Dr. Reuven Bar-Levav
Thinking in the Shadow of Feelings
In this wide-ranging, powerful book, Dr. Reuven Bar-Levav sheds new light on the tangled relationship between our hearts and our minds. Drawing on years of clinical experience, he shows how irrational fears of being abandoned or engulfed keep us from enjoying life and how they actually cripple people. But he also offers new hope, an altogether new way to eliminate fear that enables us to think clearly and to manage our lives successfully by reason and logic. Love, hate, anger, hurt, happiness, and sadness are all vividly explained, as are the conditions that allow us to experience them safely. Here is a challenging yet compassionate view of our new options for attaining a better life, free from disabling hopelessness, loneliness, and despair.
Moving from the individual to the larger society, Thinking in the Shadow of Feelings exposes the hidden sedative effects of affluence and security and boldly draws a parallel between the dilemmas of interpersonal relationships and the complexities of international politics. Dr. Bar-Levav courageously and clearly shows how we can secure liberty against the threat of barbarism, thus ensuring the safety and survival of our civilization.
"A hard-hitting, always fascinating look at how fear can impede freedom and justice."
-- American Library Association Booklist
"This is a work of major importance. It concerns general psychological problems affecting the lives and happiness of citizens of Western civilization and ultimately the existence of the countries that form it. Dr. Bar-Levav deals with these problems with that unusual balance of clarity, toughness, and compassion that characterizes though freed from the tyranny of feelings. This is the work of a wise and humane man who never loses sight of reality. Dr. Bar-Levav is one of the most powerful originators in the field of psychotherapy and in the wider application of its discoveries. The world desperately needs what he has to offer."
-- Charles R. Kelley, Ph.D., author of Education in Feeling and Purpose, Founder, Radix Education
"I have read Reuven Bar-Levav's mind-broadening Thinking in the Shadow of Feelings with great interest. It illuminates, in an original manner, many of the burning issues today, both on the level of international politics and in the realm of interpersonal relations. In my opinion, he makes a significant contribution to recognizing the need for recourse to reason and logic in planning the actions of people and states. This approach may well help us to overcome the internal and external dangers threatening us, both on the interpersonal and international levels."
-- Shimon Peres, Vice Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Israel
"An experienced psychiatrist describes his understanding of human dilemmas. He illustrates from his own wide experience. He describes the process of therapeutic change and the desirable values that are learned and accepted. He gives careful consideration to the serious issues involved in making decisions in an overwhelming, complex social situation. The problems of evolution to a free society are clarified. In short, a fine human being tells us the problems of attaining the goal of a life of high quality."
-- Hyman Spotnitz, M.D., author of The Wandering Husband and the Couch and the Circle
"Although this book is largely about human fears and uncertainties, it is an optimistic and reassuring book. It makes a strong case, not against fear, which is inescapable, but against fear of fear, a phrase made famous by Franklin Roosevelt. And although the author sets man, in the order of beings, not just a little less than angels but as significantly lower, on the other hand he sets human beings well above what Freud allows."
-- Senator Eugene J. McCarthy