New Book Released: How to Laugh Your Way Through Life: A Psychoanalyst's Advice

New York, NY, October 17, 2013 --(PR.com)-- While living in anti-Semitic Vienna, Freud wrote in a letter to Ernest Jones, "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." Tragicomic attunement—seeing the comic in the tragic and the tragic in the comic—is a perspective on life that, following Freud, is one of the best ways to "to ward off possible suffering" and better manage the stressors, anxieties, and worries of everyday life.

In chapters on love, work, suffering, death, and psychoanalysis, the author shows how the "nuts and bolts" of tragicomic attunement and intervention can be cultivated and used to help people better manage the harshness, if not outrageousness, of life, as well as more deeply engage its beauty and nobility. Unlike most books on the psychology and philosophy of humor, and following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wonderful advice—"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes," this book is replete with jokes, humorous stories, and amusing maxims and quotes making it a lively reading experience that aims to help people fashion the "good life"—a life of deep and expansive love, creative and productive work, that is aesthetically pleasing and in accordance with reason and ethics.

As tragicomic master Mel Brooks noted, "Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you," and becoming more attuned to its dynamics and applications in everyday life is the art of living the "good life."

“Paul Marcus has hit the nail on the head or should I say the nerve of the heart, a heart that is ticklish. A beautiful book showing the tragicomic richness of humor as part of life, as aid to living, as opener of soul dimensions, affi rming of everyday life touched by transcendence. He takes us on a tour of humour in psychoanalysis, culture, life and death in many modes, adding to our appreciation of who we are and what life is. I laughed and cried and learned through the ways that truth and love and fun can tickle, touch and enlighten.” - Michael Eigen, PhD, Author of Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis

How to Laugh Your Way Through Life is available in print and ebook formats.

Book Information:
How to Laugh Your Way Through Life: A Psychoanalyst's Advice
Author: Paul Marcus
Publisher: Karnac Books
ISBN: 978-1780490953
Published: March 2013
Pages: 176
Genre: Self-Help, Psychology

About the Authors:
Paul Marcus, PhD, is a supervising and training analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Being for The Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis; Autonomy in the Extreme Situation: Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps, and the Mass Society and Ancient Religious Wisdom, Spirituality and Psychoanalysis, among other books. Dr Marcus is married with two children and lives in Great Neck, New York.

For more information, review copies, or interviews please contact:

Constance Govindin @ Karnac Books
c.govindin@karnacbooks.com

Paul Marcus, Author
E-mail: Tibs9@aol.com