By exploring the concept of the tender gaze in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors.

The way I understand the gaze of God to have a defining influence on spiritual growth and development has, as its overarching image, the way a mother gazes at her infant at the breast: It is a gaze that is tender; all-absorbing; exclusive; filled with wonder and love; tranquil; and protective. Just as the mother’s gaze engages the infant in a dialogue without words and provokes a response, so too the gaze of God evokes a response from the human heart. Just as the mutual gaze of mother and infant sets up a relationship which becomes the basis of communication, so too the mutual gaze of God and the soul become the basis for prayer. The main insight of the book is that the movement into union with God is circular rather than linear; that it is not exclusively a movement into something new, something that has not previously occurred, but is also, and more importantly, a movement towards recapturing something which has already existed, namely, that relationship we enjoyed, albeit pre-consciously, at our mother’s breast when God looked upon us and saw that we were very good.

"An important novel, rich in compassion for its anguished characters." —The New York Times Book Review This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.

This timely and innovative expose by contemporary Jungian psychoanalyst, Ken Kimmel, reveals a culturally and historically embedded narcissism underlying men's endlessly driven romantic projections and erotic fantasies, that has appropriated their understanding of what love is. Men enveloped in narcissism fear their interiority and all relationships with emotional depth that prove too overwhelming and penetrating to bear--so much so that the other must either be colonized or devalued. This wide-ranging work offers them hope for transcendence. Explores: Transcendence of Narcissism in Romance Men-s Capacity to Love Kabbalistic Mysticism Post-modern Philosophy Contemporary Trends in Psychoanalysis