The first edition of The Human Quest for Meaning was a major publication on the empirical research of meaning in life and its vital role in well-being, resilience, and psychotherapy. This new edition continues that quest and seeks to answer the questions, what is the meaning of life? How do we explain what constitutes meaningful relationships, work, and living? The answers, as the eminent scholars and practitioners who contributed to this text find, are neither simple nor straightforward. While seeking to clarify subjective vs. objective meaning in 21 new and 7 revised chapters, the authors also address the differences in cultural contexts, and identify 8 different sources of meaning, as well as at least 6 different stages in the process of the search for meaning. They also address different perspectives, including positive psychology, self-determination, integrative, narrative, and relational perspectives, to ensure that readers obtain the most thorough information possible. Mental health practitioners will find the numerous meaning-centered interventions, such as the PURE and ABCDE methods, highly useful in their own work with facilitating healing and personal growth in their clients. The Human Quest for Meaning represents a bold new vision for the future of meaning-oriented research and applications. No one seeking to truly understand the human condition should be without it.

A fascinating journey for anyone who wants to learn more about the search we humans share: the search for an almighty universal presence in our lives.

Does life have real meaning? Is it worth living? How can one make sense of suffering, illness, and death? Through the ages, philosophers, clergy, and laypeople alike have grappled with such existential concerns. Some have taken the position that deep questions about meaning are unanswerable, that ideally one should take life as it comes. Recent studies have shown, however, that the way in which individuals address existential concerns has profound implications for their mental and physical well-being. We are symbol-making creatures. The quest for meaning is now regarded by many as a universal human motive--as fundamental as our need for food and water. One of the tenets of several new therapies is that an existential vacuum lies at the heart of neurosis and depression. Empirical research has clearly demonstrated that a strong sense of personal meaning is associated with life satisfaction. From a lifespan perspective, the struggle to construe meaning is a never-ending task; its effectiveness seems to predict much about personality development and successful aging. The mediating role of personal meaning in coping with stress has also received increasing attention. No matter how hopeless the situation and how devastating the pain, we are more likely to survive if we cling to the belief that life has some purpose. In this volume, leading representatives of trends converging from different fields examine the complex processes of meaning seeking, and offer the first authoritative review of the central role of personal meaning in human life and its implications for clinical practice. Brimming with new ideas for research and intervention, The Human Quest for Meaning will be an important resource for all those professionally concerned with mental and physical health.

In A Quest for Humanity, Menno Boldt presents a persuasive new framework for achieving a human social order in the global age. Boldt explores the concept of 'the good society' as a world in which every person can realize their potential for humanity through liberty, social justice, and equal human dignity. A Quest for Humanity innovatively positions globalization as a deterministic phenomenon of expanding interdependence and shared knowledge — resulting in ever-larger economic and political jurisdictions, but also creating social and psychological links between peoples across the world. Boldt challenges mainstream certainty that Western democracy and constitutional human rights are the exemplary doctrines for the global good society. With a fresh vision designed to inspire a universal acknowledgement of human dignity, A Quest for Humanity powerfully affirms the value of each human being.

Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was—that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology—the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire—and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries," including "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.