How We Are
1st Edition
Published on 4. September 2014
240 pages
978-0-241-00562-0 (ISBN)
Description
We live in small worlds.
An astonishing literary debut and the first book in the monumental How To Live trilogy, How We Are explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. A story told in three parts, this profound and ambitious trilogy gets right to the heart of what it means to be human: how we work, how we break, and how we mend.
As Vincent Deary shows us, we live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine - what he calls Act One. Conscious change requires deliberate effort, and so, for the most part, we avoid it. But inevitably, from within or without, something will come along to disturb our small worlds - some News From Elsewhere. And with ingrained reluctance, we begin the work of adjustment: Act Two.
Over decades of psychotherapeutic work, Deary has been a witness to the theatre of change - the way that ordinary people get stuck, struggle with new circumstances, and eventually transform their lives and get better. He is also keenly aware that novelists, poets, philosophers and theologians have grappled with these experiences for far longer than psychologists have. Drawing on his own personal experience, and a staggering range of literary, philosophical and cultural sources, Deary has produced a mesmerizing and universal portrait of the human condition.
Part psychologist, part philosopher, part novelist, Deary helps us to see how we can resist being mere habit machines, and make our acts and our lives more fully our own.
Vincent Deary is a health psychologist at Northumbria University. This, his first book, is part one of the How To Live trilogy, and will be followed by How We Break (book 2) and How We Mend (book 3).
An astonishing literary debut and the first book in the monumental How To Live trilogy, How We Are explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. A story told in three parts, this profound and ambitious trilogy gets right to the heart of what it means to be human: how we work, how we break, and how we mend.
As Vincent Deary shows us, we live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine - what he calls Act One. Conscious change requires deliberate effort, and so, for the most part, we avoid it. But inevitably, from within or without, something will come along to disturb our small worlds - some News From Elsewhere. And with ingrained reluctance, we begin the work of adjustment: Act Two.
Over decades of psychotherapeutic work, Deary has been a witness to the theatre of change - the way that ordinary people get stuck, struggle with new circumstances, and eventually transform their lives and get better. He is also keenly aware that novelists, poets, philosophers and theologians have grappled with these experiences for far longer than psychologists have. Drawing on his own personal experience, and a staggering range of literary, philosophical and cultural sources, Deary has produced a mesmerizing and universal portrait of the human condition.
Part psychologist, part philosopher, part novelist, Deary helps us to see how we can resist being mere habit machines, and make our acts and our lives more fully our own.
Vincent Deary is a health psychologist at Northumbria University. This, his first book, is part one of the How To Live trilogy, and will be followed by How We Break (book 2) and How We Mend (book 3).
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
File size
1,30 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-241-00562-0 (9780241005620)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Vincent Deary is professor of applied health psychology at Northumbria University, where his research focuses on the development of new psychosocial interventions for people with a variety of health complaints, including cancer survivors and fear of falling in older adults. As a clinician he works in the UK's first trans-diagnostic Fatigue Clinic, to help people for whom fatigue is a disabling symptom. He is the author of How We Are.
