Exploring and Treating Acquisitive Desire: Living in the Material World - Paperback

by Jeffrey A. Kottler (Author)

How do we live in a material world that measures success by what we own? How we deal with the pressure to compete with others in displays of our success? This is a book about the social disease of acquisitive desire for material things -corporeal and intangible. The themes covered include what acquisitive desire means in people′s lives, how therapists and therapy are treated as possessions, clinical identification and diagnosis of consumer disorders that become the primary or secondary focus of treatment, interventions and clinical issues involved in working with those who suffer the effects of an excessively materialistic lifestyle, and the way therapists, as members of a bourgeois profession, struggle with their own acquisitive desires. Jeffrey A. Kottler seeks not to encourage people to give up all attachment to things, rather to reduce the degree to which we are controlled by them. It is far better when satisfaction comes not from owning things, but using them for fun, stimulation, and learning.

Author Biography

Jeffrey A. Kottler is one of the most prolific authors in the fields of counseling, psychotherapy, and education, having written more than 90 books about a wide range of subjects. He has authored a dozen texts for counselors and therapists that are used in universities around the world and a dozen books each for practicing therapists and educators. Some of his most highly regarded works include Creative Breakthroughs in Therapy, The Mummy at the Dining Room Table: Eminent Therapists Reveal Their Most Unusual Cases and What They Teach Us About Human Behavior, Bad Therapy, The Client Who Changed Me, Divine Madness, Change: What Leads to Personal Transformation, Stories We've Heard, Stories We've Told: Life-Changing Narratives in Therapy and Everyday Life, and Therapy Over 50. He has been an educator for 40 years, having worked as a teacher, counselor, and therapist in preschool, middle school, mental health center, crisis center, nongovernmental organization, university, community college, private practice, and disaster relief settings. He has served as a Fulbright scholar and senior lecturer in Peru and Iceland, as well as worked as a visiting professor in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Nepal. He is professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton.