The insights here are of such depth, and contain such beauty in them, that time and again the reader must pause for breath. At last Rilke has met a critic whose insight, courage, and humanity are worthy of his life and work."-Leslie Epstein Director, Graduate Creative Writing Program, Boston University"[A] well-reasoned, fairly fascinating, and illuminating study which soundly and convincingly applies Freudian and particularly post-Freudian insights into the self, to Rilke's ...

Schools reflect the state of society. If society is materialistic, competitive, egoistic, technological, and without concern for human values and long-term thinking, our schools will tend to reflect those values. However, what if education were about something else? What if education were about the future? What if education were a about nurturing a new generation of human beings, integrated in body, soul, and spirit and able to think for themselves and have the capacity to love? Perhaps the w...

The first truly popular biography of the influential twentieth-century mystic and educator who-while widely known for founding the Waldorf schools and other educational and humanitarian movements-remains a mystery to many who benefit from his ideas.People everywhere have heard of Waldorf schools, Biodynamic farming, Camphill Villages, and other innovations of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Indeed, Steiner—as an architect, artist, teacher, and agriculturalist—r...

It has been described as a "tame longing without any particular object" by Schopenhauer, "a bestial and indefinable affliction" by Dostoevsky, and "time's invasion of your world system" by Joseph Brodsky, but still very few of us today can explain precisely what boredom is. A Philosophy of Boredom investigates one of the central preoccupations of our age as it probes the nature of boredom, how it originated, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any ...

Alive, fresh, and stimulating, the theme of The Double comprises the issues of identity, narcissism, and the fear of death — actually the core of human existence. Rank’s book is primarily a study of the double as it appeared in striking examples in German, French, Russian, English, and American literature from Goethe to Oscar Wilde.Originally published in 1971.A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make av...

In 1915, C. G. Jung and his psychiatrist colleague, Hans Schmid-Guisan, began a correspondence through which they hoped to understand and codify fundamental individual differences of attention and consciousness. Their ambitious dialogue, focused on the opposition of extraversion and introversion, demonstrated the difficulty of reaching a shared awareness of differences even as it introduced concepts that would eventually enable Jung to create his landmark 1921 statement of the theory of ps...

Stephanie Dowrick invites us into the transcendent and piercingly beautiful world of the much-loved early 20th century European poet, Rainer Maria Rilke and reveals how through his poetry we can connect with our inner life.'Stephanie Dowrick's gift is a capacity for sharing with readers her lifetime's pleasure in poetry and the company of one of the greatest of poets.'David Malouf, novelist and poet'This book is lovely: serious, informed, ho...

It is between the ages of nine and ten that children begin to experience themselves as "I" for the first timeas separate individuals, different from their parents and peers and essentially alone. This inner experience is sometimes precipitated by the child's first encounter with death and the first notion that earthly life is fragile and temporary. In this insightful book, Koepke offers the reader a lucid, accessible description of the outer signs and symptoms of this significant turning poin...

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousa...

During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result. Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to...

Much has been written by students of spiritual science on The Philosophy of Freedom, but the advantage of discovering what the author himself had to say about this most important and seminal work should be obvious. Not only were the words of the text chosen most carefully, but also its very structure was intended to become a powerful inner experience for the careful reader. In a sense, all of the works that flowed from Rudolf Steiner in the following years were to elaborate on this great work...

Rudolf Steiner seldom spoke of himself in a personal way, but in his Autobiography we are offered a rare glimpse into some of the most intimate aspects of his inner life, his personal relationships, and significant events that helped to shape the philosopher, seer, and teacher he became.This edition restores the original format of seventy chapters, just as they were written for the Goetheanum weekly newsletter. This autobiography is not merely a narrative of Rudolf Steiner's successes and fai...