Book Reviews

We start this issue with two books about addiction. Addiction related issues are perhaps the most commonly presented issues in clinical practice. Every 'addiction' affects at least 12 other people. Existentialism has had a problematic relationship with the AA approach to addiction, arising from an overly simplistic and reductive understanding of both the issue and also the ethos of AA. The first review addresses this issue. The second takes a much wider and polemical view of addiction and edges towards an understanding of why it is so often a part of everyday life and hence clinical presentations. The next book links back to addiction and forward to the perennial issue of meaning making with a timely review of the current field by one of the world leaders in meaning studies. The next book is about what is quite possibly, even hopefully, the issue that draws people to become therapists. One certainly cannot be a therapist for very long without being confronted by the question, 'Why am I doing this job? And each time we ask it we give ourselves a different answer. A therapist who did not ask themselves this question would be more worrying than one who did. In both our everyday life and in our clinical work we are constantly reminded of our frailty and the sense that we are all struggling with the same issues and are no more than brothers and sisters in the same dark night. Paradoxically, this is our value, but only if we are able to acknowledge it and resist the seductiveness of reductionism and easy answers. This book is an account of a piece of research into just this dilemma. The final book continues the theme of reduction and is by one of the UK's foremost philosophers and addresses through the lens of the self, the ontological tendency which Heidegger brought to our attention almost 90 years ago to actively disengage from the complexity of being in order to reduce the ambiguity in our lives. And that this is at great cost to our humanity.

Every age generates its own modes of reduction, one of which is doublespeak. In our current age, one example is the governmental strategy aided and/or endorsed by the press that uses nationalist pride to promote xenophobia and paranoia. This finds another form under the banner of religious ideology the most recent manifestation of which, at the time of writing, is the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Ideas are indeed dangerous things. Another is by socio-economic policies that reduce the person to the status of a consumer through a duplicitous narrative of austerity promoted by a financially bloated and morally bankrupt elite in which freedom and choice is offered but uniformity and mediocrity is delivered. Another is by a positivist 19thC epistemology that is used to reinforce and idealise the 21stC technology of neuroscience and so reduce the person yet again to biochemistry and mechanics. And yet another is by a healthcare model that seeks to commodify psychological health into simplistic and quantifiable criteria. This book reminds us eloquently of how this is not just a flawed argument but also a hazardous dead end for humanity.

Martin Adams