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Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation Through the Demystification of Suffering
Embracing Achieving Liberation Through the Demystification of Suffering employs a multidisciplinary examination of the relationship between oppression and suffering. Written for professionals as well as the general public, a framework is provided for understanding the causes and forms of oppression and why these constitute injustice, the dynamics of self-deception and how ideology utilizes these to portray the social causes of suffering as individual and intrapsychic maladies, and the ways in which illusions spun by the powerful stifle awareness and undermine opposition and dissent. Having provided this foundation, a path for openly facing and accepting the suffering inflicted by oppression is provided. Exposing toxic illusions can be a wake-up call that brings with it pain, fear, and anger. However, these responses can be transformed into powerful forces for personal and collective liberation. Working hand-in-hand with those whose minds and hearts have been opened to the costs of social injustices due to neoliberalism, a different and more compassionate way of being that promotes the optimal well-being of all is possible.
370 pages, Paperback
Published November 26, 2019
About the author
Frank Gruba-McCallister
5 books1 followerFrank Gruba-McCallister, PhD, received his degree in Clinical Psychology from Purdue University. He is currently retired after having taught for more than thirty-three years at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology-Chicago, Adler University, and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology-Chicago. He has been the recipient of numerous of awards for excellence in teaching. He also served in academic administration at all three schools.
In the latter part of his career, he became particularly committed to advancing the role of psychology in promoting social justice. Based on this, while the Vice-President of Academic Affairs at Adler, he oversaw the revision of all degree program curricula to provide students with education and training to be socially responsible practitioners. This innovation in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program was recognized by Adler University receiving the 2007 American Psychological Association’s Board of Education Affairs Award for Innovative Practices in Graduate Education in Psychology, a prestigious and highly competitive honor.
During his career Dr. Gruba-McCallister had a number of professional publications and presentations in the areas of working with the issue of suffering in clinical settings, spirituality, existential approaches to psychology, social activism, and psychology’s role in advancing social justice. These interests are integrated in his recent book, Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation through the Demystification of Suffering. He also addresses these topics in on-going contributions to the online platform, Medium. Prior to teaching, Dr. Gruba-McCallister provided clinical service primarily to individuals in a medical setting and in private practice.
Dr. Gruba-McCallister can be reached at frankgrubamc@outlook.com.
In the latter part of his career, he became particularly committed to advancing the role of psychology in promoting social justice. Based on this, while the Vice-President of Academic Affairs at Adler, he oversaw the revision of all degree program curricula to provide students with education and training to be socially responsible practitioners. This innovation in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program was recognized by Adler University receiving the 2007 American Psychological Association’s Board of Education Affairs Award for Innovative Practices in Graduate Education in Psychology, a prestigious and highly competitive honor.
During his career Dr. Gruba-McCallister had a number of professional publications and presentations in the areas of working with the issue of suffering in clinical settings, spirituality, existential approaches to psychology, social activism, and psychology’s role in advancing social justice. These interests are integrated in his recent book, Embracing Disillusionment: Achieving Liberation through the Demystification of Suffering. He also addresses these topics in on-going contributions to the online platform, Medium. Prior to teaching, Dr. Gruba-McCallister provided clinical service primarily to individuals in a medical setting and in private practice.
Dr. Gruba-McCallister can be reached at frankgrubamc@outlook.com.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 6, 2022
Words fail to express how utterly blown away I am by this book.
It’s a monumental achievement.
Embracing Disillusionment is Psycholgist Frank Gruba-McCallister’s magnum opus on the mystification of suffering in late capitalism.
A great companion read with The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. See my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Amongst other things, this book is a fantastic introduction to Liberation Psychology and Critical Psychology.
Liberation Psychology studies the impact of internalized and oppressive sociopolitical structures on the psychology of marginalized and impoverished people, and seeks to alleviate suffering via social and political change.
In other words:
Liberation psychology wants to understand how stuff like capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, materialism, and consumerism effects how you think, feel, behave, relate and understand yourself and your place in the world.
