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Books

Love and its Disappointment by David Brazier

Mary Midgley writes of love and therapy.

This book aims to bring art and therapy together, something surely worth doing in an age that claims to take them both so seriously. David Brazier finds the key to both activities in the concept of love. Outgoing love, both of people and of things, seems to him to be the central drive of all our motivation, something which has been strangely neglected by the in-turned individualism of much recent Western thinking. This love, he says, is constantly doomed to disappointment, yet that disappointment itself generates some of our best achievements, as well as our crimes and miseries. Brazier, himself an experienced psychotherapist, runs against much analytic and therapeutic doctrine by suggesting that life is not primarily inward-looking – not essentially an exercise in self-actualization.

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