Ann Belford Ulanov - Böcker

In this book, Ann Ulanov, an accomplished psychiatrist and scholar, draws on the work of renowned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to suggest fresh methods for effective pastoral care and counseling.

This book grew out of years of reflections on real women's experiences. From them, Ann Ulanov states, "a common voice emerged speaking about each woman's struggle to receive all of herself. Each was trying to find and put together different parts of herself into a whole that was personal, alive, and real to herself and to others." This book focuses on helping women "receive themselves" by rejecting stereotypes and categories and seeking out their own individuality.

Seated in her nest of ashes, Cinderella embodies human misery. The essence of inner and outer nobility, she is the envy of her cruel stepmother and her ugly sisters. Using this familiar story, Ann and Barry Ulanov explore the psychological and theological aspects of envy and goodness. In their interpretation of the tale, they move back and forth between internal and external issues--from how feminine and masculine parts of persons fit or do not fit together to how individuals conduct their lives with those of the same and opposite sexes: how they conflict, compete, or join harmoniously.

In Religion and the Unconscious, Ann and Barry Ulanov provide a thoughtful study of the relationship between religion and depth psychology. An insightful contribution to the entire area of pastoral counseling, this book demonstrates how to combine religion and depth psychology in order to provide more effective counseling.

Prayer is our basic expression of religious belief. It is our personal and most private act of devotion. Words cannot do justice to the feelings, wishes, terrors, pains, or pleasures that we exchange with God. This book sets out to define prayer as both a means of drawing nearer to God everyday and as a coping tool that people can use in order to achieve harmony, balance, and satisfaction in their in their lives.

The Transcendent is a reality that functions in all our lives all the time: call it God, the unknown, or the holy. It is not some obscure out-of-reach "Other" available only to those with specialized knowledge or a phenomenon spoken about only in a church, temple, or mosque. The Transcendent is both beyond us, yet nearer to us than our own heartbeat. In our daily lives, the Transcendent is often experienced addressing us through our compulsions, perversions, and ordinary struggles. We find it touching us through our most shameful problems and bidding us to realize our most hidden promise. Jungian analyst Ann Ulanov shows us how the Transcendent appears in her clinical work, how to work with it in dreams and symptoms, and how it informs encounters between analyst and analysis. She demonstrates the spiritual aspect of analysis in her case observations dealing with fatness and the female, masochistic suffering, parental relationships, follow-up treatment in patient/therapist sex, and the resolution of suicidal temptations. THE FUNCTIONING TRANSCENDENT is an important contribution to the on-going national dialogue about the nature and meaning of the transcendental spiritual experience and will be of intense interest to those interested in the contribution of Jungian psychology to this phenomena

Analyst and author Ann Belford Ulanov draws on her years of clinical work and reflection to make the point that madness and creativity share a kinship, an insight that shakes both analysand and analyst to the core, reminding us as it does that the suffering places of the human psyche are inextricably—and, often inexplicably—related to the fountains of creativity, service, and even genius. She poses disturbing questions: How do we depend on order, when chaos is a necessary part of existence? What are we to make of evil—both that surrounding us and that within us? Is there a myth of meaning that can contain all the differences that threaten to shatter us?Ulanov’s insights unfold in conversation with themes in Jung’s Red Book which, according to Jung, present the most important experiences of his life, themes he explicated in his subsequent theories. In words and paintings Jung displays his psychic encounters from1913–1928, describing them as inner images that “burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.”Responding to some of Jung’s more fantastic encounters as he illustrated them, Ulanov suggests that our problems and compulsions may show us the path our creativity should take. With Jung she asserts that the multiplicities within and around us are, paradoxically, pieces of a greater whole that can provide healing and unity as, in her words, “every part of us and of our world gets a seat at the table.” Taken from Ulanov’s addresses at the 2012 Fay Lectures in Analytical Psychology, Madness and Creativity stands as a carefully crafted presentation, with many clinical examples of human courage and fulfillment.