Becker Books

This book covers everything a massage therapist needs to know, things I wasn't even taught in massage school. If you want to know it all, get this book. It is wonderful and I plan on using it as THE massage book for the massage school I am opening this year.

First head this series on XM Radio and loved it great story lines and relaxing to the mind. would love to find the other parts this has episodes 1 -4 and there are 13 total that goes through Beckers adventures and even in to his past that always seems to seep in to his tasks. Great to have and replay over and over

I was prepared to consider the money spent on this book as money wasted--the author's name was so ridiculous, a silent-film heroine, Norma Desmond name. My interest in the Rosenthal-Becker case led me to purchase the book. I am glad that I did.
Ms. Delmar is a first rate writer who brilliantly conveys time and place. I owe her an apology.
This autobiography contrasts her artistic parents' disintegrating marriage with a tremendous news story of the period. Her father's street morality contrasts with that of her somewhat primmer mother (who was right about the case, as it turned out.)
Even if you know nothing about the sensational 1912 murder, this is a book that will charm you.

When I received this book from an antiquarian book store, my initial reaction was disappointment. I was looking for primary source material about the infamous Becker-Rosenthal case of 1912, and "The Becker Scandal- A Time Remembered" was a work of fiction.

I almost sent it back. But I'm glad that I resisted the impulse.

Vina Delmar has written a surprisingly engaging story told from the perspective of a nine year old girl whose family is nearly destroyed by the emotional undertones of the Rosenthal murder. Herman Rosenthal was her father's friend yet a figure of contempt for her mother, whose sympathies lie with Charles Becker and his saintlike wife, Helen. Delmar has done her homework, as evidenced in the accuracy of her treatment of the trial and its aftermath.

Historic fiction, yes. But an intriguing look at Mr. and Mrs. (and Miss!!) America during one of the previous century's most politically and emotionally charged murder trials.

The book is well written. It portrays the struggles of Ramona to find and learn to express her power as a woman. In the male dominant environment in which Ramona grew up, her story mirrors the efforts of other women to break free from emotionally abusive mates. Becker portrays the hard work and dedication necessary to dig out from such circumstances in soul baring honesty.

In any species, the clinical signs and symptoms of the acute allergic reactions are the end results of a number of intricate sequences of biochemical reactions initiated by the combination of antigen and antibody. An understanding of these diverse biochemical reactions is essential to an understanding of the accute allergic reactions at the cellular, tissue, organ and systemic levels. This symposium, held in Italy in June 1967, is the first entirely devoted to the subject. It brings together investigators working on the same or different in vitro systems and has delineated both areas of general agreement and areas requiring further exploration. The vigour of the discussion reflects the excellence of the manuscripts and the timeliness of the subject. The published record of the symposium should serve as a summary of the present state of knowledge for those who wish to enter the area and should provide a biochemical foundation for those already concerned with the more biological aspects of hypersensitivity reactions.
--- from book's dustjacket

This is a real "course", not just a number of experiments in a row to introduce techniques. The course takes you from soup to nuts in making a "biotechnology" product, instructing the student in the most important of molecular biology techniques along the way. Safety and record keeping are stressed. The student will gain technical knowledge and also will really see and understand how a product, in this course an enzyme, can be made from a cloned gene. The idea of teaching techniques on a continuum is really a great idea. Though the second edition is now a few years old, the methods are tried and true and haven't changed so don't let the date stop you. The writing is succinct and there are helpful hints for the instructor for getting the lab classroom set up, etc. I think this course would be appropriate for an advanced high school biotech class, a post-secondary technial school or college, or undergrad college class. I highly reccommend this book.

The Birth of Meaning

Meaning begins with Becker's unraveling of the mystery of how the mind evolved. Simply put, the mind is an organism's style of reacting to its environment. The world of meaning is built up out of the range and subtlety of the mind's reactivity. Through "fine-tuning," the animal learns to condition his reactions, and from there, on to making mental associations and higher forms of mental processing and learning. Mind then is just a progressive increase in the freedom and sophistication of an organism's ways of reacting. Freud gave us a map of how this process of reactivity is constituted within the brain's architecture. The "id," a remnant of the instinctive and reptilian brain, is uncontrolled "reactivity; the ego seeks to control and delay the reactivity of the "id." This delaying allowed for the ability to see ahead, plan and decide. The super-ego adds a "top-down" moral dimension to this structure.

From this basic understanding, of reactivity, Becker's story of the development of mind is simply this: That the imperatives of being a "meat-eating mammal" and the complex social requirements of, being around females in constant estrus, caused the turning of a complex evolutionary wheel that ended in an unfolding of all the reactivity of the mind that we have come to recognize as the characteristics we now call human: the ability to plan and reason; the use of language and the invention of social organization and culture.

The developmental sequence that results is clear and straightforward: Meat-eating required hunting; a successful hunt against larger animals of course required cooperation. Cooperation on the hunt, and the avoidance of internecine conflict -- over the continuous sexual stimulation provided by monthly estrus -- mandated, planning, symbolic or abstract thinking, and most of all complex social interactions, which led to social organization and culture. Social organization and symbolic thinking led directly to a culture based on language and then on to its most evolved social expression a "cultural hero system;" a system where the primary sustenance was no longer based just on fighting for sex and meat alone, but also on symbolic rewards such as status and roles based on self-esteem: Pride in ones own ability became a survival tool that was more important than (and in many instances replaced) the familiar animal need to fight over food and sex.

