::ABOUT THE BOOK::

Love and Knowledge: The quest for personal meaning is a seamless integration of poetry, philosophy and psychology that helps the reader feel the relevance of psychotherapy to pivotal relationship dilemmas. James Donnelly, psychotherapist, poet and philosopher takes us on a two-phase journey in this exquisite little volume.

In the first phase, Knowledge of Good and Evil, the author outlines the basic process of psychotherapy and the essential dilemmas at the root of difficulties in relationships. Highlighting the interplay of reality and experience, he leads us to revise our understanding of identity and our struggles with control and self-esteem.

Then, in the second phase, Windsongs in Season, we are taken on a poetic venture that brings breath, color and life to the prose description of psychotherapy that precedes it. The metaphoric winds of life are chronicled throughout a journey from the fall from innocence through the seasons of life - to the one truth that survives the journey: "our searching must be with each other, not in and for each other."

Compassion and love are found "between us" in relationships. Love and Knowledge: The quest for personal meaning demonstrates how psychotherapy can help us get there.

THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU IF….

• You are presently considering psychotherapy and are not sure how it can help
• You are currently in therapy and want a clearer focus or overall view of where it's going
• You are a clinician in training or a student of Psychology, Social Work, Art Therapy or Psychiatric Nursing
• You are a therapist looking for a brief, clear and precise description of therapy to orient and motivate your clients
• You are an educator in the Humanities or the Helping Professions
• You are a lover of poetry about love, life and relationships

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::ABOUT THE AUTHOR::

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Dr. James Donnelly studied Philosophy and Theology at Maryknoll Seminary where he completed his undergraduate studies. In 1972 he obtained his Master's degree in Social Work from New York University and in 1987 graduated from Adelphi University upon completion of his Doctorate in Clinical Social Work with a specialty in Family Therapy.

Over the past twenty eight years, Dr. Donnelly has practiced clinical, supervisory and administrative social work in both medical and mental health settings. He has been the Director of Social Work at Goldwater Memorial Hospital and is currently Director of Social Work at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in New York City. In 1993, he was the President of the Metropolitan New York Chapter of the Society for Social Work Administrators in Health Care.

Dr. Donnelly lives with his wife in New York City and maintains his practice of psychotherapy there.

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::EXCERPTS::

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Preface

The desire for innocence and the avoidance of guilt and loss favor the preservation of the known world and its familiar relationships. They bind the longing to know and love to prescribed ways. Yet, moments come to all of us when we must choose between pleasing the gods and knowing our own reality.

In the quest for personal meaning, the fundamental arena of inquiry is relationship. We must confront the paradoxes of love and knowledge, courage and truth, fidelity and freedom at the heart of all relationships if we are to achieve the understanding that leads to a secure and meaningful self. Such understanding is gained only “…by risk of heart’s desire.” The drama of love and knowledge in relationships plays out around the flame of risk, fueling a sense of personal meaning. The desire to be innocent inhibits passion for life and diminishes the light of meaning.

The first part of this book is an essay on the process of psychotherapy. It highlights the importance of facing the dilemmas of knowing and loving in relationships.

The second part, a collection of poems, offers snapshot images of life and love; images which dance with the paradox of knowledge, love and loss.

These reflections are offered with a profound sense of debt and gratitude to all with whom I have and do share life, love and work.

BEYOND THERAPY:

Happiness, pain and loss

Although most who seek therapy are usually not happy, happiness is not a product of psychotherapy. If there is anything that can be called a product of effective psychotherapy, it could be characterized as an expanded capacity to inquire, discover and create; a stronger identification of our self with that capacity within the context of our relationships.

We actually experience our relationships as a complex, dynamic network of mutually defined expectations and meanings shared with our intimates, families and communities. Effective psychotherapy would lead us to a greater capacity to negotiate changes in these mutually defined expectations in order to assimilate and accommodate emerging realities within one’s self, group or circumstance.

