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Adult Supervision Required
Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children
Rutherford, Markella B
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Adult Supervision Required considers the contradictory ways in which contemporary American culture has imagined individual autonomy for parents and children. In many ways, today’s parents and children have more freedom than ever before. There is widespread respect for children’s autonomy as distinct individuals, and a broad range of parenting styles are flourishing. Yet it may also be fair to say that there is an unprecedented fear of children’s and parents’ freedom. Dread about Amber Alerts and “stranger danger” have put an end to the unsupervised outdoor play enjoyed by earlier generations of suburban kids. Similarly, fear of bad parenting has not only given rise to a cottage industry of advice books for anxious parents, but has also granted state agencies greater power to police the family.

Using popular parenting advice literature as a springboard for a broader sociological analysis of the American family, Markella B. Rutherford explores how our increasingly psychological conception of the family might be jeopardizing our appreciation for parents’ and children’s public lives and civil liberties.

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Alandra's Lilacs
The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter
Tressa Bowers
Gallaudet University Press, 1999

When, in 1968, 19-year-old Tressa Bowers took her baby daughter to an expert on deaf children, he pronounced that Alandra was “stone deaf,” she most likely would never be able to talk, and she probably would not get much of an education because of her communication limitations. Tressa refused to accept this stark assessment of Alandra’s prospects. Instead, she began the arduous process of starting her daughter’s education.

Economic need forced Tressa to move several times, and as a result, she and Alandra experienced a variety of learning environments: a pure oralist approach, which discouraged signing; Total Communication, in which the teachers spoke and signed simultaneously; a residential school for deaf children, where Signed English was employed; and a mainstream public school that relied upon interpreters. Changes at home added more demands, from Tressa’s divorce to her remarriage, her long work hours, and the ongoing challenge of complete communication within their family. Through it all, Tressa and Alandra never lost sight of their love for each other, and their affection rippled through the entire family. Today, Tressa can triumphantly point to her confident, educated daughter and also speak with pride of her wonderful relationship with her deaf grandchildren. Alandra’s Lilacs is a marvelous story about the resiliency and achievements of determined, loving people no matter what their circumstances might be.

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Birth
A Literary Companion
Kristin & Lynne Kovacic & Barrett
University of Iowa Press, 2002
 Parenthood is full of secrets. The pregnant body, labor, the mysteries of a new child, the transformation of relationships—men and women are themselves reborn as they become parents. Birth: A Literary Companion collects the work of fifty accomplished writers to guide new parents through this complex emotional terrain.
Arranged chronologically—from early pregnancy to late infancy— Birth can be read solidly or dipped into in the middle of the night. Here, a curious reader can find a frank, funny essay about breastfeeding, a vividly accurate story about labor, or a tender poem about the terror of holding a newborn child. Birth covers the huge emotional spectrum that new parents pass through—from fear and loathing to uncontainable joy. Embracing all kinds of parents—gay and straight, mothers and fathers, married and single, adoptive and biological—the book unlocks, through literature, the secrets of parenthood that science and society rarely reveal.
An enduring guide to the emotional and spiritual changes of parenthood, Birth will be an important addition to both parenting and literature bookshelves.
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Boundaries of Touch
Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy
Jean O'Malley Halley
University of Illinois Press, 2006
A history of the shifting and conflicting ideas about when, where, and how we should touch our children

Discussing issues of parent-child contact ranging from breastfeeding to sexual abuse, Jean O'Malley Halley traces the evolution of mainstream ideas about touching between adults and children over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. Debates over when a child should be weaned and whether to allow a child to sleep in the parent's bed reveal deep differences in conceptions of appropriate adult-child contact.

Boundaries of Touch shows how arguments about adult-child touch have been politicized, simplified, and bifurcated into "naturalist" and "behaviorist" viewpoints, thereby sharpening certain binary constructions such as mind/body and male/female. Halley discusses the gendering of ideas about touch that were advanced by influential social scientists and parenting experts including Benjamin Spock, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Luther Emmett Holt. She also explores how touch ideology fared within and against the post-World War II feminist movements, especially with respect to issues of breastfeeding and sleeping with a child versus using a crib.

