Sublime

Adler (1973) regarded perfectionism as an indispensable part of life, a striving to rise above feelings of dependency and helplessness. Understanding one’s personal power, for Adler, involved maximizing one’s abilities and using them for the good of society. Maslow (1971) equated the full realization of one’s potential with the absence of neurosis.

Fritz Perls, MD, the psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy. He said, “Fear is excitement without the breath.”

In the 1950s, an American psychoanalytic therapist severed his Freudian roots and turned to the Stoics to form a radically new form of therapy. Rather than plumbing the depths of the content of a problem and exploring how a stumbling block might relate to, say, one’s early psychosexual development, Albert Ellis argued that we should look at whateve