Exploring and Treating Acquisitive Desire

Living in the Material World

How do we live in a material world that measures success by what we own? How we deal with the pressure to compete with others in displays of our success? This is a book about the social disease of acquisitive desire for material things -corporeal and intangible. The themes covered include what acquisitive desire means in people's lives, how therapists and therapy are treated as possessions, clinical identification and diagnosis of consumer disorders that become the primary or secondary focus of treatment, interventions and clinical issues involved in working with those who suffer the effects of an excessively materialistic lifestyle, and the way therapists, as members of a bourgeois profession, struggle with their own acquisitive desires. Jeffrey A. Kottler seeks not to encourage people to give up all attachment to things, rather to reduce the degree to which we are controlled by them. It is far better when satisfaction comes not from owning things, but using them for fun, stimulation, and learning.