Flying Without Wings: Personal Reflections on Loss, Disability, and Healing

Flying Without Wings: Personal Reflections on Loss, Disability, and Healing

by Arnold Beisser
Flying Without Wings: Personal Reflections on Loss, Disability, and Healing

Flying Without Wings: Personal Reflections on Loss, Disability, and Healing

by Arnold Beisser

Paperback(Bantam ed)

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$17.00 
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Overview

“Give yourself a gift and read Flying Without Wings. You will be kinder, wiser, and more compassionate for having read it. I am.”—Abigail (Dear Abby) Van Buren

At twenty-four, Arnold Beisser was a recent medical school graduate and a nationally ranked tennis player. But overnight a devastating bout of polio left him permanently paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on an iron lung to draw his next breath. Polio robbed Arnold Beisser of his strength, his athletic ability, and almost his life. Yet he discovered in this unthinkable trap not only the expected sadness and despair, but wonder, delight, and the pleasure of everyday living.

This is the wise, deeply moving, and warmly humorous account of Arnold Beisser’s search for a new life and meaning as he comes to terms with his disability and then transcends it . . . to practice psychiatry, to fall in love, truly to soar without wings. His spirit and determination to fight for happiness will inspire any reader faced with unbearable loss. Dr. Beisser shows us why the contrast between winner and loser, athlete and cripple, is in our minds much more than in our bodies. And he shares with us the experiences that taught him life’s greatest truth: Nothing can keep you from love, laughter, meaningful work, or enlightenment—except yourself.

“A book of blazing honesty and openness. It goes right to the heart of the reader.”—Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780553348682
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/01/1990
Edition description: Bantam ed
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 881,068
Product dimensions: 5.52(w) x 8.43(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Arnold Beisser was a graduate of Stanford University and its medical school. He was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a recipient of its Gold Achievement Award. He published over 100 articles, reviews, book chapters, and books, including Madness in Sports and Mental Health Consultation. Arnold Beisser died in 1991.

Table of Contents

1Time1
2Space15
3Relationships31
4Reconstruction45
5Of Athletes and Cripples75
6Flying Without Wings93
7Not Enough103
8The Choice115
9Acceptance123
10Humor and Enlightenment139
11Antaeus and the Paradox of Change163
12Is It Possible to Be Disabled and Healthy at the Same Time?173
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