| I believe Authentic Love should be required reading for all therapists and a mandate for all Christian counselors.... Of particular benefit is Brennan Mullaney's synthesis of myriad therapeutic approaches into one, simple and comprehensive whole. He reaches perhaps the highest level of abstraction in his discussion of love, with the result being the simplification of heretofore complex reality.... This groundbreaking work makes it abundantly clear that the fundamental cause and the ultimate cure lies in our ability or lack therof to love and be loved. How utterly simple! How utterly difficult! How utterly true! --John Runda, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, University of Mobile
To whom would I recommend this book, Authentic Love? To everyone in the field of mental health, counselors of all kinds, anyone who works with others: teachers, pastors, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, et alia.... I am already blessed for having read it. --Rev. Monsignor Theodore H. Hay, S.T.L., who served as a mental health chaplain for twenty-five years
With impeccable logic and a crystalline simplification of human complexities, Brennan Mullaney's Authentic Love has revolutionized the mental health system. His explication of love as the basic drive of life and the root reason for our every emotion, action and thought, provides a hopeful new way for both lay people and professional caregivers to understand others, and themselves, too. Love therapy engulfs and subsumes, but also respects, utilizes and makes sense out of the hundreds of disparate theories floating around the therapeutic marketplace. --Mark Wiegand, P.T., Ph.D., Chariman, Physical Therapy Department, Bellarmine University
After years of clinical practice, consultation with other professionals, careful research, and feedback from reviewers, Mullaney has created a radical personality theory and its application in clinical practice. This is not an "easy read" and an open mind is required. Mullaney is candid as he shares his basic concepts and his long-held difficulties with various personality theories. Influenced by the work of Carl Rogers and Charles Truax, Mullaney came to the conclusion that Love was at the core of any success he had with clients, a conviction that firmed up his disbelief in the Freudian personality theory taught in graduate school. Based upon his own experience as a clinician and based upon discussions with other clinicians, the key factor in therapeutic success was the relationship between client and therapist. He identified love as the basis for successful therapy and set about developing a personality theory that explains love in human functioning.
In the Introduction and in the first paragraph, Mullaney throws down the gauntlet: "Love alone heals. This is the fundamental premise of love therapy, a new model of psychotherapy introduced here." Mullaney credits his skepticism with Freud's personality theory as well as the sterile theories of the behaviorists for his motivation to develop love theory and how it impacts psychotherapy. Love seated in the heart is a core concept in his personality theory. In the area of human functioning, "love is normal" and that "not loving is abnormal." He is not afraid to describe a "psychospiritual heart" and some of the mystery experienced in intimate, loving interaction.
Mullaney adheres to the basic Hebrew-Christian tenet that a first cause or God exists and humans are created with the spark of life (God is Love) at the core of the self. He maintains that his personality theory and therapy applications are valid if a person believes in other first causes other than God. Readers who are tired of our culture equating love with sexual intercourse will appreciate this definition of love: Human love is a fusion of psychospiritual hearts, an experience of intersubjectivity, a communion of uniques in their uniqueness, an interpenetration of beings, a dynamic mutuality of subjective selves given, received, and so fully united that even some of the otherwise unknowable spiritual mysteries of the heart become known. Love is the power that enables us to risk a leap into mystery -- believeing, trusting, and hoping in the unseen and unproved goodness of others, ourselves, and God, risking that we will not be hurt. "Love is Reality" sounds like a theological concept and requires attention to the precise language in defense of that Principle. Readers oriented to the experimental method will be challenged to reread this chapter.
In Part Two, Mullaney redefines emotional disorders as wounds of the psychospiritual heart. At first reading, one is tempted to laugh at this concept. Mullaney defends his concept as no more laughable than a physicist's description of the ultimate unit of matter. Only pure love is permitted into the core of the heart. This is love characterized by faith, hope and trust. The love exchange between therapist and client is a necessary prerequisite for movement toward health on the part of the person who has a damaged heart, i.e., disorder. This sort of love exchange alleviates fear, enables one to control anger, and deal with guilt.
In Part Three, the application of Love Therapy to Major Mental Disorders assumes that the mental disorder being treated has no physical origin. Most therapists working one to one with clients suffering a major mental disorder will appreciate the insights shared in this Part.
