Sublime

In a society where the family, church, and community are not the support structures they once were, people look to their colleagues for the emotional support a family once provided. This lack of boundaries between the personal and work life is fraught with all sorts of difficulties.

In 1998, Dr. Martin Seligman, incoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA), had challenged the field of psychology to broaden its focus to study and implement interventions that went beyond human problems and pathology to include the study of human strengths and well-being—basically, what’s going right.2 He thus initiated posi

The psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg wrote, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them.

“If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network—about your friends and family, and the strength of your bonds with them.”

Therapists who are trained to see people as complex human beings with multiple characteristics and potentialities can help them explore their system of inner parts and take care of the wounded facets of themselves.

Purpose in a person’s life reduces the risk and effects of illnesses, including heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s, depression, addiction, suicide, and anxiety.

But it isn’t as though depression completely has no source. Rather, Ehrenberg argues that its source is late modernity’s demand to create and continue to curate your own self. This task is taxing and deeply fatiguing. The speed of late modernity, its frantic pace of life imposed on us by the blitzing social and technological change since the 1970s,