In this exciting and original work, Gerald Alper, illuminates the crucial elements that together constitute intimacy. Knowing If It's the Real Thing offers a radical departure from today's popular, yet mythological belief that if two people stay together, in an adaptive, productive, and moderately mutually enhancing way, they will achieve the most a relationship can offer. Some issues discussed in the book are the basic ingredients and rudimentary ground rules of "postmodern intimacy;" how to discover the arena in which one feels most comfortable in expressing intimate feelings; the many ways that sincere efforts to connect can completely misfire; and how to build up defenses, dodge self-reproach, and retain one's dignity and sense of trust following a serious break-up.

Within the last few decades a dizzying array of scientific disciplines and "explanations" of the motivating forces behind the profound enigmas of human behavior have emerged: sociobiology, cognitive psychology, game theory, experimental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, "existential" neurology, social psychology, genetics, and other attempts at interdisciplinary thinking. Each, according to its own reductive approach, strives to separate, isolate, examine in laboratories and through experiments extracted from real-life experience, and thereby "understand" the most complex aspects of being human--including our subjectivity; morality and altruism; our economic survival and our irrational biases that affect it; our innate need for religion and wonder; and the cross-cultural stalwart, humor.But as Alper argues in his exciting and challenging new work, this sort of contemporary balkanization of the human mind actually achieves the opposite of its purpose. Rather than unraveling and illuminating the "Ur" source of a particular behavior or mindset, it merely shrinks the richly threaded tapestry to a single frayed thread dissevered and abstractly disconnected from the everyday experiential realities of human existence.Examining the assertions and fallacies of the theories conceived (or contrived) by some of today's most brilliant scientists and thinkers (including Dan Ariely, John Barrow, Pascal Boyer, Frank Close, Nicholas Humphrey, Richard Dawkins, Stanley Milgram, Oliver Sacks, and Carl Sagan), Alper explores why these varied attempts at joining the world of experience and the world of measurement so regularly fail, how consciousness explained is really a concentrated effort to explain away the subjective phenomena of consciousness.From the psychic rat to the gorilla in the room, from British double-agent Kim Philby to comedian Steve Martin, "The Incredible Shrinking Mind" not only offers a provocative and entertaining critique, but also a profound and practical solution: the psychodynamic approach, which takes seriously the question of meaning and not solely observable behavior, which combines the quantitative and the experimental with the human and multidimensional, which seeks to understand not just how but why. No single equation, no theory, no dazzling fMRI image of the hidden brain can ever accomplish this for us. It must be patiently done, one person at a time.

Examining the assertions and fallacies of the theories conceived (or contrived) by some of today's most brilliant scientists and thinkers (including Dan Ariely, John Barrow, Pascal Boyer, Frank Close, Nicholas Humphrey, Richard Dawkins, Stanley Milgram, Oliver Sacks, and Carl Sagan), the author explores why these varied attempts at joining the world of experience and the world of measurement so regularly fail, how consciousness explained is really a concentrated effort to explain away the subjective phenomena of consciousness. From the psychic rat to the gorilla in the room, from British double-agent Kim Philby to comedian Steve Martin, The Incredible Shrinking Mind not only offers a provocative and entertaining critique, but also a profound and practical solution: the psychodynamic approach, which takes seriously the question of meaning and not solely observable behaviour, which combines the quantitative and the experimental with the human and multidimensional, which seeks to understand not just how but why.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient, the first book of non-fiction written by Gerald Alper, is also the first serious attempt to explore in depth the dynamics of the yet-to-be recognized, unfulfilled and usually perplexed fledgling artist. The artist tries to live in two separate worlds: a factual, linear, banal, reality-driven outer world that is best kept at arm's length; and a creatively organized, aesthetically orchestrated, dramatically engaging inner world that is forever being obsessively cultivated. Indeed, facilitating the patient in his or her efforts to forge a usable bridge between these generally discontinuous worlds is no small part of the task of the therapist who elects to work with such young artists.

Self Defense in a Narcissistic World explores a new, basically unrecognized and highly prevalent everyday addiction: power trips. Author Gerald Alper examines the disastrous consequences of this simple but insidious, and largely unconscious, cultural and psychological phenomenon. Discussed in the book are vivid everyday occurrences of power trips, including myriads of "therapy trips," or subtle power transactions between therapist and patient. A key section is then devoted to revealing the strategies and dynamics of power trips. The author also offers a sober consideration of consequences suffered when the psychodynamics of a power trip are performed on the world stage.

Power Games is a brilliant exploration of the psychodynamic strategies unconsciously enacted to spare the person the imagined pain and frustration of an authentic encounter. Although such strategic power operations can be characterological, they do not have to be: all people, even those rare individuals who are capable of ongoing intimacy, are forced at moments of fraility or interpersonal indecisiveness to play power games, and certainly the culture at large pervasively sponsors the enactment of opportunistic interpersonal strategies. In this new book, Gerald Alper, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patientwas called by the New England Review of Books "one of the most important modern studies of the psyche of the creative personality that we have," continues his profound examination of the obstacles that stand in the path of the true intimacy.

In Narcissistic Giving, Gerald Alper chronicles the unconscious defenses, gambits and strategies by which fightened people seek to escape the imagined terrors of relating to one another and to themselves.