Symbolic rewards resulting from complex social interaction and organization caused the ego to evolve. According to Freud, the ego then became the "guard dog" over the more primitive "id," and the control tower for the body. It organized time; delayed a need for immediate reactivity; protected against disorder, chaos and anxiety; and most importantly introduced a consciousness of (the self), an "I."

As Becker puts it, abstract thinking (and consciousness) itself is basically a "sneak preview" of the thing we intend to experience. Through reflexive and abstract thinking, the ego builds up a symbolic world safe for the body by first "conquering" and then "colonizing" the process of disorder and anxiety manipulation. By developing the ability to preview and "play out in the mind" anxious situations, man was able to attenuate -- if not completely defang -- them of their fear content.

Becker, along with Freud's other protégés, (Adler, Jung, Rogers, Rank, Brown, Perls, in particular) parted-company with Freud's phylogenically-linked instinct interpretation of anxiety and neurosis, and despite giving us a masterful analysis of how conscience is implanted, according to Becker, Freud misunderstood the Oedipus complex and thus failed to explain guilt and the true nature of the conscience. And while empirical evidence still does not support Freud's neatly crafted biological instinct-driven theory of anxiety, the disparate refutations of it, do not, when taken together quite add up to a full-fledge coherent and comprehensive alternative to it.

Acting very much like several blind men trying to discern the correct outlines of an elephant, Freud's disciples, each made individual contributions within the scope of their own limited and often isolated islands of theory. But the final "pulling together" and synthesizing of these pieces, remained undone until Becker's work. Becker is one of the few psychologists who could see the whole elephant, or light at the end of the long dark Freudian tunnel.

The Middle

The middle of the book is the story of what Freud missed: the grand motive of man, the central law of human nature, what existed on the ground floor of the "Grand Existential Hotel:" self-esteem. In retrospect, it is now easy to see that "self-esteem' is just a natural outgrowth of early ego efforts at anxiety-manipulation: We learned to make the world safe for ourselves by doing what those who control our well-being (our trainers) want us to do. We shape ourselves into the kind of people who can take for granted the approval and support of those who control our wellbeing. We are both "reality-adjusted" and "socially-adjusted" throughout life in order to gain the qualitative feeling of "self-value:" the epitome of ego development and the basic predicate for human action.

The child must learn how to switch modes of maintaining self-esteem from the body to the mind. Or put another way, from the biological (ones own body) to symbolic codes of behaviors (coming from the public mind) -- all in an effort to be accepted and supported. Feelings of self-value are thus "artificialized" when they are "mapped" from the body to the mind, and then onto "accepted" and "sanctioned" symbols. Feelings of self-value are turned into a linguistic contrivances. The rest of a person's life is then devoted to the protection, maintenance, and worship of the symbolic edifice of self-esteem that he has built up. Life itself becomes a movie of images of self-worth. The newsreel in our mind is an ongoing test of whether, as Jessie Jackson used to say, "we are somebody." In our own private inner movies, the most subtle and most minor of events, and the finest discernable differences and gradations take on enormous importance: Symbols tend to chop reality into a very fine grid indeed. When the newsreel records a bad deed or negative image, we immediately try to balance it off with a positive one. At this stage we have accomplished complete socialization: We have been thoroughly "reality-adjusted" and thoroughly "socially-adjusted."

The roll of culture in Shaping the Character of Man

Thus, our self-esteem is very much based on our social role in society. The plaudits of the market place are the driving force of mankind. Our whole life is an exchange of "peddling of our resumes" to each other. The process of socialization, the process of humanization is an exchange of "animal worth" for "symbolic worth." It is others who decide who we are and what we are worth. Our character is a social creation, a grand social production. The basic process of character formation results directly from our need to be somebody in the symbolic world, and to, at the same time, try to accommodate to the superior powers of our trainers; and from all of this somehow also be able to salvage our own sense of superiority and confidence.

The Death of Meaning

The crowning achievement of "symbolic man" is to be able to "act in an arena of primary meaning and values." For all of mankind, this arena is the cultural hero system: the axle of the wheel that makes man's self-esteem machine turn. Without it, man is marginalized, left to struggle alone on the outskirts of existence against unknown, sometimes unknowable and insurmountable odds and adversaries. With it, he is (or at least appears) to be "somebody." His meanings, his values, and thus his worth are all tied to something larger than himself: It is connected to the cosmos, to religion (collective immortality project), to society, to and thus ultimately to an arena that can give him the ultimate illusion of appearing to cheat death. But alas, these illusions, the comfort of this community neurosis, comes at the same price as all other illusions: They extract a cost on man's freedom and on his definition of what is to be considered his own sanity: What does it mean to gain a whole symbolic world and still lose ones own soul?

The struggle of man meanings end where they began: alone in denial, with only his illusions to comfort him.

Five stars.

I read this book as a college assignment in the late 1960s. I expected little from it, and was merely duty-bound in reading it. When I finished it, my first thought was a phrase from Goldman's Temple of Gold: I'd "found the handle." It explains, in the most straight forward manner, how language is implicated in the meanings that the culture - and all cultures - lay out for us, and consequently what are the motivating factors in all peoples actions. Subsequently, I have read the book some seven times; each time, drawing from it, a new, refreshed understanding of the concept of "self-esteem," and its role in the actions of people as varied as Mother Theresa and George Bush, and the spectrum of folks between them.

My son, age 8, picks this book up again and again. We've tried lots of "I'm bored" books, but this one really has great ideas.