The "basic restlessness", germ of anxiety, is according to Paul Diel, the common characteristic feature to all living beings, for it is determined by their dependence on an external world which may oppose obstacles against the satisfaction of vital needs. This book shows us with a catching precision in which way does, at the human stage, take place the reversal of anguish, nonetheless the driving force for evolution, into pathological anguish with all its individual and social consequences. But moreover, it shows the way in which pathological anguish can be overcome, and dynamically reverted into joy.

The "basic restlessness", germ of anxiety, is according to Paul Diel, the common characteristic feature to all living beings, for it is determined by their dependence on an external world which may oppose obstacles against the satisfaction of vital needs. This book shows us with a catching precision in which way does, at the human stage, take place the reversal of anguish, nonetheless the driving force for evolution, into pathological anguish with all its individual and social consequences. But moreover, it shows the way in which pathological anguish can be overcome, and dynamically reverted into joy.

I was lucky enough to be introduced to Diel by a French friend. Diel doesn't hold anything back: by page 7 he reveals the meaning of life ("harmonius satisfaction of multiple desires"). Diel's intended audience was probably students of psychology, but writers bored of the hackneyed "mythic structure" instilled by the popularity of application of Joseph Cambell's work to screenwriting will revel in what Diel has to offer. But more than improving my writing, I feel reading Diel has made me a better person--and for that, I rank this as one of the most important books an adult person can read.

Furthering the steps of Joseph Campbell, deeper than J. P. Vernant, less poetic but more rigorous than Mircea Eliad, not as structurally biased as C. Levy Strauss, more versatile than Freud's Totem and Taboo, Paul Diel's work supplies an analysis which applies to any religious story or any myth at any period in time in any geographical region. This is a book for a lifetime. Confronting Paul Diel's enlightments with Rene Girard's analysis offers a path for anyone interested in getting wiser. Hard to read but more than worth deciphering.

It is impossible to admit that divinities were the result of vain fabulations, for it has been proven historically that faith in mercyful divinities exerted an immense motivating influence. The symbolic expression, foundation of every nation's culture, previews in images the psychic conflict between unsensible and sensible intentions. This book sets the basis for the understanding of metaphysical as well as ethical symbolization.

In this basic book, Paul Diel shows that innermost motivations, unlike the mobiles of action, are the secret personal intents: inner tensions. Often repressed, and removed from conscious control, they are our ulterior motives (arriere-pensees). If such is the case, it follows necessarily that inner motivations, which decide essentially of our activity, cannot be studied but by way of introspection, which ensures the feasibility of a curative self-control.

This book restates and applies to education and reeducation the psychology of motivations. It proposes a new answer, based on a deep-seated biological definition of the origins of the values love and sociability, to questions relative to social and individual life. Either being concerned by education or self-reeducation, it is only through becoming aware of our inner motivations and our unconsistent value judgments, that one may answer to the real questions of life.

Psychosomatic medicine, which owes to Freud the discovery of subconscious thought, restitutes its deep-seated meaning to the Hippocratic formula "mens sana in corpore sano" (A healthy soul is a healthy body). In order to endorse its complementarity to medicine, the psychology of motivation, outpassing the pan-sexual doctrine, has to take into account the role of imaginative exaltation in the "disorders of the mind" and in psychopathic symptoms.