This book should help readers who have experienced a childhood deprived of parental acceptance break their approval-seeking...
An author offers a theory springing from her study of her psychologically neglected childhood and its lifetime of consequences.
The term “enmeshment” is used to describe a dysfunctional relationship with permeable and unclear boundaries that may lead to a damaging lack of autonomy. This is exactly what Vogels (A Guided Journal to a Healthy Sense of Self, 2014, etc.) experienced as a child with a mother who withheld love and only granted approval with self-centered conditions. As the author grew, she began to realize this and how it contributed to her extreme anxiety and stress. She spent so much of her life, including her adult years, chasing potential parental approval that she never developed her own sense of self-worth. After studying herself for years, she has now composed her conclusions in this book as “The Sense of Self Theory & Method,” intended particularly for those who suffered similar circumstances. Early on, she emphasizes the crucial role of the primary caregiver (“A Sense of Self is something that either develops or does not. That process depends mainly on the nature of the input from the primary caregiver….The people who are with the child from birth on are the ones who make the greatest impression on the individual”). Though not a licensed psychologist, the author certainly thinks and writes like one, and this volume is replete with definitions of terms and supporting examples. Vogels’ “Sense of Self Theory” is incredibly well-articulated with insights that should resonate with those who endured difficult childhoods that led to thorny adult paths. The author also encourages new parents to center their children in their lives with an atmosphere of unconditional love. Unfortunately, the remainder of the work, namely the effects of lacking a sense of self and Vogels’ recovery suggestions, loses some of the magic from the first section and includes some redundancies. Furthermore, it is likely that only those readers who fit the same mold as the author will find these parts especially useful. That said, Vogels’ organization of the manual and her meticulous assessments are superb. Though her theory may still need perfecting, the concepts she writes about are vital and should be seriously explored in the world of psychology and human development.
This book should help readers who have experienced a childhood deprived of parental acceptance break their approval-seeking habits and discover who they truly are.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9887226-2-0
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Healthy Sense of Self Publications
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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