Böcker av Louis S. Berger

Humanity's self-destructive failure to give global and human survival top priority is complex, puzzling, and irrational. Berger conceptualizes it as analogous to manifestations of individuals' psychopathology. He devises a 'sociocultural therapy' patterned after an individual psychotherapy framework, the so-called analysis of defense and designed to supplement the standard approaches to global threats. The new and valuable principal contributions are: identifying our failures with societal pathology; focusing on the latter's defenses; conceptualizing a therapeutic analogue applicable at the social level; and constructing a prototypical example of that therapy.

One's conception of language is central in fields such as linguistics, but less obviously so in fields studying matters other than language. In Language and the Ineffable Louis S. Berger demonstrates the flaws of the received view of language and the difficulties they raise in multiple disciplines. This breakthrough study sees past failures as inevitable, since reformers retained key detrimental features of the received view. Berger undertakes a new reform, grounded in an unconventional model of individual human development. A central radical and generative feature is the premise that the neonate's world is holistic, boundary-less, unimaginable, impossible to describe_in other words, ineffable_completely distinct from what Berger calls 'adultocentrism.' The study is a wholly original approach to epistemology, separate from the traditional interpretations offered by skepticism, idealism, and realism. The work rejects both the independence of the world and the possibility of true judgment_a startling shift in the traditional responses to the standard schema. Language and the Ineffable evolves a unique conception of language that challenges and unsettles sacrosanct beliefs, not only about language, but other disciplines as well. Berger demonstrates the framework's potential for elucidating a wide range of problems in such diverse fields as philosophy, logic, psychiatry, general-experimental psychology, psychotherapy, and arithmetic. The reconceptualization marks a revolutionary turn in language studies that reaches across academic boundaries.