In addition to contemporary periodicals and self-help books on child rearing, Halley uses information gathered from interviews she conducted with mothers ranging in age from twenty-eight to seventy-three. Throughout, she reveals how the parent-child relationship, far from being a private or benign subject, continues as a highly contested, politicized affair of keen public interest.

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Children as Treasures
Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan
Mark Jones
Harvard University Press, 2010

Mark Jones examines the making of a new child’s world in Japan between 1890 and 1930 and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. Family reformers, scientific child experts, magazine editors, well-educated mothers, and other prewar urban elites constructed a model of childhood—having one’s own room, devoting time to homework, reading children’s literature, playing with toys—that ultimately became the norm for young Japanese in subsequent decades.

This book also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context—the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan. The ideal of making the child into a “superior student” (yutosei) appealed to the family seeking upward mobility and to the nation-state that needed disciplined, educated workers able to further Japan’s capitalist and imperialist growth. This view of the middle class as a child-centered, educationally obsessed, socially aspiring stratum survived World War II and prospered into the years beyond.

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From Parents to Children
The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage
John Ermisch
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
Does economic inequality in one generation lead to inequality of opportunity in the next? In From Parents to Children, an esteemed international group of scholars investigates this question using data from ten countries with differing levels of inequality. The book compares whether and how parents' resources transmit advantage to their children at different stages of development and sheds light on the structural differences among countries that may influence intergenerational mobility. How and why is economic mobility higher in some countries than in others? The contributors find that inequality in mobility-relevant skills emerges early in childhood in all of the countries studied. Bruce Bradbury and his coauthors focus on learning readiness among young children and show that as early as age five, large disparities in cognitive and other mobility-relevant skills develop between low- and high-income kids, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Such disparities may be mitigated by investments in early childhood education, as Christelle Dumas and Arnaud Lefranc demonstrate. They find that universal pre-school education in France lessens the negative effect of low parental SES and gives low-income children a greater shot at social mobility. Katherine Magnuson, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook find that income-based gaps in cognitive achievement in the United States and the United Kingdom widen as children reach adolescence. Robert Haveman and his coauthors show that the effect of parental income on test scores increases as children age; and in both the United States and Canada, having parents with a higher income betters the chances that a child will enroll in college. As economic inequality in the United States continues to rise, the national policy conversation will not only need to address the devastating effects of rising inequality in this generation but also the potential consequences of the decline in mobility from one generation to the next. Drawing on unparalleled international datasets, From Parents to Children provides an important first step.
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A Generation at Risk
Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval
Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth
Harvard University Press, 1997

Just what do we know about the current generation of young Americans? So little it seems that we have dubbed them Generation X. Coming of age in the 1980s and '90s, they hail from families in flux, from an intimate landscape changing faster and more profoundly than ever before. This book is the first to give us a clear, close-up picture of these young Americans and to show how they have been affected and formed by the tremendous domestic changes of the last three decades.

How have members of this generation fared at school and at work, as they have moved into the world and formed families of their own? Do their struggles or successes reflect the turbulence of their time? These are the questions A Generation at Risk answers in comprehensive detail. Based on a unique fifteen-year study begun in 1980, the book considers parents' socioeconomic resources, their gender roles and relations, and the quality and stability of their marriages. It then examines children's relations with their parents, their intimate and broader social affiliations, and their psychological well-being. The authors provide rare insight into how both familial and historical contexts affect young people as they make the transition to adulthood.

Perhaps surprising is the authors' finding that, in this era of shifting gender roles, children who grow up in traditional father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker families and those in more egalitarian, role-sharing families apparently turn out the same. Also striking are the beneficial influence of parental education on children and the troubling long-term impact of marital conflict and divorce--an outcome that prompts the authors to suggest policy measures that encourage marital quality and stability.

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Go Play Outside!
Tips, Tricks, and Tales from the Trails
Nancy Fresco
University of Alaska Press, 2021
Having children doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy every season in the great outdoors—even if you happen to live in the middle of Alaska. Whether you’re biking eighty miles into the heart of Denali National Park, cross-country skiing to a remote cabin, or merely enjoying the mud on the banks of the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks, fun for all ages abounds, with a little preparation and the right mindset. Using a deft mixture of storytelling and practical pointers, this guidebook offers advice and encouragement to families—those who live in Alaska, as well as those in less extreme climates and locales.
 
Organized by the age of the young adventures, from days-old infants to independent teens, each section invites readers to learn from the humorous real-life adventures and misadventures of the author, her husband, and their twin girls. Weaving in the kids’ advice in their own words, this guide covers challenges ranging from unexpected hailstorms to very-much-expected mosquitoes. Tips include everything from how to avoid moose, to how to get out in the rain, to the benefits of setting big kids free to explore. This family’s enthusiastic, joyful, and often hilarious tales offer the impetus and the tools to encourage new parents—or more experienced parents, or anyone who loves kids —to go play outside.
 
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Growing Each Other Up
When Our Children Become Our Teachers
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
University of Chicago Press, 2016
From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. “Growing up”, then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring—voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle—are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them.
 
With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize–winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies’ rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn—often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance—from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children—an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance.
 
Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.
 
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Horizon Note
Robin Behn
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

A son is born too early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life’s other horizon. In language dense and clear, playful and somber, and with a formal exactitude and emotional amplitude suggestive of her own musical training, Behn traverses these horizons “extracting,” like the horizon note that drones through traditional Indian music, “a red needle from the sky.”

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Human Attachment
Virginia Colin
Temple University Press, 1996

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Inappropriation
The Contested Legacy of Y-Indian Guides
Paul Hillmer
University of Missouri Press, 2023
In 1926, Harold Keltner, a YMCA Boys Work secretary from St. Louis, and Joe Friday, a member of the Canadian Ojibwe First Peoples, channeled white middle-class fascination with Native Americans into what became the Y-Indian Guides youth pro­gram, engaging over a half million participants across the nation at the height of its 77-year history. Intended to soften the stereo­typical stern father, the program traced a complicated thread of American history, touching upon themes of family, race, class, and privilege.

The Y-Indian Guides was a father-son (and later parent-child) program that encouraged real and enduring bonds through play and an authentic appreciation of family. While “playing Indian” seemed harmless to most participants during the pro­gram’s heyday, Paul Hillmer and Ryan Bean demonstrate the problematic nature of its methods. In the process of seeking to admire and emulate Indigenous Peoples, Y-Indian Guide participants often misrepresented American Indians and reinforced harmful ste­reotypes. Ultimately, this history demonstrates many ways in which American culture undermines and harms its Indigenous communities.

 
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Kid-Friendly Parenting with Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children
Daria Medwid
Gallaudet University Press, 1995

For the parents of thousands of deaf and hard of hearing children, this step-by-step guide offers hundreds of ideas and methods that work with children ages 3 to 12. It provides scores of play activities to help parents enhance communication, solve problems, and strengthen relationships in skillful, fun ways. Also, parenting techniques are concisely presented to help parents set limits while avoiding power struggles and help foster positive behavior changes. In addition, this manual provides information about special resources and support services.

       At each chapter’s beginning, experts (some deaf, some hearing), including I. King Jordan, Jack Gannon, Merv Garretson, and others, offer their insights on the subject discussed. Designed for parents with various styles, Kid-Friendly Parenting is a complete, step-by-step guide and reference to raising a deaf or hard of hearing child.

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Legacy of a False Promise
A Daughter's Reckoning
Margaret Fuchs Singer
University of Alabama Press, 2009
The compelling story of a teenage girl caught up in the throes of the McCarthy era.

Margaret Fuchs was thirteen in June 1955 when she learned that her parents had been Communists while working for the U.S. government in the 1930s and '40s. This book chronicles the years during which her parents were exposed and her father was subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eventually he named names, and subsequently lost his job as a law professor at American University, and was blacklisted from teaching ever again. Legacy of a False Promise also details the author's quest as an adult to learn whether or not her parents ever spied for the Soviet Union.

Based on eight years of research using family records, FBI files, American University archives, personal interviews, and the recently declassified Venona cables, Legacy of a False Promise offers unique insights into the McCarthy Era. Most "red-diaper babies" who have written on the subject had parents who refused to give in to HUAC's demands. Singer's work instead recounts the shame and series of betrayals that her father's decision to name names brought to her family. Furthermore, it explores the campaign of the liberal anti-Communist movement to publicize its political position while defending a fired ex-Communist professor, the nature and activities of secret Communist underground cells, and the motivation of New Deal government workers who spied for the Soviets.

