Reluctant Adult Revisited

A much anticipated and exciting new edition, originally printed in the early 1990s, with additional material and updates.

This new edition of a prescient masterpiece from the 1990s brings updates including a new Preface, Foreword, Afterword, Appendixes & a comprehensive index. The book was very ahead of its time 30 years ago, and is even more urgently relevant today, exploring how to get beyond the wheel of victimhood, finding our full adulthood in freedom.

Why is it that a sense of freedom and well-being is not a more natural human state? Perhaps we are still hampered by an outdated ‘Newtonian Psychology’ which underpins the belief that something or somebody caused us to be the way we are. Once trapped in an endless chain of blaming, woundedness and guilt, victimhood prevails and adulthood then eludes us.

Along with our species’ physical maturity, there must surely be vital aspects of the human psyche which most of us have not, as yet, brought into play. In relinquishing our present framework of thought, and opening to a more extended experience of self, spirit and ego could then be reconciled, with freedom and responsibility becoming an achievable reality. Yet letting go is precisely what we fear most. This book is an exploration of why this should be so – and an invitation to embrace our full adulthood.

About the Author

Jill Hall moved to London from South Africa in her late teens to train at the Central School, spent her 20s as an actress, her 30s as a mother and philosophy student, subsequently working over four decades as an individual and group psychotherapist in Norwich. She has lectured extensively to professional bodies and universities about the ideas in The Reluctant Adult.