We’re going into that time of the year, at least here in the Pacific Northwest of Seattle, where the grey is coming. It’s that time of the year where life seems to slow down, folks are a bit more dormant, and for some a depression can begin to sink in. Winter is often a time to struggle and wrestle with ones life and ideas. It’s a time of introspection. Why not begin with a compelling read?
I recommend these 10 books for a few reasons. One is the obvious, that any time someone recommends a book its cause it likely in some way has spoken to them personally and had a huge impact. Which is certainly true in this case.
Second, though I come from a Humanistic and Existential Analysis background, I believe these books to be foundational books to life itself. Not necessarily the things of life like our jobs, belongings, relationships, but the current that runs through all things, that which all these things sit on top of - life itself.
Third, these books give you no instructions. They require something of you; reflection of yourself and action. Hopefully, the ideas presented here get you to think differently about the things of life and your own deep inner life.
Four, one could say that these books contain universal wisdom. Wisdom that transcends and also penetrates all life, regardless of race, gender, orientation, culture, demographic, etc. These things are a-part-of life itself.
Fifth, the mental health of a flourishing human is not a fixed, concrete, or static thing. It’s dynamic and changes just as we change. Put simply, mental health and human flourishing is a never-ending process or journey.
I’ve realized and have to keep in mind that as a therapist I have the luxury and also a responsibility to be continually invested on this path. Most people have day jobs and struggle to read more than a few minutes a day, if even that. At the end of the day, being a therapist is about giving presence and helping one another find our way home to ourselves. I believe these books are some of the best resources to get into and be on this journey and process.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
I discovered Joseph Campbell in just the last year and have found this to be an incredibly comforting read on the journey we take in our process of becoming more whole.
Campbell, an anthropological mythologist, is a man who has unearthed a golden thread that stretches throughout and is within all individuals stories. In studying world history and the cultural narratives, rituals, and practices throughout the world, he saw themes and dynamics that are present in the human journey throughout time and spanning across all cultures.
Campbell's work is genuinely existential in that he is dipping into and unearthing something of the essence of the person - what it means to be human no matter where you're from or what you do.
I'd also recommend, if you're in the States, to check out the Netflix series The Power of Myth. It's a highly accessible, understandable, and brief taste of what Campbell is all about.
I put The Hero With a Thousand Faces first, because you can get a glimpse of the person via media that’s still around. This is pretty important with regard to the first two authors on this list. You get a taste and experience of who they are, how they handle tough questions, and their own life.
When you watch the interviews, you get the sense that this work has changed Campbell. These aren’t just scholars who wrote some books but are people that wrestled with and integrated all this material, let it change them, until they were able to birth something so touching to the human spirit.
Anam Cara by John O’Donohue
There have been several books that have had an impact on me as a person, but only a few I would say have had an immense hand in the shaping of who I am on a profoundly deep or ontological level as Anam Cara by John O'Donohue. O’Donohue, a Hegel and Ekhart scholar, is also a poet and retired Catholic priest who has a profound way of talking about the deep things of life. He was able to talk about them in a beautiful and thought-provoking way that makes them practical and digestible to life.
Anam Cara is Gaelic for soul friend. O’Donohue essentially is talking about relationship and connection between all things. He does such a beautiful job illuminating and describing the invisible space between things that intimately connect us to one another. Much of O’Donohue’s philosophy and spirituality is based on the unity and connection of all things. O’Donohue, deeply influenced by his Celtic heritage, was a man of wonder, imagination, relationship, and deeply rooted in creation. Much of his writing was focused around these themes.
A major point to be taken from this Anam Cara, is that O’Donohue addresses the problem of dualism in the world. He states that the Celtic world did not view was not burdened by separateness and did not separate things that belonged together. All things were one.
I’ve had to replace my first copy because it was worn out. Unsellable because of all the marks. His use of words was profound and poetic. Penetrating the heart and the mind in such a way that I’m only able to read a few pages at a time because of how moving it is. Like Campbell, O’Donohue was an amazing human being and the world lost one of its most brilliant minds in his passing. I’ll share this opening paragraph of the book to give you a taste.
“It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, in rooms, on streets, on television, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together. Yet the uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.”
For an additional experience of the person of O’Donohue check out Krista Tippets On Being podcast.