And how we can free our minds from all that toxic deviltry.
Critical psychology is a closely related subfield that draws extensively on critical theory in order to deconstruct and challenge the individualistic, reductionist meta-narrative undergirding mainstream psychology.
Critical psychology rejects many of the assumptions of conventional psychology, particularly those that that locate the source of suffering as exclusively within individuals.
Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology fails to consider how power dynamics between social groups impacts mental health. And identifies conventional psychology as complicit in the mystification of oppression and class/race/political based suffering by explaining psychology predominantly at the individual level.
Critical psychology asserts that social inequities and injustices are also important sources of suffering, and as such promotes social change as a means of preventing and treating socially determined psychopathology.
Critical psychology asserts that the study of the psychology of the individual, isolated and decontextualized, is the study of the “wordless person”.
In the same way cartesian dualism is criticized for perpetuating a harmful “mind/body” split. Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology perpetuates an equally spurious and harmful “person/environment” split.
This is problematic because people are in fact, highly impacted by their environmental and sociopolitical context.
If someone is anxious because they are subjected to racism or poverty or political oppression, aren’t we part of the problem if we pathologize their actually quite appropriate anxious response?
By directing clients to “look within” cultural workers, including clinicians, are perpetuating the notion that master narratives like capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, and classism are “natural facts” and further mystify the suffering they cause by exclusively focusing on adapting the individual’s internal process and behavior.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of addiction treatment. When people become addicted to drugs and alcohol, we focus exclusively on their individual factors, and only secondarily refer to social determinants of addiction.
It can be said that capitalism is just as addicted to drugs and alcohol as any junkie. Capitalism is dependent on the mechanisms of addiction.
Capitalism is also addicted to industrial medicine. Capitalism needs people to become addicted, and it needs people to be sick.
Medicine treats pain, at the expense of suffering. Addiction is suffering born from avoidance and resistance to pain, and a failure to value suffering as an opportunity for growth in and of itself.
The reductionistic biomedical model’s focus on masking or deferring pain in the immediate short term, in denial of the likely or inevitable suffering this practice engenders in the long term, is rooted in neoliberalism, mind/body dualism, and a general failure to understand the mechanisms of suffering and the value of radical acceptance.
Drugs and alcohol do not solve the problem of suffering. They simply mask it temporarily, while concurrently lowering the threshold overtime, and disempowering users and so far as they imprison us in addiction, and corrode our mental and physical health, and make our lives unmanageable in the process.
The environment is becoming ruined, and we are all commodified, and as such, we are all caught in a vicious cycle of addiction.
In an America that makes happiness an imperative and promotes the myth that nothing stands in your way except your own shortcomings and pathologies, much of human suffering becomes mystified.
Demystification entails not just insight and personal change, but concomitantly clear vision as to external mechanisms of suffering, and an eye toward progressive social change.
Great book.
This thing is a MONSTER 👹 rrrAARRRR!!!
5/5 stars ⭐️ (wish I had a 6th star to give it)
It’s a monumental achievement.
Embracing Disillusionment is Psycholgist Frank Gruba-McCallister’s magnum opus on the mystification of suffering in late capitalism.
A great companion read with The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. See my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Amongst other things, this book is a fantastic introduction to Liberation Psychology and Critical Psychology.
Liberation Psychology studies the impact of internalized and oppressive sociopolitical structures on the psychology of marginalized and impoverished people, and seeks to alleviate suffering via social and political change.
In other words:
Liberation psychology wants to understand how stuff like capitalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, materialism, and consumerism effects how you think, feel, behave, relate and understand yourself and your place in the world.
And how we can free our minds from all that toxic deviltry.
Critical psychology is a closely related subfield that draws extensively on critical theory in order to deconstruct and challenge the individualistic, reductionist meta-narrative undergirding mainstream psychology.
Critical psychology rejects many of the assumptions of conventional psychology, particularly those that that locate the source of suffering as exclusively within individuals.
Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology fails to consider how power dynamics between social groups impacts mental health. And identifies conventional psychology as complicit in the mystification of oppression and class/race/political based suffering by explaining psychology predominantly at the individual level.
Critical psychology asserts that social inequities and injustices are also important sources of suffering, and as such promotes social change as a means of preventing and treating socially determined psychopathology.
Critical psychology asserts that the study of the psychology of the individual, isolated and decontextualized, is the study of the “wordless person”.
In the same way cartesian dualism is criticized for perpetuating a harmful “mind/body” split. Critical psychology asserts that conventional psychology perpetuates an equally spurious and harmful “person/environment” split.
This is problematic because people are in fact, highly impacted by their environmental and sociopolitical context.
If someone is anxious because they are subjected to racism or poverty or political oppression, aren’t we part of the problem if we pathologize their actually quite appropriate anxious response?
By directing clients to “look within” cultural workers, including clinicians, are perpetuating the notion that master narratives like capitalism, neoliberalism, racism, and classism are “natural facts” and further mystify the suffering they cause by exclusively focusing on adapting the individual’s internal process and behavior.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of addiction treatment. When people become addicted to drugs and alcohol, we focus exclusively on their individual factors, and only secondarily refer to social determinants of addiction.
It can be said that capitalism is just as addicted to drugs and alcohol as any junkie. Capitalism is dependent on the mechanisms of addiction.
Capitalism is also addicted to industrial medicine. Capitalism needs people to become addicted, and it needs people to be sick.
Medicine treats pain, at the expense of suffering. Addiction is suffering born from avoidance and resistance to pain, and a failure to value suffering as an opportunity for growth in and of itself.
The reductionistic biomedical model’s focus on masking or deferring pain in the immediate short term, in denial of the likely or inevitable suffering this practice engenders in the long term, is rooted in neoliberalism, mind/body dualism, and a general failure to understand the mechanisms of suffering and the value of radical acceptance.
Drugs and alcohol do not solve the problem of suffering. They simply mask it temporarily, while concurrently lowering the threshold overtime, and disempowering users and so far as they imprison us in addiction, and corrode our mental and physical health, and make our lives unmanageable in the process.
The environment is becoming ruined, and we are all commodified, and as such, we are all caught in a vicious cycle of addiction.
In an America that makes happiness an imperative and promotes the myth that nothing stands in your way except your own shortcomings and pathologies, much of human suffering becomes mystified.
Demystification entails not just insight and personal change, but concomitantly clear vision as to external mechanisms of suffering, and an eye toward progressive social change.
Great book.
This thing is a MONSTER 👹 rrrAARRRR!!!
5/5 stars ⭐️ (wish I had a 6th star to give it)
December 17, 2022
Hell of a first book Frankie! I’m not educated enough to do it justice with an academic review, but I can say that for myself and for the masses, we’ve been going through life looking at reality through a certain aperture and Frank just comes in and confidently and tenderly opens that aperture way the fuck wide! Now look! Oh my eyes my eyes. And my third eye. Never the same. He shines light into the darkness of suffering and our way of navigating suffering in a way most have not considered. This is not prima materia content, so it’s not an obtuse, meandering mess like some of the most prolific thinkers of our time. Nor is it a tertiary publishing, meant for bookstore windows, that short blond actress’s book club and self-help addict indulgence. It sits snugly in the middle - a deep dive into available knowledge, studies, wisdom. An amalgam of Erich Fromm, Alan Watts quotes, to reflective pondering that would honor Barry Lopez, to partnership oriented solutions right out of Riane Eisler’s playbook. Worth dedicating a highlighter, colored pens and notebook if you want to take applicable meaning out of it. If you’ve been looking at life, like looking through the windows of a house, Frankie takes the roof off and let’s you look at it all from above. This book may live on and be a reference for the continued works of many to come. Ties my year together nicely and for that, this dude abides..
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews