Stress in Everyday Life

Description:

A highly respected New York psychiatrist of Montenegrin Serbian origin, formatively influenced by the ideologico-political and socio-cultural turmoil of World War II and its dramatic aftermath in the second half of the twentieth century and trained in the best medical schools and psychiatric institutes of the former Yugoslavia, Canada and the United States, Dr. Dushan Kosovich is uniquely qualified to write about Stress in Everyday Life, both as a rarely sophisticated theoretician and as a richly and broadly experienced practicing psychoanalyst. He accepts the definition of anomie by the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim, as a condition of an individual, a number of individuals, or of a whole society, in which older common values, and sometimes even common meanings, are no longer understood or accepted, and new common meanings and values have not yet been developed. He recognizes that such a normative interregnum, such a rudderless transition, definitely characterizes and permeates our period of history, unusually conducive, as it is, to the sociogenesis of stress as a global problem in human adaptation and adjustment. This is why Dr. Kosovich deliberately aims at a comprehensive, holistic and integrative approach, which maximally avoids all doctrinaire, sectarian and reductionist oversimplifications and methodological pitfalls.

Fully aware of the curative limits of every branch of medicine, including all schools of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, he open-mindedly and selfcritically espouses the Neo-Freudian, existentialist school, duly mindful of the insightful contributions of anthropology, sociology, developmental social psychology and other relevant behavioral sciences. Seeing the patient as a dynamic participant in and product of an often rapidly changing and confusing technologico-economic, political and cultural context, Dr. Kosovich is watchfully on guard against all professional and other cliches and prejudices and all ideological myths. He never forgets the fellow-humanity, dignity and co-vulnerability of his patients as fellow sufferers and fellow mortals.

Dr. Kosovich's clear and lucid text, remarkably free from needless technical jargon, is solidly based upon and amply illustrated by numerous cases and real situations, so that the refreshing alternation and interplay of the particular and general, practical and theoretical, never ceases to hold the reader's curiosity and attention.

Especially valuable and professionally novel are the author's objective, balanced, well-documented and convincing analyses and discussions of collective stress and its traumatic and tragic individual and social consequences. These are particularly devastating in limiting cases of anomic intra-national and international upheavals, such as the recent NATO bombing of civilian targets in Yugoslavia, with its often heartlessly overlooked, denied and dismissed "collateral damage."