Control (Psychology), Interpersonal relations, Meaning (Psychology) 

In Feeling Strong, noted psychoanalyst Ethel S. Person redefines the notion of power. Power is often narrowly understood as the force exerted by the politicians and business leaders who seem to be in charge and by the rich and famous who monopolize our headlines. The whiff of evil we often catch when the subject of power is in the air comes from this one conception of power-- the drive for dominance over other people, or, in its most extreme form, an overriding and often ruthless lust for total command. But this is far too limited a definition of power. Pointing to a more fulfilling sense of self-empowerment than is being touted in pop-psychology manuals of our time, Feeling Strong shows us that power is really our ability to produce an effect, to make something we want to happen actually take place. Power is a desire and a drive, and it central in our lives, dictating much of our behavior and consuming much of our interior lives. We all have a need to possess power, use it, understand it and negotiate it. This holds true not just in mediating our sex and love lives, our family lives and friendships, our work relationships but in seeking to realize our dreams, whether in pursuit of our ambitions, expression of our creative impulses, or in our need to identify with something larger than ourselves. These separate kinds of power are best described as interpersonal power and personal power, respectively, and they call on different parts of our psyche. Ideally, we acquire competence in both domains. Drawing from her expertise honed in clinical practice, as well as from examples in literature and true-life vignettes, Person shows how we can achieve authentic power, a fundamental and potentially benevolent part of human nature that allows us to experience ourselves as authentically strong. To find something that matters; to live life at a higher pitch; to feel inner certainty; to find a personality of your own and effectively plot our own life story -- these are the forms of power explored in the book. To achieve and maintain such empowerment always entails struggle and is a life-long journey. Feeling Strong will lead the way. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly While the jacket copy suggests a self-help title, this latest book from Person (The Sexual Century) is really a history of theories of power, as revealed through close readings of psychoanalytic theory, literature and popular culture. According to Person, a physician and professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, Western culture is enamored of a "pornography of power"-in love with images of dominance and subordination. But really, she argues, power works more subtly. According to Person, there are two major kinds of power: interpersonal (the kind we exert over others, or feel exerted over ourselves) and personal (the kind we experience as strength, self-confidence and, in trendy parlance, "empowerment"). Drawing, with varying degrees of efficacy, on sources as diverse as Freud, The Sopranos, Eugene O'Neill, Hannah Arendt and Edith Wharton, Person's book seeks to explain why we are relentlessly seduced by the image of holding power over others and less able to draw on its strength for ourselves. She argues that intimacy and power are not, as we generally like to believe, mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent, as evidenced in both everyday personal relationships and--in its most explicit form-- sado-masochistic ones. Person is at her best when musing on less obvious exercises of power, such as the tense, ambivalent power relations that exist between mother and child, or the way in which games like Pok‚mon allow kids, if only in the realm of make-believe, to experience the thrill of holding control over others. "Authentic power," she writes, "is the ability to live fully, with few regrets and fewer recriminations"-a sentiment readers may welcome in a world where corporate and political recriminations are common by-products of power. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Psychoanalyst Person (clinical psychiatry, Columbia Univ.) renders a weighty intellectual account of empowerment, a topic often plumbed in self-help circles. Filled with research findings, life stories, and thoughts from the books of best-selling authors (e.g., Judith Viorst, Deborah Tannen, Susan Faludi), this work covers types of power (e.g., creative, coercive, charismatic), how people's interactions foster or negate the use of power, and enlightenment, or "authentic" power. Person clearly explains that the inner struggle between wanting power and feeling powerless is rooted in our psyches and carries over into adulthood, ultimately determining our intestinal fortitude. Compassion toward ourselves plays a major role in resolving this tug of war. The book is not practical enough for the task of building self-empowerment skills, but the author's notion that the resistance that grows in the disempowered must be addressed to bring about global communication rather than global unrest is an important tack not typically explored. Recommended for larger public libraries in a category bridging self-help and mainstream psychology. Lisa Liquori, M.L.S., Syracuse, NY Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.