| For
over 30 years, a truly original thinker, London psychotherapist Bill Howard,
has been engaged in a private, part-time analysis of the culture, customs, habits
and lifestyle of the North American people. Unique amongst contemporary studies
of human relationships, Bill examines the full range of America’s social
and interpersonal processes and proffers a candid, compassionate and uncompromisingly
honest diagnosis of what he calls: ‘ … the many self-engendered psychological
difficulties and complexities that afflict American intimate interaction.
With disarming simplicity, clarity and perspective Howard
vividly explores and explodes the myths and distortions of American relationships.
Drawing on incisive personal observation the author identifies an involuntary
but self-imposed suppression of his natural masculine instincts, urges and impulses
by the American male and isolates a cluster of unique forms of emotional instability,
confusion, rage and conflict being endured by American couples since the end of
the Civil War.
In his new book Letter To America
Howard asserts that America is a quagmire of sexual deceit, distortion, manipulation,
fantasy and fear. To this lifetime student of America the truth is unquestionable;
the people are psychologically and sexually shackled, hiding their real selves
from the world, never totally involved, and either afraid to listen to their feelings
or too frightened to feel at all. And, with the honest exchange of feelings now
impossible, they are suffocating in a state of self-induced emotional paralysis,
while no-one has the slightest idea how to go about solving the problem.
Out of his unconquerable conviction that the American
people will continue to lie buried under layers of emotional negativity and remain
forever unable to confront the issue without ‘outside’ intervention,
Howard has set out on a one-man crusade to smash what he interprets as America’s
phoney, psycho-social veneer, to lance the boil of their poisoned relationships
once and for all and put into effect a national recovery programme designed to
provide American couples with a blueprint for extinguishing the vast psychological
web that keeps their sexual impulses in check, for improving their understanding
of each other and for reshaping their relationships the way they would wish them
to be.
This refreshingly honest volume would appear
to achieve the goal of explaining the source of the distinctive emotional problems
of contemporary America for the first time proper, and providing a bold answer
for bringing lasting and beneficial change to the confused, detached and unfulfilled
lives of its millions of citizens. |  | Liz
Baxter |
| 'Highly thought-provoking
… Shows imagination and courage… Howard deserves to be taken very, VERY
seriously… His robust common sense may be the first step towards restoring
sanity to American relationships...' | |
Sir Peter Lloyd-Reynolds |
| "Pulling no punches,
Bill Howard explains not only how Mr America lost his domestic freedom but how
he can reclaim it! 'Letter to America', the devastatingly accurate, relationship
masterpiece that is set to take all America by storm is the book for 21st Century
American man… a must!" (our italics) |
At last…
America, always so hard to understand at a distance, is explained. By drawing
on a huge range of empirical data a British psychoanalyst has disentangled the
maze of American relationships to present an integrated overview of American mental
life in simple, understandable prose. For me, Bill Howard’s brilliant new
book Letter To America demystifies ‘the American experience’
and brings a deep and profound expansion of our understanding of that country’s
values, attitudes and lifestyle characteristics.
Focussing
a white-hot searchlight on every facet of their unique lifestyle, the author boldly
yet convincingly puts the pieces of the American puzzle together. It’s all
here - the idiosyncracies, quirks and oddities of American life, their causes
- and even a cure. Americans may act slick, casual and happily lavish their attention
on materialism but we should not mistake their apparent composure and back-slapping
congeniality for genuine ease. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.
The sad reality is that they are secretly plagued by self-destructive forces,
stricken by a collective emotional anaesthesia. Americans’ lives are glowing
with superficiality whilst their emotions lie frozen behind a collective mask
of pretended happiness through materialism. Rigidly clinging to the safety of
emotional estrangement, they are too frightened to experience passion, unwilling
or unable to experience intense emotions or lose themselves in their sexual experiences.
Howard’s well-argued postulate is that comparatively
minor social imbalances have had momentous results, and created a society which
has strayed so far from the path of natural human instinct it clutches at every
esoteric straw in the wind. He convincingly asserts that despite its many flattering
appearances the country is psychologically sick to its very core and, in example
after example, this riveting volume certainly manages a credible account for virtually
every unique feature of America's unique lifestyle characteristics.