This is a poignant meditation on family secrets, father-daughter relationships in times of crisis, teenage loneliness in the midst of trauma, and the effects of parents' actions on the lives of their children. It also serves as a timely reminder of the dangers of sacrificing civil liberties in the name of national security.



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Making Grateful Kids
The Science of Building Character
Jeffrey Froh
Templeton Press, 2014

If there was a new wonder drug on the market that got kids to behave better, improve their grades, feel happier, and avoid risky behaviors, many parents around the world would be willing to empty their bank accounts to acquire it. Amazingly, such a product actually does exist. It’s not regulated by the FDA, it has no ill side-effects, and it’s absolutely free and avail­able to anyone at any time. This miracle cure is gratitude.

Over the past decade, science has shown that gratitude is one of the most valuable and important emotions we possess, and it is a virtue that anyone can cultivate. In fact, researchers have developed many different methods people can use to foster an attitude of gratitude, and the science shows that many of them really work.

In Making Grateful Kids, two of the leading authorities on gratitude among young people, Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono, introduce their latest and most compelling research, announce groundbreaking findings, and share real-life stories from adults and youth to show parents, teachers, mentors, and kids themselves how to achieve greater life satisfaction through gratitude. Most importantly perhaps, they expand on this groundbreaking research to offer practical and effec­tive common-sense plans that can be used in day-to-day interactions between kids and adults to enhance success and wellbeing.

Their unique, scientifically-based approach for producing grateful youth works whether these kids are very young ele­mentary school students or troubled teenagers. Not only does the purposeful practice of gratitude increase their happiness, but the research indicates that grateful kids also report more self-discipline, fulfilling relationships, and engagement with their schools and communities when compared to their less grateful counterparts. After reading Making Grateful Kids, parents, teachers, and anyone who works with youth will be able to connect more mean­ingfully with kids so that all parties can focus on the things that matter most and, in turn, create a more cooperative and thriving society.


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Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality
Casey B. Mulligan
University of Chicago Press, 1997
What determines whether children grow up to be rich or poor? Arguing that parental actions are some of the most important sources of wealth inequality, Casey B. Mulligan investigates the transmission of economic status from one generation to the next by constructing an economic model of parental preferences.

In Mulligan's model, parents determine the degree of their altruistic concern for their children and spend time with and resources on them accordingly—just as they might make choices about how they spend money. Mulligan tests his model against both old and new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of consumption, earnings, and wealth, including models that emphasize "financial constraints." One major prediction of Mulligan's model confirmed by the evidence is that children of wealthy parents typically spend more than they earn.

Mulligan's innovative approach can also help explain other important behavior, such as charitable giving and "corporate loyalty," and will appeal to a wide range of quantitatively oriented social scientists and sociobiologists.
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Parenthood In America
Undervalued, Underpaid, Under Siege
Jack C. Westman, M.D.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
Our society is engaged in heated debates about family values, child care, education, and the future of children. Largely missing from these debates is any serious discussion of the complex vocation we call "parenthood." This book recognizes parenthood as a lifelong process in which parents and children grow together. The distinguished contributors call for families, employers, communities, government, and society to give parents real help with their day-to-day concerns and challenges.
    Parenthood in America brings the insights of experts in child development, education, health, media studies, economics, history, sociology, and human services to bear on practical aspects of childrearing and on the kinds of policies that have a real effect on parenting. In response to the stresses of parenthood today, they call for:
o family-friendly workplaces and decent childcare options
o pediatric health care for all
o programs that aid children’s development as well as their physical health
o recognition by professionals of parents’ expert knowledge about their own children
o alternatives to vapid or violent games and TV programs
o prioritization of time for family meals, talks, chores, and activities
o valuing of caring relationships above wealth and possessions
o appreciation of cultural and religious diversity
o supportive networks among parents, teachers, pediatricians, and childcare providers.
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Parents and Peers in Social Development
A Sullivan-Piaget Perspective
James Youniss
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Most studies of social development in children have relied on the assumption that adults' instructions to children pass on knowledge of the rules of behavior which govern and preserve society. In this volume, James Youniss argues that the child's relations with his or her friends and peers make a distinctive and critically important contribution to social development. While the child's relations with parents and other adults provide a sense of order and authority, peer relations are a source of sensitivity, self-understanding, and interpersonal cooperation.