Whether we actually choose to engage in such negotiations at a given point in time is a moral or ethical decision of profound consequence. Having the capacity doesn’t guarantee the act. Whether we are happy or sad as a result of such choices, could depend on many things such as the intensity, rigidity and power balance of the participants in the negotiation as well as the clarity of our own spiritual and moral stance. Inquiry has always a consequence.

~~~

Outside the Garden of Eden, pain and loss are indifferent to capacity or accomplishment. The knowledge of good and evil surrenders the desire to be innocent and accepts the caprice of pain and death. Death is indifferent to innocence or guilt.

However grounded our sense of self is in the ability to inquire and discover or flexible the intercourse between the foreground and background aspects of our identity, pain and loss are essentially beyond our control. In their caprice, they challenge our capacity to make sense. The inevitable assault of pain and loss, no matter what the circumstance of their generation, present us with a profound spiritual dilemma:

To incorporate pain and loss is to endure its challenge to our sense of meaning and hold the question without a guarantee of relief;

To reject and construct one’s life to avoid them as evil is to impair our capacity to feel, to know and to be present to one’s fellows.

Therapy can only bring us to the realization that there is a choice.

WINDSONGS IN SEASON:

Poems about Life and Love

The wind has always been a powerful symbol of life for me. I can remember as a child lying awake at night listening to the wind, and in some inarticulate way, feeling beckoned. It felt both seductive, with hints of freedom and adventure, and frightening, with the dangers of the unknown.

Throughout my life, I have both courted and feared the wind. Most of the poetry in this little volume was written during times of great change in my life and the wind always appeared as the sustaining metaphor.

One’s dance with the wind reflects the cyclic excursions to the borders and boundaries of our defined lives. When more frightened, we struggle with the wind and try to create or impose constancy by force of will. We batten down against its beckoning; yet we long for it and flirt with it. We are like Odysseus tying himself to the mast to experience and be enlivened by the bewitching song of the sirens … from a safe and manageable distance.

Sometimes, in these journeys to the boundaries of our defined lives, we cross over … but not too far. Sometimes, we cross over and never come back.

The wind seems to laugh at our efforts at control. Listen to it through the trees or on the surf. The wind laughs! It plays with us, buffets us with its paradox: it not only can, but will take the very life it gives you.

I have found that the possibility of true joy requires an embrace of this laughter. Try as we may, we cannot establish a secure sense of meaning through constructing the circumstances of our lives by force of will alone. Meaning is discovered not imposed, and often in the very capricious blow that disrupts our carefully constructed circumstances.

Life, through some untoward event, can take away all you expect of it; a child, a spouse, a friend, your own health. The capriciousness of it is felt as absurd. Yet, through or with or in spite of that pain – pain that somewhere always abides, you either find a way to perceive the essential meaningfulness of joining the wind, or you give up and something in you dies.

Somehow, our ability to be trustworthy is rooted in our embrace of this paradox of caprice. I don’t see how one can freely love or allow oneself to be loved without owning a sense of the ridiculous. Whatever love is or grounded upon, it is not in the maintenance of meaning in our own or each other’s lives by force of will alone.

We truly join each other in joining with the wind.

THE FALL

through pain
of first love lost

i was delivered

you were my mother
and i touched you

i was your friend
and you taught me
though i well knew
how to fly

how to walk

then on your way you stumbled
the dark November night
enclosed you
far beyond my reach
and cries

i wanted you to need me
but you didn't

whirlwinds tore me
from the web of my desires

to see

your silence gave us both
our freedom

and love abides the wind

through letting be
and surrender of its dreams

GOOD FRIDAY

the wind
blows petals from the trees
clouds
race before and fade the moon
and love
wraps its truth in dreams
for life to blow away

revealing

one knows only
by risk of hearts desire

REFLECTION

what we look for in each other
cannot be found
for all we are
is the searching for our being

for a while we deceive ourselves
to see in each other
containers
for what we need and want
and feel we lack

but in the end
after the excitement and the dance
we are left again
with the pain of our questing

that, perhaps,
is grace
and an opportunity to know
that our questing must be
with each other
not in and for each other

then in the freedom
of that letting be
we can join in the pain of our questing
to search for our being
in the right place
that at least can be
the beginning
of compassion

and making way for our loving and being
to become
even more apparently

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