Jane G. Goldberg, Ph.D.

New Book by Jane G. Coldberg, Ph.D

THE VOLUTION CODE

WIRED FOR WHAT?

The Urgency of Becoming Ourselves in an Age of Civilizational Discontent

We are not here to find the answer – we are here to become the ones who can live the question.

Knowing, Not Knowing, and Becoming

(and the questions behind each)

This book begins with a simple but destabilizing proposition: the deepest confusion in human life is not about what to do. It is about not knowing where you are in the process of becoming. This confusion is a problem of orientation — not of behavior, intelligence, or emotional fitness. Orientation is the knowledge of where you stand in the unfolding of your own life. It is not a luxury. It is the precondition of everything else. Without it, all effort is just random motion.

My original training was as a neuropsychologist. But I have spent fifty years as a psychoanalyst, sitting with patients in the particular kind of attention that analytic work requires — slow, receptive, without agenda. I have listened to them describe their lives: what had happened to them; what they had done with what happened; what they had surrendered in order to become who they had become; what they were still trying to become; and what they feared they never would. I have sat with people in crisis and people in flourishing, with people at the beginning of their adult lives and people near the end of them.

What I kept finding, across all of those years and all of those lives, was that the confusion people brought me was not random. It had a shape. And that shape, once I could see it, turned out to be the same pattern at every scale: in the development of the brain across the human lifespan; in the psychological maturation of each individual life; and, most surprisingly, in the long arc of civilizational history itself.

This book is the account of that shape.