Growth and Guilt: Psychology and the Limits of Development - Tapa dura

""Growth and Guilt is an outstanding book of vision and scholarship, stylishly written and skillfully translated from Italian. It is an ocean of western thought distilled into one volume." -"The Economist "Zoja's book--richly instructive and strongly felt--takes on the great question of all western psychology: its devotion to expansion. By placing personal psychology and all the therapies within the limits of western history, culture and myth, Zoja shows the millenial denial of limits--hence our concomitant haunting guilt. A truly basic book; it can change your mind." -James Hillman

The relentless exploitation of the earth's resources and technologys boundless growth are a matter of urgent concern. When did this race towards the limitless begin?
The Greeks, who shaped the basis of Western thinking, lived in mortal fear of humanity's hidden hunger for the infinite and referred to it as hubris, the one true sin in their moral code. Whoever desired or possessed too much was implacably punished by nemesis, yet the Greeks themselves were to pioneer an unprecedented level of ambition that began to reverse that tabu.
If it is true that no culture can truly repudiate its origins, and that gods who are no longer potent can vanish but still leave behind a body of myth which coninues to live and assert itself in modernized garb, then our concern with the limits of growth reflects something more than an awareness of new technological problems - it also brings to light a psychic wound a a feeling of guilt which are infinitely more ancient.