I AM-NESS: The Road to the Discovery of the Self Beyond the Ego

by Ian & William Nicholls Kent ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1972

A vaguely bizarre mishmash of neo-Freudian psychiatry, Encounter, existential psychology, Hatha Yoga, the Judeo-Christian heritage and all of its interpreters, plus paranoia at the political scene, that attempts to find an eclectic method for approaching the inner self. While the authors have sympathy toward revolutionaries, homosexuals, drug users, atheists, and hippies, whose acts they consider ""symptoms"" of rebellion against a conventionalized and hypocritical society (actually, with typical Freudian complacency, one's parents), they consider these false paths that actually make meditation (and the subsequent goal of self-awareness) more difficult to attain. Their eclecticism is either so broad as to become meaningless or self-evident, the differentiation between their system and the others from which they borrow (but nevertheless put down) is never made clear, and the constant didactic repetition and re-explanation of the necessity to pass beyond the mind into the self is in the exact opposite spirit of what they are presumably trying to achieve. Equally disturbing is the authors' rather cavalier dismissal of the sociological explanation of societal and individual ills (which focuses on changing society) and their preference for the financially elitist and politically reactionary Freudian analysis vs. other kinds of therapy. The book is full of ""I-Thous"" and other unpleasant methodological ""isms.

Pub Date: March 1, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION