Psychology

Psychology

Existential Psychotherapy and the Interpretation of Dreams by Clark E. Moustakas

Existential Psychotherapy and the Interpretation of Dreams, by Clark Moustakas, presents a fresh model for the effective integration of dreamwork in humanistically oriented psychotherapy. The existential-phenomenological emphasis opens channels of conscious awareness that enable people in therapy and in everyday living to awaken to their own visions, hopes, and dreams. The internal shadows and fires of individual consciousness come to light in therapy and in dreams and invite self-resources and self-directions for change in self-growth and in significant relationships. An Existential Model is presented in detail as a guide to effective psychotherapy. With slight modification, the Model is also applicable to an understanding and interpretation of one's own dreams as well as the dreams of people who are in therapy. Through existential awareness and reflective thinking, the reader is encouraged to discover constructive challenges and paradoxes that connect dreams with waking life and lead to the discovery of creative possibilities for work and living. The existential approach to psychotherapy and dream interpretation is explicated through examples of phenomenological interviewing, use of description in lifting out horizons and core meanings, and analysis of core themes that intimately embrace the self. Existential philosophy recognizes mystery encompasses the unknown and unpredictable and asserts that regardless of past suffering and impoverishment, the potentials for health and well-being are within reach. The Existential Model offers a practical methodology and a set of guides for achieving these goals and finding a future that moves beyond the restraints and rejections that have resulted from choosing the wrong path for identity expression and selfhood. The person is the central catalyst for decision and action and retains control over her or his own destiny.

Grow Wherever You Work: Straight Talk to Help with Your Toughest Challenges by Joanna Barsh

Powerful, unvarnished advice for growing through the work challenges all aspiring leaders face!
The business world is full of catchphrases: follow your passion; think positive; be authentic; suck it up; take risks; network. All well-intentioned, but let’s be honest. This inch-deep advice just isn’t very helpful. How do real people succeed in the real world of work? That’s the question bestselling author Joanna Barsh sets out to answer—not by asking motivational gurus or well-established CEOs but by diving into the trenches with today’s boldest, brightest, up-and-coming leaders.
Distilling the stories of important work challenges from more than 200 rising leaders in 120 companies, this hands-on guide helps you grow through the challenges you face—not despite them.
You’ll learn how to:
• Handle rising pressure and recover from colossal mistakes
• Bounce back from poor performance reviews and use them to up your game
• Get people on board with you and your mission
• Deal with office villains like a superhero
• Take uncomfortable risks and dare to challenge
• Grow when everything is falling apart around you
• Know when it’s time to find another position
Packed with raw experiences and on-the-job coping strategies from a rich diversity of voices—immigrants and first-generation Americans; blacks, Hispanics, and Asians; Ivy League alums and high school grads; and parents, some of whom are single—from all industries, this book offers the kind of nuts-and-bolts, real-world insights you won’t find anywhere else. Using these proven strategies, you can accelerate your growth with every new challenge. Best of all, you’ll be able to take the lead in your own career and build a future that works for you.
This is how ordinary people turn challenges into extraordinary opportunities for action—and how you can Grow Wherever You Work.

One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer

The essential guide to kaizen—the art of making great and lasting change through small, steady steps.
Written by Dr. Robert Maurer, a psychologist on the staff of both the University of Washington School of Medicine and Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center, and an expert on kaizen who speaks and consults nationally, One Small Step Can Change Your Life is the gentle but potent way to effect change. It is for anyone who wants to lose weight. Or quit smoking. Or write a novel, start an exercise program, get out of debt, or conquer shyness and meet new people.
Beginning by outlining the all-important role that fear plays in every type of change—and kaizen’s ability to neutralize it by circumventing the brain’s built-in resistance to new behavior—Dr. Maurer then explains the 7 Small Steps: how to Think Small Thoughts, Take Small Actions, Solve Small Problems, and more. He shows how to perform mind sculpture—visualizing virtual change so that real change comes more naturally. Why small rewards lead to big returns by internalizing motivation. How great discoveries are made by paying attention to the little details most of us overlook. Rooted in the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Tao Te Ching—“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”—here is the way to change your life without fear, without failure, and to begin a new, easy regimen of continuous improvement.

The Wonders of Language: Or How to Make Noises and Influence People by Ian Roberts

Ian Roberts offers a stimulating introduction to our greatest gift as a species: our capacity for articulate language. We are mostly as blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the structure of language as fish are of the water they swim in. We live in a mental ocean of nouns, verbs, quantifiers, morphemes, vowels and other rich, strange and deeply fascinating linguistic objects.
This book introduces the reader to this amazing world. Offering a thought-provoking and accessible introduction to the main discoveries and theories about language, the book is aimed at general readers and undergraduates who are curious about linguistics and language. Written in a lively and direct style, technical terms are carefully introduced and explained and the book includes a full glossary. The book covers all the central areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics

Exploratory Factor Analysis (Understanding Statistics) by Leandre R. Fabrigar and Duane T. Wegener

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) has played a major role in research conducted in the social sciences for more than 100 years, dating back to the pioneering work of Spearman on mental abilities. Since that time, EFA has become one of the most commonly used quantitative methods in many of the social sciences, including psychology, business, sociology, education, political science, and communications. To a lesser extent, it has also been utilized within the physical and biological sciences. Despite its long and widespread usage in many domains, numerous aspects of the underlying theory and application of EFA are poorly understood by researchers. Indeed, perhaps no widely used quantitative method requires more decisions on the part of a researcher and offers as wide an array of procedural options as EFA does.
This book provides a non-mathematical introduction to the underlying theory of EFA and reviews the key decisions that must be made in its implementation. Among the issues discussed are the use of confirmatory versus exploratory factor analysis, the use of principal components analysis versus common factor analysis, procedures for determining the appropriate number of factors, and methods for rotating factor solutions. Explanations and illustrations of the application of different factor analytic procedures are provided for analyses using common statistical packages (SPSS and SAS), as well as a free package available on the web (Comprehensive Exploratory Factor Analysis). In addition, practical instructions are provided for conducting a number of useful factor analytic procedures not included in the statistical packages.