Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life

John Russon

Mar 2010 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Co-winner of the 2005 Biennial Book Prize for the best philosophy book published in English presented by the Canadian Philosophical Association

John Russon's Human Experience draws on central concepts of contemporary European philosophy to develop a novel analysis of the human psyche. Beginning with a study of the nature of perception, embodiment, and memory, Russon investigates the formation of personality through family and social experience. He focuses on the importance of the feedback we receive from others regarding our fundamental worth as persons, and on the way this interpersonal process embeds meaning into our most basic bodily practices: eating, sleeping, sex, and so on. Russon concludes with an original interpretation of neurosis as the habits of bodily practice developed in family interactions that have become the foundation for developed interpersonal life, and proposes a theory of psychological therapy as the development of philosophical insight that responds to these neurotic compulsions.

About the author

John Russon is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. He is the author of The Self and Its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. He is also the coeditor (with John Sallis) of Retracing the Platonic Text and (with Michael Baur) Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H. S. Harris.