More
importantly, in challenging many of our traditional preconceptions the author
brings a broad and profound understanding to America’s complex social and
intimate dynamics. Weaving diverse strands of its cultural manifestations into
a distinctive tapestry, the origins and causes of America’s rampant inter-gender
frictions are meticulously explained while their obsessions with sexual imagery,
health, looking young, entertainment and materialism are interpreted in full and
satisfying manner.
Highly eclectic (behaviorism and
feminism are expounded alongside female mud wrestlers and gangsters), nothing
escapes the author’s eagle-eye as, with incisive and shrewd psychological
observation, he accounts for practically every recognisable trait, mannerism,
characteristic and cultural manifestation that identify America’s unique
modes of behaviour and the social values, attitudes and beliefs that help shape
them.
All couples go through challenging times of
course, but Americans, as we have come to know, more than most, and require a
different approach to helping disengaged or unco-operative partners. After explaining
how to move their unconscious feelings and thought patterns out of emotional anaesthesia
and into awareness, Howard offers his American readers fresh insights into how
to establish new relationships that are genuine and unaffected, and how to introduce
greater freedom through fearless honesty into existing ones.
He
goes to pains to ensure the realization is driven home that the most important
lesson is about ‘balance’, and gives practical advice to couples on
how to avoid problems and hold each other accountable for their choices and actions
without challenging episodes, how to avert power-struggles and ‘going-nowhere’
dialogues and how to re-invigorate their partnership by facilitating change through
genuine solutions.
This explosive page-turner may shock
America to its core but it deserves the psychological world’s attention and,
if America finds the courage to read it with an open mind, they will find it is
much more than just about relationships; it shows how to cultivate courage and
freedom in an increasingly hostile world. By bringing together many diverse elements
Howard has created a masterful mosaic of the American psyche and, if he is right,
his theory will surely cause a paradigm-shift in the principles of interpersonal
psychology of tectonic proportions. | | Eleanor
Huxley |
| "Bill Howard says the
unsayable - and that is what makes him right! 'Letter to America' is one small
step for man, one giant leap for American men - and their partners…"
|
| "This timely and lively-written
landmark study successfully extrapolates the inner essence of the American psyche…"
|
LETTER
TO AMERICA, psychoanalyst Bill Howard’s in-depth interpretation of America’s
relationship problems, sex wars, social values, attitudes and behaviour may well
prove to be the most important book ever written on the subject. Tempered by appropriate
sensitivity this sometimes tersely-expressed account provides some profound insights
into emotionally-stifled America; a land of more complicated secrets than could
possibly have been imagined before now.
In short,
Howard claims to have isolated a 'collective emotional psychoneurosis', a specifically
North American inter-gender dysfunctionality which afflicts all Americans throughout
their lives! Americans, he asserts are, as a result of ‘cultural conditioning’,
psychologically unwell, emotionally numb and sexually repressed. What's more,
this saccharine-coated disorder has apparently been contaminating communication
between American men and women for well over a century.
First demolishing mountains of psychobabble and then driving a truck through America’s
defensive behavioural veneer, new psychology-writer Howard then gently peels off
layers of confusion, anxiety, repession and denial to reveal a deep-rooted sickness
that he claims afflicts the collective American psyche. This is followed by a
fascinating and logically-compelling analysis of the sexually-disempowered American
male who apparently languishes in secret, rage-ridden, emotional anaesthesia,
trapped in a psychological prison entirely of his own making. Howard convincingly
explains the reasons for Mr America’s emotional paralysis, for his misunderstanding
of masculinity and misinterpretation of his natural role, while the sexual connotations
to skyscrapers, blondes, gangsters, guns, Showbiz, explosions and even going to
the moon are conveyed with a depth of meaning not present in previous offerings.
This debut book is a candid yet constructive critique
of America which offers radical new insights with great simplicity of exposition.
In all, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the fact of a massive psychological
aberration; however, the author’s findings not only explain the causes and
manifestations of the malaise but also include creative strategies for tackling
relationship problems and dissolving barriers to happy and honest interaction.
