Synopses & Reviews
In the collected essays here, Schlag established himself as one of the most creative thinkers in the contemporary legal academy. To read them one after another is exhilarating; Schlag's sophistication shines through. In chapter after chapter he tackles the most vexing problems of law and legal thinking, but at the heart of his concern is the questions of normativity and the normative claims made by legal scholars. He revisits legal realism, eenergizes it, and brings readers face-to-face with the central issues confronting law at the end of the 20th century.
--Choice, May 1997
Pierre Schlag is the great iconoclast of the American legal academy. Few law professors today are so consistently original, funny, and provocative. But behind his playful manner is a serious goal: bringing the study of law into the late modern/ postmodern age. Reading these essays is like watching a one-man truth squad taking on all of the trends and movements of contemporary jurisprudence. All one can say to the latter is, better take cover.
--J. M. Balkin, Lafayette S. Foster Professor, Yale Law School
At a time when complaints are heard everywhere about the excesses of lawyers, judges, and law itself, Pierre Schlag focuses attention on the American legal mind and its urge to lay down the law. For Schlag, legalism is a way of thinking that extends far beyond the customary official precincts of the law.
His work prompts us to move beyond the facile self- congratulatory self-representations of the law so that we might think critically about its identity, effects, and limitations. In this way, Schlag leads us to rethink the identities and character of moral and political values in contemporary discourse. The book brings into question the dominant normative orientation that shapes so much academic thought in law and in the humanities and social sciences. By pulling the curtain on the rhetorical techniques by which the law represents itself as coherent, rational, and stable, Laying Down the Law discloses the grandiose (and largely futile) attempts of American academics to control social and political meaning by means of scholarly missives.
Review
"Schlag [has] established himself as one of the most creative thinkers in the contemporary legal academy. To read [these essays] one after another is exhilarating; Schlag's sophistication shines through. In chapter after chapter he tackles the most vexing problems of law and legal thinking."-Choice,
Review
"Pierre Schlag has been through the collapse of legal theory and lived to tell the tale, a tale that is burdened by as few illusions as possible except for the saving one of hope. He is also a great (and serious) comic." -Stanley Fish,Duke University
Review
"Schlag [has] established himself as one of the most creative thinkers in the contemporary legal academy. To read [these essays] one after another is exhilarating; Schlag's sophistication shines through. In chapter after chapter he tackles the most vexing problems of law and legal thinking."
"Pierre Schlag has been through the collapse of legal theory and lived to tell the tale, a tale that is burdened by as few illusions as possible except for the saving one of hope. He is also a great (and serious) comic."
Pierre Schlag is the great iconoclast of the American legal academy. Few professors today are so consistently original, funny, and provocative."
Review
Pierre Schlag is the great iconoclast of the American legal academy. Few professors today are so consistently original, funny, and provocative." -Jack Balkin,Yale Law School
Synopsis
The number of people in therapy has grown at an unprecedented rate over the last decade. Yet the dynamic between therapist and client remains an enigma. In
Tales of Un-Knowing, Ernesto Spinelli presents eight tales of a therapeutic approach that has proven highly effective in assisting troubled individuals in confronting the problems of everyday life. According to Spinelli, therapy at its most fundamental level involves the act of revealing and reassessing the "life stories" that clients tell themselves in order to establish or maintain meaning in their lives. The role of the therapist is not only to listen, but to help the client to explicate and reconstruct this life story.
Tales of Un-Knowing presents the lives of eight individuals whose experiences illuminate a variety of dilemmas and anxieties that most of us encounter at different points in our lives. We meet a man who refuses to grow old gracefully, a woman who fears that she is only loved for her body, and an octogenarian who lives simultaneously in the present and in the past. We also meet Giles, whose obsessive identification with Einstein led him to theorize about his sex until it became a "living mathematics" full of enthralling permutations and combinations. In the course of the book Spinelli tackles head on the last great taboo of therapeutic practice--sexual attraction between therapist and client.
Existential therapy, then, requires that the therapist experience life through the client's eyes. This frequently leads to challenges to the therapist's own ways of being, and the underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions that maintain them. The term "un-knowing" refers to the challenge to the therapist, who must force him or herself to remain open to new interpretations of that which is familiar, and to treat the seemingly familiar as novel, unfixed in meaning, and accessible to previously unexamined possibilities.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-188) and index.
About the Author
Dr. Ernesto Spinelli is Principal Lecturer at the School of Psychology and Counseling, Regent's College, London. The author of Demystifying Therapy, he maintains a private practice in London.