Healing

The Defining Root of Our Existence

De: Morris Berman

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In Healing, Morris Berman seeks to explore a condition that has become a national, if not international, disease: almost all of us believe, on a deep level, that we are not OK. As one therapist puts it, we experience our lives through a lens of personal insufficiency, a “trance of unworthiness,” a “noose of self-hatred.” The eminent body worker, Alexander Lowen, summarizes this by saying that the hidden slogan of our lives is “Grim and bear it.”

Healing is a synthesis of Berman’s review of some of the great healers—Donald Winnicott, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, and F.M. Alexander—with his own experience of healing practices. All of these individuals point to the core factor in our deep dissatisfaction with ourselves and our lives: we are living out scripts, or narratives, that don’t correspond to who we really are. We don’t live in the present; rather, we spend our lives in a fog of unknowing. The solution to this, according to the author, is to reach into the body, to get down to the defining root of our existence, and recover the self that we lost along the way. This is not, he says, an easy path; most of us have no interest in doing it. But there are a few who will embrace the challenge, understanding, to quote trauma therapist Bessel van der Kolk, that “The road of recovery is the road of life.”

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written nineteen books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, and Mexico. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.