Mitchell Ritter
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Mitchell Ritter

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Born and raised in New York City, I left for university when I was just 16. A series of happy coincidences led me to an unplanned trip to Switzerland where I discovered a new path, enrolled as a student at the Universite de Geneve in their Clinical Psychology Program. At the time, Jean Piaget was still active, as were several of Carl Jung's original collaborators at the Jung Institute. I had the privilege of studying simultaneously at both institutions, ironically strictly ignoring each other. But for me, they joined the cognitive and the emotional from a developmental perspective. I married, raised a family, and spent 30 fascinating years in a European world, speaking languages other than English, and developing an real understanding of just how culturally conditioned psychology, psychiatry and basic societal values are. The French, as the self-declared founds of logic (Descartes), are fond of disqualifying their interlocuteurs by declaring their positions as illogical. Yet they have an uncanny tolerance for their own contradictions which disturbs neither their thinking or their conclusions in the least. This maddens the Anglo-Saxon world - myself included - until I was able to truly understand and accept their basic premises. This example applies to all cultures, and represents a significant challenge to not only Europe or Asia or any other region, including our own - for we are all children of all forms of diversity. I returned to the US in 2002, and experienced my own "reverse" culture shock, for not only had I changed, but the US I had known - having missed the 1980s amd 1990s - no longer existed. I became a student of these changes and the psychological costs they had imposed, for technological progress brings with it operational advantages, but tremendous human dislocation and difficulties - most often denied and ignored here in the face of economic progress. Mr. Hide's progress is a short story based on real life experiences of someone I knew well. I observed his personal struggle to find that original part of himself which had been lost in his growing from a boy to a man. The demons he thought banished from his consciousness lived in the shadows, infecting his emotional life, poisoning quietly but surely his self-image and the values he had chosen to live by. And in the end, when faced with the possibility of finding real love, jettisoning that heavy burden he carried with him everywhere and which ensured one failure after another, he could not relinquish the "security" of an unhappy present, fearing more the uncertainty of a future he would have to build. This story is by no means his alone, for in my practice, I have found it time again in those who want to change their lives, have an opportunity - for Life can also be generous, yet when they must let go and cross into the unknown, the look out across the new frontier, then turn around and go back to their self-proclaimed prison. Who could leave this question unanswered. Not me.
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