The Righting of Passage

the long version

"In this book, David Napier offers a novel argument that accounts for diffuse and flexible notions of the self while also illustrating how a coherent, communicating self persists amid such apparent instability. This he does by arguing something entirely counterintuitive to both modernist and postmodernist positions - namely, that modernity's increasing separation of embodiment from meaning not only slows down human transformation but attenuates human growth by encouraging us to perceive risk as largely pathological. Today the combined forces of stress management, depth psychology, therapeutic writing, dislocated meaning, and institutional conformity work together to produce a reduction - not a proliferation - of change in human life."--Jacket.