This book contributes to an understanding of the nature of mid-life transitions and crises by focusing on the unique personal meaning of the transitional experience for the individual. There is an implicit structure to the way in which such a transition is experienced by the individual, and this can be made explicit by the techniques and methods of the approach outlined and illustrated in the book. The value of making this structure explicit is that it enables us to understand and assess the nature and dimensions of the transition, whether or not it will reach crisis proportions, and to assess possible intervention strategies. Meaning in Mid-Life Transitions should be of interest to human service practitioners as well as teachers and students of human development and behavior. It evidences an integrative approach and structural framework, including a series of in-depth clinical and research studies.
The essential purpose of this book is to provide practitioners and students of the human service professions with a practice approach and methodology that has been developed over the past ten years in both research and clinical work with older persons. It is concerned with the kinds of emotional prob lems that are salient and pervasive in the second half of life, that is, from about the ages of 50 on into the 60s, 70s, and 80s. These problems are often related to inevitable developmental and situational events and losses, as well as the decrements and concerns that are prevalent in the latter decades of life: physical decline and illness, loss of loved ones, concerns about one's own mortality, loss of major occupational and family roles, and the issues of meaning in and about one's life which are raised by these losses and concerns. The approach to these problems will include a range of assessment and treatment methods for counseling and psychotherapy. It will, however, em phasize two particular kinds of methods for dealing with these problems. The first of these, cognitive methods, tend to focus on how older persons think about or construe these problems whereas phenomenological methods focus on how persons experience or feel about them. What is common to both is that they are oriented toward the person's perception of the prob lem.
In this last of the three-volume printed edition of The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, the celebrated Virginia agricultural reformer and apostle of secession chronicles the increasingly melancholy events of the last two years of the Civil War and of his own life. Apart from one brief sojourn in Charleston, Edmund Ruffin spent the last two years of the war in Virginia. Failing health and the course of the war prevented the devout Confederate from traveling to important battle sites and recording events there firsthand as he had done in the earlier years of the war. Unable to move about, Ruffin nonetheless continued to follow the war closely and to keep a daily commentary on contemporary events. This commentary provides a remarkably dispassionate and astute analysis of the declining military fortunes of the Confederacy as well as an illuminating portrait of deteriorating conditions on the home front. Yet this final volume of Ruffin’s diary is more than a record of “first impressions of public events,” as Ruffin claimed. Ruffin comments on religion, race, class, and politics. The topics he discusses range from the controversy over the enrollment of black troops and the transition to free labor at war’s end to an extended discourse on de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As the final curtain fell on the Confederacy, the embittered southern nationalist, overwhelmed by physical maladies and familial misfortunes, resolved to take his own life. Only two months after Lee’s surrender to Grant, and less than fifty miles from Appomattox, Ruffin fired the last shot in his own private war against the Yankees—a bullet through his head. Rich in detail as well as in Ruffin’s personal beliefs, this carefully edited diary stands as one of the most valuable documents of the Civil War era.
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