Following a discussion of the views of Harry Stack Sullivan and Jean Piaget, whose theories are synthesized in Youniss's perspective, Youniss presents a wealth of empirical data from studies in which children describe their own views of their two social worlds.
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Siblings
Love, Envy, and Understanding
Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick
Harvard University Press, 1982

The birth of a younger sibling can be a traumatic event for the older child. Unquestionably it places increased demands on parents and causes important changes in the inner balance of the family. Childrearing manuals are full of advice about how to get through this difficult time. But until now such advice has been based more on clinical guesswork than on direct observation of what really happens to families when a sibling is born.

With the arrival of Siblings, this gap in our knowledge is admirably filled. Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick studied forty families for a period of approximately one year starting shortly before the birth of a second child. Some families, they found, weather the storm much better than others, and their book examines the full catalog of factors that can make the difference. There are, for instance, parenting styles that ease the impact on the older child, improve relations between siblings, and generally make life easier for the entire family. But there are also differences among children in such characteristics as sex, age, and temperament, all of which have a major influence totally beyond parental control.

Despite the undeniable stress involved, Dunn and Kendrick demonstrate that the advent of a sibling can be a stimulus for real cognitive and emotional growth on the part of the older child. No longer "the baby," the child must try to deal with a newcomer whose attempts to communicate are necessarily rudimentary. Siblings shows how the elder child's efforts to understand the baby can form the basis for a loving bond of extraordinary durability.

A sensitive and informative book, Siblings takes psychology into an area of family life and child development that has long received too little attention.

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Thundering Sneakers
By Prudence Mackintosh
University of Texas Press, 2002
Thundering Sneakers begins the story of the Mackintosh boys. In these essays, Prudence Mackintosh describes the delights and terrors of living with little boys who are determined to be boys, despite the carefully nonsexist childrearing practices of the 1970s. With telling vignettes of boyish disasters that drive her to despair, as well as the rare quiet moments of hugs and confidences that make it all worthwhile, she perfectly captures the early years when a young mother still looks for "the real mother" to come and bail her out.
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WHEN KIDS GO TO COLLEGE
A PARENTS GUIDE TO CHANGING RELATIONSHIP
BARBARA & PHILIP R. NEWMAN & NEWMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 1992

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Why I Left the Amish
A Memoir
Saloma Miller Furlong
Michigan State University Press, 2011

There are two ways to leave the Amish—one is through life and the other through death. When Saloma Miller Furlong’s father dies during her first semester at Smith College, she returns to the Amish community she had left twenty four years earlier to attend his funeral. Her journey home prompts a flood of memories. Now a mother with grown children of her own, Furlong recalls her painful childhood in a family defined by her father’s mental illness, her brother’s brutality, her mother’s frustration, and the austere traditions of the Amish—traditions Furlong struggled to accept for years before making the difficult decision to leave the community. In this personal and moving memoir, Furlong traces the genesis of her desire for freedom and education and chronicles her conflicted quest for independence. Eloquently told, Why I Left the Amish is a revealing portrait of life within—and without—this frequently misunderstood community.

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The Wounded Jung
Effects of Jung's Relationships on His Life and Work
Robert C. Smith
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, is widely considered an intuitive genius with a profound understanding of the peculiar spiritual dilemmas of modern man. In this book, Robert C. Smith shows how Jung's interest in the healing of the psyche was rooted in the conflicts of his own childhood.

Smith begins by exploring Jung's formative and transformative life experience, including his relationships with a deeply troubled mother and despairing father, with Sigmund Freud, and with the various women in his life. The relationships to his parents, in particular, have been remarkably unexplored by scholars. Smith then shows how these experiences shaped Jung's thoughts and writing -including his reassessment of religion as inner process - as well as his fascination with gnosticism and alchemy; the attention Jung gives to psychology as myth and the realization of selfhood; and his reinterpretation of evil as a process to be integrated into the proper sphere of human existence.

Smith's findings are based on the unprecedented number of primary sources to which he had access, including archival research, his own interviews with many of Jung's intimates, and personal correspondence with Jung himself, as well as on the synthesis of a wide range of recent scholarship on Jung. The culmination of many years of scholarship and reflection, this book should be read by anyone interested in spiritual healing or the connection between psychology and religion.
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