Abstract
BOOK REVIEWS 487 The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy . By PETER KoESTENBAUM. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press: 1978. Pp. xi + 570. $~~.50. In thirty-nine chapters and eight appendices, the author renders us the whole of a phenomenological philosophy of person and its consequent therapeutic, upon which he has worked since the late sixties. His is a humanistic realist viewpoint, yet quite impressive to the theistic realist, who finds much to ponder in this effort, and then to challenge in a stimulating exchange of visions. Certainly, the very idea of a " clinical philosophy " is intriguing; it is refreshing to find a thinker offering a therapy rooted formally in a philosophical persuasion. Many therapists insist they harbor no underlying philosophy of human nature, much less the metaphysics for a whole worldview. The philosopher quite often sees the contrary situation, and wonders how those who indeed have no coherent theory of what they are doing in fact help anyone. Koestenbaum's approach is vigorous, orderly, and free from the obfuscation often afflicting those who work within the ambit of Continental categories. The text comprises three approaches to the topic. A theory of what it is to be human, existential and phenomenological in its metaphysics and bipolar in personality assessment, forms the first book. Then a discourse on anxiety relating to birth, freedom, and death follows in Book Two. Finally, a somewhat disjointed presentation of pathology, focusing on the "deconstituted consciousness," techniques for pain and need management, and his notion of participatory healing, is offered in the last book. Koestenbaum delivers exactly what he promises, and then some. The study could well serve in several contexts, especially in personality and counseling courses where a personalist viewpoint is formally espoused, with options left for theistic interpretation of basic thematics. This task will not prove difficult since most humanist thinking, and Koestenbaum's is no exception, borrows from religious themes and traditions. The volume is superbly presented, with the best current bibliography of existential phenomenology the reviewer has seen and a full index of themes. The text also abounds in those kinds of charts and graphs of complex notions one seldom finds in philosophy works (generally composed on the supposition that script alone suffices to convey meaning) . His effort to lay out the structure of human consciousness is one of the most noteworthy to date. There will be exception taken to his model, no doubt, but Koestenbaum comes to his project with solid work on Husserl's Paris Lectures already published. " A person is secure, grounded and at home by virtue of his nature, because of his relationship to his consciousness and to the universe," he states at the outset (p. 11). This new discipline, clinical philosophy, will enable th~ 488 BOOK REVIEWS individual therapist-self-counseling is also envisioned-to claim this truth " which is always there but not always perceived." On this account, selfesteem is not to be considered a psychological feeling but rather a philosophical fact. Self-esteem, in short, is to be learned as a truth, not created as a feeling. It is a "metaphysical reality related to the structure of our consciousness and of the external world, which is always the object of that consciousness." This foundation of mutuality will be emotionally experienced when, and only when, it is intellectually clarified. For Koestenbaum's client, it is what one does not know because one has not discovered it, or been taught it by another, that leads to maladjustment. The other option is that the client has chosen one way or another to escape from self-valuation into illusion. The forms illusion takes are of course multiple, but the ultimate illusion is infinitude. Koestenbaum's root cause of human frustration and illness is the rejection of human finiteness. This desire to be infinite, to transcend especially the fact of death, leads into illusion. His move is now apparent: educate the individual in total acceptance of the real world and the real world's termination in death. This then is not to be a therapy of emotional adjustment by a technique of denial or any nominalistic re-categorizing of the unpleasant. Rather, acceptance of human finiteness...
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