Cover image for Feet of clay : saints, sinners, and madmen :a study of gurus
Title:
Feet of clay : saints, sinners, and madmen :a study of gurus
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Publication Information:
New York : Free Pr, 1996
ISBN:
9780684828183

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30000003552787 BL72 S76 1996 Open Access Book Book
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Summary

Author Notes

Charles Anthony Storr, May 18, 1920 - March 17, 2001 Charles Anthony Storr was born on May 18, 1920 in London to a Reverend of Westminster Abbey and his wife. The two were first cousins, which may have lead to his poor health and depression. At the age of eight, he attended public school at Winchester and was very unhappy. He graduated from Winchester College and proceeded to Christ's Church in Cambridge where he met C. P. Snow who encouraged him to be moral and compassionate. Storr continued his medical studies at Westminster Hospital from 1941 to 1944, and then became a house physician at various hospitals. He is best known for his books on Freud and Jung.

After completing his education, Storr practiced psychotherapy privately, but combined his private practice with hospitals as a consultant. In 1974, he retired from private practice to teach post graduate doctors at Oxford where he received dining rights at Wadham College and became a fellow at Green College. After his first attempt at writing proved fruitful, Storr continued his career as a writer, producing 11 books in the next 26 years.

Storr's books were very popular in the U. S. and following his literary fame, he became a frequent book reviewer and commentator on British television. He wrote on different themes, but his favorites were gurus, as evidenced in his book, "Feet of Clay, solitude as a helpful tool in recovery, "Solitude: A Return to Self", and the theories of Freud and Jung.

Storr died on March 17 in Oxford after having a heart attack during a speech at Wadham College. He was 80 years old.


Reviews 3

Publisher's Weekly Review

"The wisest men follow their own direction and listen to no prophet guiding them," wrote Euripedes. Storr (Music and the Mind), a psychiatrist, uses this ancient caution as the epigraph to a fascinating yet frustrating investigation into the appeal of guru figures. He analyzes the lives and works of the destructive, unbalanced cult leaders Jim Jones and David Koresh, and he uses their symptoms‘isolation, narcissism, paranoid delusion‘to take the measure of other, generally more respected, "gurus," including Gurdjieff, Freud, Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Rajneesh, St. Ignatius, even Jesus. While insisting that none of these latter can be described as insane, Storr considers their authoritarian certainty an ominous sign. Stressing that there can be a charisma based on goodness and genuine devotion to truth rather than on the power of personality, Storr warns against teachers who claim to know what he judges no single person can know: "No one knows in the sense that Gurdjieff or Rajneesh or Jung believed that they knew and were supposed to know by their disciples." But Storr's elegantly written account is tarnished by his own unacknowledged authoritarianism. He never entertains the notion that there may be states of consciousness‘states of knowing‘that exceed customary bounds, so that a strange cosmology like Gurdjieff's might be understood not as a paranoid delusion or mere belief, but as a challenge to habitual modes of perception and cogitation that is composed with a clockmaker's care. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


Choice Review

What does it take to be a guru? Storr takes us on an in-depth journey through the lives of self-selected men to shed light on some commonalities. These charismatic individuals have often been isolated or self-absorbed in their early lives. They seem to share a history of "creative illness" during which they experience some type of mental or physical distress followed by an enlightened period of new insights. For example, Storr examines people like Rajneesh, who had a period of severe depression with apparent psychotic features, and Jung, who experienced a serious psychotic episode resembling schizophrenia. Such men--Gurdjieff, Steiner, Freud, and Jesus--all attracted a following. Although some took advantage of their disciples, others were considered beloved. Jung and Freud made invaluable contributions to psychology and the way one views life as a whole. Devote Christians may take exception to Storr's views on Jesus because he tends to focus on fragments of Christ's recorded teachings without allowing room for similarly recorded events, such as Christ's divine birth and resurrection. He states that most people need a belief system, that provides answers to life's questions. He questions the current psychiatric categories, discussing delusions and their purpose. Many of the gurus discussed had a firm belief system including the belief of knowing. Storr concludes that "One man's faith is another man's delusion." Upper-division undergraduates. M. A. Gillis Elmira College


Library Journal Review

Storr (Music and the Mind, LJ 10/15/92), a former lecturer in clinical psychiatry at Oxford University, considers the minds, motives, and missions of seven influential thinkers: Freud, Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Ignatius of Loyola, and Jesus of Nazareth. True to his training, Storr closely considers the family background; transcending clinical psychiatry, he finds meaning in the message of each thinker. Storr's earlier Solitude (LJ 8/88) showed how artists such as Beatrix Potter, Beethoven, and Kafka found stability and truth in their work despite disconnection from other humans; Feet of Clay, in contrast, shows how "gurus" depend upon other humans for devotion and obedience. The title, however, is somewhat misleading, since Storr finds a core of value and truth in even those (e.g., Gurdjieff) whom he labels "confidence tricksters" and those (e.g., Rajneesh) who eventually rotted from adulation and drugs. Storr's work is a rich, thoughtful, well-documented, and accessible work, easily recommended for most academic and larger public libraries.‘Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.