Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is usually discussed as a political text, an anti-colonial work, or a foundational book in postcolonial theory. All of those descriptions are true. But they are also incomplete. At its core, Black Skin, White Masks is a psychological document. It is a book about what happens to the human…
Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy is often described as a book about death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Those are the four existential concerns that structure the text, and they certainly matter. But beneath the psychology, philosophy, and clinical theory, the book makes another quieter argument. Therapy is a form of reading. Not reading in the academic…
There is a small book that almost everyone has heard of and that almost no one has read carefully. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was first published in German in 1946, under a title that translates roughly as Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything. The English edition appeared in 1959. The book…