Eric Hoffer Award to The Cycle of Life

I am happy to share with you that my book The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention in the category of Culture (which makes me especially pleased!)

The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey, by Erel Shalit, Fisher King Press

Part Jungian review of the various stages of life and part travel guide for leading a self-aware existence, this book explores the dynamic and meaningful archetypal images formed in each of us throughout the various stages of our lives.

Chapter by chapter, Shalit, a Jungian analyst deftly guides readers through the complexities of life, not merely in a linear fashion, but with an emphasis on the particular meaning and significance of the various clusters and transformative elements that are present in each stage of all of our years, from beginning to end.

Exemplified by personal stories and clinical vignettes, The Cycle of Life, provides a solid foundation for readers to chart a conscious life by formulating a natural balance at every stage of their journey—specifically by not fixating on any one particular stage. By learning to embrace, retain, and refine the universal initiation and by changing our perspective that each season of life presents to us, we live our lives to the fullest.
Read more about the cover painting 'Life' and the artist Benjamin Schiff

Eric Hoffer Award Committee, USReview of Books, May 2012.

For those of you who are not familiar with Eric Hoffer, (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) "he was an American social writer. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005." Learn more about Eric Hoffer . . .

Professor Marina Boyadjieva, MD, 28.01.1924-12.05.2012

Few of you have ever heard about Marina Boyadjieva, who died of cancer on May 12th, at the age of 88.

Professor Boyadjieva was a senior psychiatrist, who served many years as Director of Psychiatry at the Medical Academy in Sofia, and among her other tasks, also had been advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO).

I had the privilege to get to know Marina a few years ago, through Sania Tabakova, the publisher of literature and psychoanalysis, Lege Artis publishing.

For more than twenty years, Marina was the foremost translator of many psychoanalytic authors, from Freud and Jung to Wilhelm Reich, Ellenberger and Marie-Louise von Franz. She also translated works by recent Jungians, such as James Hall and James Hollis. I was fortunate to have two of my books translated into Bulgarian by this exceptional woman.

Pleven, where Marina moved from Sofia, is a couple of hours’ drive from the Bulgarian capital. Dinner with Marina in her small apartment was a big event—meeting an old woman full of humor and mature vitality, profound intellect and life-generating stamina in spite of life’s hardships.

I pray that Marina will rest in peace, but believe that no less will she stand on the bridges of the afterlife, making the voices spoken in one language at the one side of the river heard and understood by people at its other bank.

Erel Shalit
14 May 2012