Books -- Drive Yourself Sane!: Using the Uncommon Sense of General-Semantics by Susan Presby Kodish and Bruce I. Kodish
Robert R. Potter · 1995
Susan Presby Kodish, Ph.D., and Bruce I. Kodish. Drive Yourself Sane Using the Uncommon Sense of General-Semantics. Englewood, NJ: Institute of General Semantics, 1993. There is a joy in life if we know to live, and science as always helps us. That's one of the few sentences I jotted down not long ago while making my way through Alfred Korzybski's Collected Writings (Institute of General Semantics, 1990, p. 128). Science * Knowledge * Living * Joy. Now comes an excellent introduction to the kind of science Korzybski thought would be helpful. Drive Yourself Sane! is an admirable distillation of Korzybski's basic formulations, minus the turgid prose and plus the more-than-occasional fillip of a fresh in-sight. Susan and Bruce Kodish, a wife-husband team, seem well qualified to offer us such a book. Both are in the healing arts/sciences: she a psychotherapist in current practice, he a physical therapist now pursuing a doctorate in general semantics. They met, their book informs us, at a general-semantics seminar-workshop, and have subsequently been part of the IGS teaching staff for ten years. Both serve as editors of the august General Semantics Bulletin. Drive Yourself Sane! combines this experience with a clear and seemingly effortless writing style to teach others how to improve the way you evaluate, so that you can make fuller use of your potentialities, learn more easily, cope better with uncertainty and change, achieve more of what you and avoid more of what you don't want (p. 3). That's a tall order. The Kodishes try to meet it in thirteen well-organized chapters that cover everything from the event (process) level to overblown generalizations, from logical fate to the circularity of human knowledge Each chapter starts with two epigraphs (the second by Korzybski) and concludes with an Applications section that attempts to fit the formulations to the individual reader. Just when the going gets too heavy and analytical, one of the Kodishes rekindles the fire with a personal experience: When I (Susan) was a young teenager, my parents got me a much-desired electric blanket. I spent a warm, cozy night and happily reported this the next morning. We then discovered that the blanket was not plugged in. Where was the warmth? More than that, Drive Yourself Sane! is competently documented and contains both an exhaustive index and an indispensable (to me) glossary of key terms. Although aimed at the uninitiated, the book will also be useful to those who, like myself, have, usually unknowingly, developed weak junctures in their webs of knowledge regarding general semantics. Having once authored an introductory text myself, I was continually amazed at the Kodishes' ability to arrive at the lucid presentation of a formulation with neither distortion nor GEE-WHIZ simplification. …