Barbara Held, Bowdoin’s Barry N. Wish Professor of Psychology and Social Studies, is co-editor of Humanity’s Dark Side: Evil, Destructive Experience, and Psychotherapy, which was just published by the American Psychological Association.
Held has also received the 2012 Joseph B. Gittler Award, which recognizes “the most scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge, ” by the American Psychological Foundation, of the American Psychological Association.
Held’s book, which evolved from a symposium conceived by Held, is a compilation of essays by prominent writers on psychotherapy who offer disparate views regarding humanity’s “dark side,” defined as the capacity for destructiveness that ranges from the everyday little ways in which we hurt each other to atrocities such as genocide and slavery.
[blockquote]When did feeling bad turn into being bad?…By feeling bad, I mean feeling unhappy. And by being bad, I mean being a bad person, one who lacks virtue or goodness of character[/blockquote]
Is it common in the US to believe that being unhappy manifests lack of virtue?
Surely all who turn from Goodness, will in some ways, be fractured, experience contradictory desires and fail to flourish. However not all experiences of say grief of sorrow indicate that one has turned from the Good, for the Lord himself tells us that at least some of those who grieve are actually blessed and he seems to describe the whole of Christian life as, again in some way, a kind of mourning.