Active Life: Philosophy of Work, Artistic Creation, and the Healing Arts

In the 68 years since Vita Activa, Hannah Arendt's treatise on the nature of labour, work, and artistic creation, the three core activities have undergone and continue to undergo profound transformation. We present here a sustained, open-minded critical reflection on how we live and who we are, as a species. Our earthbound wisdom – individually and collectively informs our experience of soul-making and the world we share with other living beings. The kernel of the present work is that psychotherapy as lived attention, from person to person, needs to include in its corpus, its claim to heal, the issues and suffering which we confront in our present-day conditions, as the basis of our existence. In this book then we take a fresh look at the meaning of human labour, work, and artistic creation. This approach to human misery and well-being casts fresh light on the work of psychologists, psychotherapists and mental health professionals and their ostensible commitment to alleviate mental and emotional distress by benign means.

About the Author :
Theodor Itten (1952) is a retired clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. After 40 years practising in Switzerland, he now lives in Hamburg. In the 1970s he was educated at Enfield College, a People's University (as of 1992 Middlesex University) and City, University of London (both based in the UK). He is a past President of the Swiss Psychotherapeutic Association.Ron Roberts (1954), PhD is the author of 17 books and over 60 refereed articles and has previously held posts at University College London, The Institute of Psychiatry, The Tavistock Institute, St Bartholomew's Medical College, The London Hospital and King's College London (all based in the UK). He has worked in higher education for over 40 years, and has many years' experience teaching and practising Re-Evaluation Co-Counselling.

Review :
'A profound and wide-ranging meditation on the nature of work and society, creativity and meaning. With their long and distinguished combined careers in psychotherapy and psychiatry, [the authors] share valuable insights into how a person can build a 'good, decent, honest, authentic, free, and enjoyable life.'' Lucy Moore, Author of In Search of Us'Clinical terms such as depression, crisis, anxiety, addiction, and compulsivity have become the language of economics and finance. The patient is no longer an individual as everything in life becomes an expression of the market. Both individual and social pathologies require redress, but the healing of specific individuals seems to be difficult, if not impossible, without confronting its social and economic context. In [this book, the authors] offer a powerful and timely analysis of the links between work, human nature, and psychotherapy. Libertarian capitalism is a predatory system that generates destruction, death, and anxiety. Given that the vital signs of this system are compromised, this inevitably impacts its components - that is, us as individuals. We are the essential cogs in a machine designed to crush us, producing turmoil in both the material and psychological realm. In the current economy, the bulimia of consumption is presented as a survival instinct rather than a sickness. More generally, the confusion between 'to be' on the one hand, and 'to have' and 'to appear' on the other, is generating profound imbalances. An essential and thought-provoking book for understanding the psychological costs of contemporary capitalism.' Prof Marc Chesney, Mathematical Finance, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Author of Stop - Casino Finance and the Commodification of the Living World