Finished Mo 9/20/21
This is an ancient hardback (pub. 1976) that I found during the 'book clean-up'. I have few 'self-help' books and I decided to give this one a shot.
Basically, he rails against 'Dependency' that he describes as a false adherence to ideas that are no longer relevent or true. Your 'parents' and 'elders' are in your head far after you become an adult and their ideas or biases form a kind of 'psychological shell' around the personality and prevent it from growing.
A couple of user reviews at Amazon:
"In this short and inspiring book, Deikman seemingly allows his themes to emerge and wander through human emotion and spirituality, our tendency to prefer 'action' to 'receptivity', psychotherapy and meditative practices, and following a learning path. He borrows liberally from the wisdom of others though quotes, and offers a couple of simple practices to help you on your way. I found much to reflect on with every page, and yet Deikman himself describes the 'truths about the human world' that he describes as 'perishable answers' - they carry us just so far, and are not enough. Which is true."
"If you've come to a notion something like, "I think I may have been trained, taught, conditioned, socialized, habituated, accustomed and normalized to believing in all sorts of cultural beliefs, values, ideas, ideals, assumptions, convictions, rules and requirements that don't always square with the way thing really are," Deikman's little gem may be just the ticket out of his buddy, Charlie Tart's "consensus consciousness." (Or, more obtusely, "consensus trance.") Authors like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Eric Hoffer could see the Problem, but few before Tart and Deikman so adequately described the Solution. A solution that has since become -- in somewhat diluted (and more politically correct) form -- the bedrock of the modern mindfulness movement advanced by mass market authors like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron and Eckhardt Tolle... as well as the modern-day giants of psychotherapy like Marsha Linehan, Mark Williams, Stanley Block and Stephen Hayes."
I skimmed through the book in a couple of days. No new ground broken, but not entirely a complete waste of time.
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