Wisdom from the Couch. Jennifer Kunst

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FOREWORD

      IN THIS IMPRESSIVE BOOK FOR the general reader, Jennifer Kunst finds wisdom not only from her training and practice as a psychoanalyst, but also from her experience of everyday life, from films and children’s books, and from her religious training and experience.

      Dr. Kunst spreads her net widely, but her aim is traditional. She sets great store by truth, and by growth and development, and her heart is set on finding peace. As she expresses it, “Peace in the world, peace with your enemies, peace in your families, and peace within yourself. Peace is perhaps the most valuable thing in all of life.”

      Having this goal does not mean that Dr. Kunst ignores the problems that arise along the way, nor does she ignore the horror and violence that we see around us when we read the news or watch TV accounts of wars, terrorist attacks, and counterattacks.

      She searches for “a bigger life and a bigger God out there.” In the past she has worked with criminally insane patients and has encountered “people from other races and cultures, poverty, violence, addiction, crime, severe mental illness, and a host of other contexts so far from my own.” All this has broadened and deepened her understanding, so that she is far from an armchair theoretician.

      Perhaps most important is her awareness that any belief system can be turned into a fundamentalist creed, whether religious, political, philosophical, or psychoanalytic. In this respect she recognizes how difficult it is to live in the real world with its pain, disappointment, and imperfection, and how tempting it is to turn to a belief in our own omnipotence—a concept that Melanie Klein found to be so central to the human condition. Dr. Kunst suggests that omnipotence commonly involves three related beliefs: a belief in magic, a belief that we can be perfect, and a belief that we will live forever.

      It is Jennifer Kunst’s experience as a young psychoanalyst that allows her to deepen her understanding of the human predicament. Not content with the isolation of the clinical situation, she applies the knowledge acquired there to the tasks of everyday life. In doing so, she allows readers to reflect on the psychoanalytic dynamics that might be at play in their own lives.

      This sensitive and passionate book will interest a wide range of readers, and particularly those who wish to look beneath the surface of beliefs, dogmas, and ideologies. It is so easy to look for magical solutions from an omnipotent deity or an omnipotent ideological system, and in this way to partake of the omnipotence. If we take this route, we come to believe that only our thinking is right and we react with prejudice to other beliefs.

      Perhaps the most potent counter to prejudice is knowledge, and Jennifer Kunst has made a valiant attempt to integrate various sources of knowledge and bring them to bear on the contemporary problems of everyday living.

       —John Steiner, MD, Training and Supervising Analyst at the British Psychoanalytic Institute; Author, PSYCHIC RETREATS and SEEING AND BEING SEEN: EMERGING FROM A PSYCHIC RETREAT