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
There are a few characters in history who passed away or just disappeared shortly after the completion of a major work. Perhaps you could say their life's work was complete and it was their time to go. I'd say John O'Donohue was one of these people, along with Kahlil Gibran, the author of The Prophet. If you have a chance, look up some bibliographical information about him as a person, it’s quite fascinating.
I’ve never read a book that was more concise, heart felt, and packed full of wisdom about numerous life topics than The Prophet. Even in my work with clients as we explore their personal lived experience and meaning of money, relationships, suffering, clothes, marriage, and work, I regularly come back to Gibran in my mind.
It’s a book of poetry, and each topic is no longer than two pages. It’s regularly available online for free, but I’d highly encourage you pick up a hard copy as it’s one of the most densely and concisely packed books of wisdom I’ve ever come across. Here’s an exert from his poem on Joy and Sorrow:
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?”
Focusing by Eugene Gendlin
When folks come asking me for a general "self-help" book, the only one I recommend is Focusing by Eugene Gendlin. This book, like many others on this list, is so simple a child could learn it, while at the same time can be made immensely complicated.
Gendlin's work, which he originally published as a "new" philosophy in the 1960s is, in many ways, the foundational philosophy of many of the streams of somatic/body psychology that's been developing over the past 2-3 decades.
The process of focusing is quite simple. When something difficult comes up in our life, we give it space, we focus on it and it alone. We locate where in our body we feel something as we focus and give space to this thing that’s bothering us.
As we’re doing this, and begin to feel something within our body, we describe it as best we can. Is it hot? Cold? Tight or tangled? Heavy or light?
We make way for words and descriptions that will bring more detail to what we’re experiencing. Next, see if a word comes to mind, instead of searching for it. When one comes to mind, we test it against our gut and will know whether or not it’s true for us when there’s a notable bodily shift.
For a lot of folks this can take time before they begin to see a shift. I think as a society, we’re largely disconnected from our bodies and have over-valued cognition over feeling and the wisdom of the body. I’ve personally used this regularly over the past year and am amazed at how much of a difference it’s made for me. I use this method even when something isn’t consciously bothering me, but I give space to my being.
For a more advanced read, I'd encourage you to check out his foundational philosophical work Experience and the Creation of Meaning (1962). There are also tons of YouTube videos of him lecturing that makes the focusing skill quite accessible.
Nurturing Resilience by Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell
I put Gendlin's book before Nurturing Resilience because it's the philosophical foundation to much of the body psychology that's been developing over the past 30 years.
I came across this book a few months ago and found it to be such a good summary and integration of many new foundational books of body psychology. As a result, I've replaced one of my prior favorites, Levine's book Healing Trauma.
Authors of Nurturing Resilience Cain and Terrell have done a fantastic job making the research of attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, developmental trauma, psycho-somatics, and other forefront research areas accessible to the average Joe.
We're in a time in psychology where we are learning an immense amount of information around the intersection of the body/physiological process and symptoms and mental-health/psychopathology. It's viewed as a new wave in psychology right now, but these findings have been talked about in psychoanalytic literature, philosophy, and indigenous medicine for decades, if not centuries. It's just now that we have scientific evidence to back it up.
Resilience is in its essence, some measure of a person's ability to bounce back from adversity, stress, challenging moments, etc.
The Artist Way by Julia Cameron
I’ve worked with and had conversations with a number of “well to do” therapists or psychoanalyst and they’ve all explained that the challenge of creating a depth oriented therapist who embodies presence and subjectivity is getting them to experience there own subjectivity or experience in a free, non-repressed way.
The major piece that’s involved in The Artist Way is the “morning pages exercise” where you write or journal three pages every day. You can put whatever you want in the pages, you just have to fill three pages.
At times, filling those pages, is like fighting a battle. You find out what your psychological blocks are that keep you from noticing your experiences of life. In these moments you’re encountering your self, likely some shame, that has kept you from having more relationship with yourself. Every week you’ll being doing a more expressive or artist exercise as you’ll do creative exercises, which you’ll have more than enough time to experience and reflect on throughout your week and morning pages.
A piece of what this taught me is that we’re afraid of ourselves. Afraid of what we’re experiencing. Afraid to actually look at how our job is for us, afraid of how we feel with how our partner treats us, afraid of how we feel in relationship to our family. When we give space (the morning pages) to something in our life we allow our experience to grow and more consciousness of it to emerge. This is now the place of courage and responsibility, but it’s also an invitation to a more full and vitalizing life.
Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Sabbath by Heschel is actually a Jewish Theological book that I read in seminary in a course on the sabbath. The oversimplified definition of the word “sabbath” is that it’s a day of rest.
Not just any day of rest though. We’ve begun to distort what the sabbath, or rest, really is.
Heschel addresses this in quite a poetic and moving way. I include this book because we’ve come to a time when we don’t give our-self space to see what’s there for us. We don’t see what’s moving and occupying us, and what we’re dragging into our work and relationships.
Particularly in an urban setting, where we’re swept away in needing to work long hours, pay a high price for rest, and sacrifice many life giving connections. Rest itself, from time to time, should be difficult or even painful because there might be something their occupying us that we haven’t dealt with. At other times, it’s a time to be playful, even amidst tragedy. This is an existential theme that’s present throughout many of the titles on this list.
The Eden Project by James Hollis
What topics are more important to look into in our life, than relationships? I’ve read quite a few books on relationships. Most of them have some level of truth in them but a lot of them are quite long winded and overly scientific (or not at all). The Eden Project by James Hollis, a senior Jungian Training Analyst, in Washington D.C. who has been practicing for far longer than I’ve been alive and has written this book on relationships from that place of experience. Much of psychoanalytic literature, is written for the clinician, and it can be quite difficult to understand, let alone give you something to come away with and apply to your life. Not so with the writing of Hollis.
And still, this book is not for the faint of heart. I’ve had a number of folks tell me it was quite confronting. It’s a no B.S. deep dive into relationships. It’s highly provoking and will likely move you towards taking a look at yourself, what you bring into relationships, your experience of relationships, what your partner or others bring and treat you, the fantasies you and culture hold about relationships, what is love, what is a self, just to name a few.
The Eden Project takes a good honest look at what involved to survive and thrive in relationship both as and with a flawed person. No-one is perfect... that's reality. It's how we handle ourselves and the other when life shows up, and you can only be responsible for yourself. “The only way to heal relationship is to take full responsibility for one’s own individuation.” (p.82)
The Courage to Create by Rollo May
Rollo May was the one who brought Existentialism to Psychology in North America. He’s the American father of the tradition. He’s written quite a few books on numerous topics and is a prolific and prophetic voice in the world of psychology.
The Courage to Create was one of my second introductions to Existential Psychology and is again a foundational book to my own practice as a therapist and as a person. The key component of this entire book, as given in the title, are some of the most core existential themes embedded in all of human life: that our personal experience and lived life is what we create and that in order to begin living our own life requires courage.
These themes of responsibility, freedom, choice, and also wonder are highly compelling but also frightening because it inevitably moves us to reflect on our life and begin to value ourselves. What I’ve learned from being a therapist and a person is that this is in some way the therapeutic act to be with what’s there within the person, that is, their felt experience of life and this is, for some, horrific. In time though, and it does take time to chip away at ideas that are quite ingrained and a-part-of someone's life - you begin coming home to something more personal. You begin creating a life that is of your choosing.
Rollo May, the mentor and therapist to countless pivotal and parental figures in the field of existential and analytic psychology such as James Bugental, Irving Yalom, and numerous psychoanalysts who were at the William Alanson White Institute (a renowned school in the development of the relational turn in psychoanalysis) between 1948-1975 when he was the director or lead supervisor.
Family Ties That Bind by Ronald Richardson
Our families were our first context. We were born into them without a choice. They were the ground from which we began to grow and were nurtured by. I've never come across a more straightforward and digestible book to help clients understand and work with their family dynamics. This is one of the most recommended books in my private practice, and I generally always have it on my side table.
The timeless - or existential - truth that this book gets at is that we are the products of our past and our first relationships, our families, but we have a choice.
Our family is a-part-of us, but we are also a-part-from them and have our own individuality and can grow past the dynamics that are described in this book.
Bonus: Human Relationships
Don't go jumping to Amazon to add this to your wish list. You will not find it there.
But it might available be right next to you, in the cubicle across from you, or sweating up a storm as you work out together. There's a timeless truth, and it's present in all of these books, that we are relational people. Our lives are profoundly impacted by those we interact with.
As you read these books, you'll undoubtedly be exposing yourself to information that presents you with the opportunity to grow to new places in life, but nothing can replace the importance of actual human relationships.
My name is Caleb Dodson I’m a private psychotherapist in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, WA and I’m most passionate about bringing kindness to and excavating a sense of humanity in the most challenging experiences to bring about a more full life.