Publisher's Synopsis
This book continues my first book: Hypertension and Well-Being in the Modern Era. It continues the theory of absences. Absences are illnesses of the soul that turn a man to bitterness, hollowness, weakness, and grief.
The study of absences and the STRAPE therapy are instructions by which a man, through effort and understanding, may triumph from his mental disturbances to reach health, mental stability, wellness, and productivity.
It is about bringing man back to himself to fulfill his destiny to dominate his environment with his spirit of power, compassion, and self-discipline. (Christian Gospel)
The first book was a paradigm shift in understanding hypertension and well-being. The first book presented Presence and Absence as a therapeutic control of wellness.
The second book continues the paradigm shift in understanding the human being. Parallel to absence and presence, the I/Me duality is presented.
From this point, it introduces empathy as the motherhood of all human problems. With the interpretation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Vision and the Enigma: a snake in a man's mouth, the Pythagorean transmissibility of souls: a man's soul in a dog's body, we offer an existentialist reinterpretation of individuation, integration, the shadow, and obsessive/compulsive disorders.
This book studies well-being, following the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Nietzsche, and John Bradshaw. Standing on existential philosophy, we establish outside reference points to revise these psychological concepts. It integrates psychoanalytical concepts with the writings and insights of existential philosophers for clarification and understanding.
There are concepts that we must contemplate from different angles to understand the author's intent. My study of the I/Me duality and the study of absences made the shadow invisible; under the light, we can recognize it as the non-person of my first book.
It is clear that the shadow is the devil inside, a concept very close to what Sartre called the "hell within." Sartre has exposed more of the shadow than Carl Jung; in the person of Jean Genet, the philosopher, Sartre found an excellent living example.
The human problem has always been, from the beginning of time, a problem of the shadow or the deviancy of the soul that is not fundamentally corrupted but superimposed by an unnatural, exterior force that dwells deep into suffering, actively looking for faults to feed the soul with pains, anger, and sadness. The shadow is not of the psyche. It is an unnecessary addition, like the snake that had crawled into the man's mouth.
Once we expose the shadow and associate it with the snake in the mouth of the shepherd in Zarathustra, the Vision, and the Enigma, we may draw the lesson hidden in Nietzsche's fable and help a man master his destiny. We may understand empathy as the intrusion of a foreign entity into our psyche and learn the principles to defend our integrality.
The knowledge of good and evil, the curse that drowns mankind, may have well been the good instinct and the addition of the shadow.
We show how a man can confront his shadow.
With this new book, I conclude the "Theory of Absences." The first book was an integrated research on the origin of absences and therapy to contain the death inside.
This book continues the theory of absences and integrates psychoanalytical concepts with the writings of philosophers to offer understanding over dogma.
Well-Being is the attribute of the man who is well, and suffering is an attribute of a man under his shadow. It is the rebirth of the study of absence and presence, and the book is, practically, simple. It shows how the shadow or the non-person feeds the soul with grief and desolation, actively searching the world for desolation to create miseries and distorted consciousness. It shows how to dissipate it.