Howard shares his observations with the fervent hope that it will also force America
to see itself from a more realistic perspective as he forthrightly challenges
its people to rekindle long-frozen emotions and to discover their ‘true selves’.
Each chapter offers great insight and clarification and,
by the end of the book, Americans will certainly have had the most original and
honest outsider’s view of their society ever! Though it does not fall within
any single, recognisable category, this structured analysis should rock America
to its very foundations - and, the author hopes, the beneficial reverberations
felt by generations of Americans to come! | | The
Sunday Chronicle |
Many wonderful
advances in disease diagnosis and understanding have been made during the
scientific and medical explosion of the 20th Century, yet an ever-growing body
of evidence suggests that humanity is actually less happy and settled today -
and certainly more neurotic - than previous generations. Some argue that a prime
source of much emotional illness is America and, in submitting his identification
of The American Neurosis and the social origins of such a disorder, Bill Howard
contends that there is enough commonality between America's unique cultural features
and acquired characteristics of the populace to suggest that they are derived
from a single source of social maladjustment. He asserts that most elements of
America's unique lifestyle are manifestations of this one condition.
Howard
claims that the malaise itself is a form of national contagion, ie. an emotional
state with the tendency to spread and which has allowed unique environmental demand
characteristics to come into play. It is fuelled by obscure contradictory forces
which wreak emotional havoc and which are so far-reaching that a degree of intimacy
in human communication has been lost. Americans, he claims, live lives boxed in
by uncertainties of every kind. Emotionally estranged from each other, anxiety
and conflict underlie their every thought, word and deed; cut off emotionally,
they are lonely and emotionally bankrupt. Within their distorted perspectives
they are rarely satisfied with their lives yet have little idea what they would
like better, always feeling they are missing something but never quite sure what,
always wanting to change but not knowing how.
The neurosis
has flourished only because of the unwillingness of people to confront it, to
ask the hard questions. US Talk Shows make a pretence of offering help but do
not ask the right questions either, so, having become immune from the demands
of normal relationships, Americans now base theirs on assumptions and expectations
which are completely wrong. Paralysed by emotional inertia they have little sense
of how they would like to be different and engage in discussions about 'centering',
'self-nurturing', 'empowerment' which Howard dismisses as meaningless waffle.
The constant deluge of new approaches and 'instant cures' for unhappy relationship
advanced by America's legions of self-help gurus has not worked (because, according
to Howard, America's psychology experts are just as sick as their clients!) while
an increasingly desperate population constantly change everything but what they
should. Their search is blurred by the lack of the very thing they seek: vision.
Meanwhile, as their dissatisfactions and perceived deficiencies
inevitably grow, the American people continue to push boundaries in search of
an elusive something, the most visible result of which is their frenzied consumer
culture, while domestically, mundane disagreements between partners yield disproportionately
severe consequences leading to constant resentment and bitterness rather than
honest understanding. Worse, by refusing to acknowledge their emotional sides
to avoid the possibility of painful experiences they resort to 'faking it' (in
and out of bed!) and, in so doing, have made a pallid mockery of genuine, honest
social and sexual interaction.
While Americans constantly clamour for change
Bill Howard believes that just waiting for change to happen brings nothing. He
claims that it has to be actively pursued, and has mapped out a strategy for first
weaning them off emotional negativity and then helping them explore and develop
their interpersonal capabilities to the maximum. He believes that despite many
national, ethnic and cultural distinctions the laws of humanity are universal
and Americans must be helped to master their essence. His aim is to bring a permanent
solution to the interpersonal landscape by using new breakthrough techniques which
will generate a renewed sense of hope throughout America and then provoke the
momentum to help the people escape the relationship traps they have created for
themselves.
In this regard he has devised qualitative and
quantitative therapeutic intervention strategies to first facilitate recovery
from the condition and second, to enable Americans to listen more closely to their
intuitive senses and feel the intensity of real emotion - to connect with the
world and not just wander through life - so that they are able to find the courage
to trust someone enough to be truly intimate, to make and keep relationships that
are in harmony with each other's desires and demands and thus happy and fulfilling.
| | Ranjit
Vethakhan | |
