effect, and finally concludes with a brief outline of some of the psychosocial interventions that might enable older people to weaken or neutralize the toxic effects of internalized negative self-perceptions of ageing. Note: the structural and power relationship dimensions of ageism, while hugely important, are not considered within this article as its focus is on the psychological and emotional dimensions and their impact on personal health and well-being outcomes, an aspect of ageist stereotyping that is seldom discussed.
Professor of Social Work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William Epstein has for the last 40 years pursued a meticulous and cumulatively hard-hitting critique of the evidence base for socia...
This article looks at work conditions in our current age brought about by materialism. In particular, it looks at the damaging effects of materialistic scientific management principles and the allied condition of illusionism. It shows how the policies of society based on neoliberal managed care principles are not only inadequate for addressing the problem but actually exacerbate it since they adopt the self-same materialistic principles. In contrast, it argues for a psychotherapeutic response based on the principles of anthroposophic psychotherapy and other similarly socially and politically aware therapies such as intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis.
This issue has the theme of ageing, and therefore the thrust of this column will be about the experience of our older generation. First though, a little context. In January, the government was told...
You wonder sometimeshow we survive –our shortness of breathribs that achelike trains stuck in tunnelsno airyou ponder on our sanityour non-sequitur linesescaping across family reunionsfields of pai...
"Cash not care: the planned demolition of the UK welfare state." Self & Society, 45(3-4), pp. 336–337
