cover image Freeing the Soul from Fear

Freeing the Soul from Fear

Robert Sardello. Riverhead Hardcover, $23.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-57322-133-7

In contrast to most popular self-help books, such as Gerald Jampolsky in Love Is Letting Go of Fear, Sardello counsels that the challenge is not to escape fear but to confront, embrace and transform it. A psychologist and co-founder of the School for Spiritual Psychology, Sardello (Love and the Soul) offers a largely philosophical treatise on the soul's relationship to fear, supplemented with visualization exercises geared toward improving the use of the imagination in understanding the soul and its dilemmas. Whereas most current writing on the soul is based on Jung's depth psychology, Sardello favors the work of Jung's contemporary Rudolph Steiner, who went further in acknowledging the effects of the outer world of relationships and culture on the soul. In Sardello's view, fear is not a transitory feeling or experience but a permanent, objective presence. Among the topics he explores are the effects of fear on the body; ""perennial fears,"" such as money worries; fearful relationships; and the fear of suffering and death. A former colleague of Thomas Moore and James Hillman, Sardello presents some innovative ideas, such as his view that the practice of therapy has been a cultural testing ground for a new empathy-centered way of human relating. However, these notions are rendered less interesting than they might have been by his penchant for abstraction and his occasionally pedantic tone. Agent, Katie Boyle, Veritas Literary Agency. (Nov.)