AUTHENTIC LOVE is a daring challenge to clinical social workers, clinical psychologiest, psychiatrists, nurses, and counselors. Mullaney's personality theory is less mysterious than that of Sigmund Freud and more in tune with personal experiences than that of Pavlov or Skinner. With some refinements and revisions, AUTHENTIC LOVE can take its place as a graduate school textbook. Clinicians who read this work will be moved to love their clients and patients.
The reader with a knowledge of Hebrew/Christian Scriptures and with an orientation to Scholastic Philosophy will find it easier to understand Mullaney's principles. Spiritual directors can benefit from a meditative reading of AUTHENTIC LOVE. --Joseph Emmanuel Willett, Ph.D., retired clinical psychologist, former CEO of a multi-county community mental health organization, former president of the Kentucky Psychological Association, and former member of the Psychology Licensure Board of Kentucky.
People reading Authentic Love: Theory and Therapy will be quick to recognize that Brennan Mullaney's simple, yet complex translation of "love" effectively takes the mystique and fear out of helping people with emotional problems. Psychotherapists surely will discover that Mullaney's love theory issues in a veritable revolution in mental health. I shall leave the evaluation of "love therapy" to others -- except for two notes. First, Mullaney argues that there will never be enough professionals to help a world full of people with emotional problems, so teaching people to help one another with expert, "down-to-earth love" is the only alternative. Secondly, I have watched Brennan Mullaney take his love ideas to several social agencies and even to state government as he continually refined the love principles now formulated in this book. The testimony I offer is this, "Authentic Love is a direct product of the author's 'talking the talk and walking the walk.' Authentic Love is the real deal."
Perhaps the most surprising fact testifying to both the revolutionary impact and validity of this theory is that the author actually had the audacity to bring the word "love" into the stodgy halls of government and persuaded bureaucrats to provide funding and staffing for a program founded precisely on that worn-out old word. I know. I was there thirty years ago when Mullaney persuaded me and others in the Department of Child Welfare on the "love" concept. That love-centered program, Community Resource Development, involved some nine thousand (9,000) people within three (3) years. Mullaney proved that by challenging citizens to put "love" to work, average people could produce hundreds of programs to help thousands of children and their families. The Community Resource Development program was cited as a model for child advocacy in a "national baseline study" by Alfred Kahn, et. al. (Child Advocacy, Columbia University School of Social Work, New York, 1973).
This is a powerful book with a powerful message. When we accept Mullaney's first principle that every human act is motivated by love, and that every human being has the capacity, right and responsibility to love and be loved, then Authentic Love is readily seen to be an "Everyman Book." Think about this for a moment. Authentic love if properly understood can be a catalyst to revolutionize not only psychotherapy and personality theory, the way we human beings treat each other. Indeed Authentic Love becomes a handbook for the love-centered revolution of social systems throughout the world. Interestingly enough, this same call to revolution was first uttered just over two thousand years ago. --Bill Ryan, Vice President, Jane Addams Hull House (1994, 1996); Deputy Director, Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (1974 to 1994); Deputy Commissioner, Kentucky Department of Child Welfare (1970 to 1974)
For the first time, I have found a book that provides a comprehensive understanding of all human behavior, written in understandable language that clergy and lay people alike have always needed. With amazingly simple concepts, Mullaney shows how every single human action, every emotion, every dream, every desire, every mental and emotional disorder, are the results or expressions of the singular, fundamental drive to love and be loved.
Authentic Love Therapy does work! I grew up in a love-deprived environment; not only at home, but in school and church as well. By the age of nine, I believed that I was a mistake or an accident of God -- far beyond God's ability to save. At the age of seventeen I was into drugs and alcohol, trying to medicate the pain. It seemed like nothing worked. The only other option was suicide. Four steps away from suicide, God intervened. That intervention came in the form of authentic love. With the help of some good therapists, friends and God's grace, authentic love has turned my life around.
I highly recommend this book; not only to therapists and counselors, but to pastors and ministers as well. This is the bridge between Psychology and Spirituality that we have been looking for. It is time that the barriers between these two camps were brought down. There are too many people out there depending upon us. --Rev. Leo Kennedy, OFM Conv., St. Francis Xavier Church, Brunswick, GA
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