Inner Conflicts (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781685712440)

What should I do? What is the right thing to do? What do I do when I don't know what to do?

The difficulty in answering these questions does not come from a lack of knowledge but a deeper problem that requires us to look inward (and outward). Inner Conflicts is an antidote to the difficulty we feel when we don't have the answer to our own questions. Certainty and confidence are prized qualities, both personally and politically, but Inner Conflicts looks to connect with readers who are rightly suspicious of this valuation and are searching for something different.

Using cases from clinical material, literature, pop culture, and politics, the chapters traverse the jagged terrain of our conflicts and, in doing so, articulate the unspoken doubts, uncertainties, and insecurities many of us feel today. Rather than getting us stuck, Inner Conflicts shows us how attending to our conflicts can "unstick" us from the foreclosure of certitude. Neither a simple critique nor a defense of uncertainty, Inner Conflicts contends that only when we acknowledge all parts of the argument within us can we fully attend to the urgencies and particularities of ethical and political life.