Drawing on thirty years of practicing psychotherapy, Dorothy Martyn here gives readers a unique look into a play-therapy room where three children individually present their own journeys over some months. These children, in that setting, provide us with a special lens through which we can better understand what transpires in their minds -- and in ours. Through the children's creative, poetic utterances -- enhanced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and other literary giants -- Beyond Deserving persuasively argues against the justice idea of reward according to what is deserved and for the superior potency of a beyond-deserving model in cultivating love and creative work in children. Written primarily for parents and other mentors -- teachers, youth leaders, counselors, and so on -- Beyond Deserving draws the subject of child rearing back to its roots in the biblical declaration of unconditional love, love that moves first, without a prior "deserving."

Gully Fisher’s twin sons will soon be 45, and are the push and pull of their clan. Michael is almost too good; immune to consternation, he is the family rock, while Fish is the family maverick, acting out what the others cannot bring themselves to do. Michael’s wife, Ursula, spends her days rearranging the lives of failed families, and craves a deeper intimacy with her taciturn husband and her two children. Katie, still seduced by Fish’s tales of Vietnam and jail, has a new job and a boyfriend, and thinks of breaking away. The elder Fishers, celebrating 50 years of marriage, teeter on the line between suppressed anger and fierce loyalty. When Katie and Fish’s 9-year-old daughter, Rebecca, appears from Texas (where she is being raised by Katie’s mother), she lurches across this landscape and the entire family is beset by a summer of little squalls. By the fall, a few secrets are out, and they’re all better for it. This is a novel full of the telling: poignant details that illustrate the fabric of domestic life, allowing the reader a shock of recognition. It is often funny, sometimes sad, always wise. All the Fishers are emotionally complex characters who reveal fresh insights into human nature and relationships. At a time when groups are springing up all over the country in order to provide instant intimacy and support for people lost in their selfhood and history, this is a novel demonstrating that love can be messy, silly, painful, and utterly idiosyncratic—that marriage and family can be uniquely defined. The Fishers are such a family, loving because they are bound, because they have the habit, and because the larger world can’t understand them. They love more than they know how to say, and they love beyond deserving.

For all our knowledge of psychopathology and sociopathology--and despite endless examinations of abuse and torture, mass murder and genocide--we still don't have a real handle on why evil exists, where it derives from, or why it is so ubiquitous. A compelling synthesis of diverse schools of thought, Psychoanalysis of Evil identifies the mental infrastructure of evil and deciphers its path from vile intent to malignant deeds. Evil is defined as manufactured in the psyche: the acting out of repressed wishes stemming from a toxic mix of harmful early experiences such as abuse and neglect, profound anger, negative personality factors, and mechanisms such as projection. This analysis brings startling clarity to seemingly familiar territory, that is, persons and events widely perceived as evil. Strongly implied in this far-reaching understanding is a call for more accurate forms of intervention and prevention as the author: Reviews representations of evil from theological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic sources. Locates the construction of evil in psychodynamic aspects of the psyche. Translates vague abstractions of evil into recognizable concepts. Exemplifies this theory with the lives and atrocities of Hitler and Stalin. Applies psychoanalytic perspective to the genocides in Turkey, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Revisits Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil." Psychoanalysis of Evil holds a unique position in the literature and will gather considerable interest among readers in social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and political anthropology. Historians of mass conflict should find it instructive as well.