John Crosby – författare

Father-son relationships can be notoriously difficult. Often fractious, sometimes hostile, and occasionally destructive, the issue of authority is negotiated by fathers and sons in a range of styles. In this fascinating new book, John Crosby describes the filial relationships of 20 historical figures to illustrate the different ways they related to their fathers, and what this can tell us about love, authority and the wider family context.

Sons and Fathers is an approach to understanding this son-father conflict based on early life experience rather than upon psycho-historian or psycho-biographical material and theorizing. Each vignette is designed to be read as a biographical account, but is bookended by a section reflecting on how each man’s relationship to his father can be understood in the context of key developmental theories, in particular those of Eric Erikson and Murray Bowen’s family system theory. The book also includes an extended introduction to both theorists for those unfamiliar with their work, as well as a discussion of the role of corporal punishment as a method of disciplining children.

From Michael Jackson to Bing Crosby, Joseph Stalin to John F Kennedy, this is a uniquely accessible but insightful book that will appeal to both general readers as well as students of Developmental Psychology across the lifespan, Family Studies, Marriage and Family therapy, and related subjects. It will also appeal to professionals working in the area, including social workers, counsellors and therapists.

Father-son relationships can be notoriously difficult. Often fractious, sometimes hostile, and occasionally destructive, the issue of authority is negotiated by fathers and sons in a range of styles. In this fascinating new book, John Crosby describes the filial relationships of 20 historical figures to illustrate the different ways they related to their fathers, and what this can tell us about love, authority and the wider family context.

Sons and Fathers is an approach to understanding this son-father conflict based on early life experience rather than upon psycho-historian or psycho-biographical material and theorizing. Each vignette is designed to be read as a biographical account, but is bookended by a section reflecting on how each man’s relationship to his father can be understood in the context of key developmental theories, in particular those of Eric Erikson and Murray Bowen’s family system theory. The book also includes an extended introduction to both theorists for those unfamiliar with their work, as well as a discussion of the role of corporal punishment as a method of disciplining children.

From Michael Jackson to Bing Crosby, Joseph Stalin to John F Kennedy, this is a uniquely accessible but insightful book that will appeal to both general readers as well as students of Developmental Psychology across the lifespan, Family Studies, Marriage and Family therapy, and related subjects. It will also appeal to professionals working in the area, including social workers, counsellors and therapists.

The phenomenologists were concerned to show that essential structures of being, knowable by rational insight, are found far more abundantly than is commonly thought. In his great monograph Reinach shows that in the civil law, where one usually thinks that there are only legal structures of human devising, there are in fact many essential structures, such as the structure of promising or of owning. These pre-positive structures, which are something different from the moral norms relevant to the positive law, provide the civil law with a foundation that can be known by philosophical insight. Though the enactments of the civil law are changeable, these essential foundations are not changeable. Of particular significance and originality is Reinach’s concept of a social act, that is, of an act that addresses another and has to be heard by the other in order to be complete. Reinach shows that the essence of legally relevant acts such as promising, comes to evidence when they are understood as social acts. The concept of a social act, in fact, has significance far beyond the part of legal philosophy in which Reinach first discovers it.