Marking Time

By Herbert Rappaport

Book Overview

Professor of psychology Herbert Rappaport shares the importance of timing as he examines the fundamental issues involved with planning and living in order to help readers realize that time is the most... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067174027X
• ISBN13: 9780671740276
• Release Date: July 1991
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Human relationships to time can be indicative of pathology or help the struggling move forwards towa

This is as much a book about Dr. Rappaport's clinical discoveries, research, and insights about how people percieve and relate to time, as it is a self-help manual. His inspiration to examine this issue and draw upon the research of others and later to perform his own research on this issue was sparked early in his career by an encounter with a schizophrenic in the mental hospital where he was working at the time. To his surprise, this young woman who was hospitalized for schizophrenia did not exhibit hallucinations or delusions (and in today's practice of psychology, would most likely be diagnosed with something else) but she did have a distorted perception of future time which led to an inefficient use of time and difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior, which made her non-functional enough for her to need to be in the supervised environment of the hospital. Dr. Rappaport shares several insights he discovered about other clients with recognized mental disorders or everyday life challenges, and about how the exercise of plotting a timeline upon which you note significant events in your past life as well as time ranges for future goals can help patients with insight and goal-directedness, provide fodder for psychoanalysis, and assist people, including those with no overt mental disorder in making up their own minds as to what to do with their lives and how to achieve their goals. Contrary to the practice of some in the mental health field, Dr. Rappaport does not keep his timeline exercise and the nature of the insights which can be derived from the timeline exercise a "secret of the guild" to lord it over lay people, but instead discusses how he devised the Rappaport Timeline as a measuring instrument of temporal perception, how he uses it in theraputic or evaluation consultations (it can reveal some surprising things about an unknown person's past life!), and how you, the self-help book reader, can effectively "try it at home"!

Marking Time

If you struggle with time - and wonder why - Marking Time offers a profound opportunity for self discovery. Based on twenty years of research and cinical experience, it provides a fascinating framework for moving fluidly into your personal future. --- from book's back cover