The Power of the Unconscious

About the Book

By the time I graduated from high school, I had so many things buried and tucked away, so much anger, rage, hatred, fear, sorrow, grief, and pain, that I could not dare to get close to anyone, including myself, as I could not tap into my emotional and intellectual potential. As the years went on, I had to build armor plating around these feelings as if they ever got out, I would be overwhelmed, and I do not know what would have happened to me. So they stayed buried, but that doesn’t mean they did not influence my behavior. These feelings produced some completely unconscious motivations that affected my decision-making, if you can call it that, regarding career and marriage. The problem was that I kept making decisions and pursuing fantasies that did not work in my best interests and thus I was mired in a life that had reached its end when I was almost 40 years old. Something had to change, and I eventually sought out psychotherapy that brought those feelings to the surface and the unconscious motivations that went with them, and only then did I have the capacity to make decisions about a career that I made something of a success of and married a person for love rather than some other neurotic reason. It took three years of therapy on two different occasions to get this all out and deal with those feelings that I thought I had buried but in reality were determining the decisions I was making. The power of the unconscious is real and is not something to be ignored. This this book is my story of how I came to have all these buried feelings and fantasies and how eventually I was able to bring them to the surface and lead something of a normal life. Hopefully, this story might inspire others who feel they are at a dead end in their lives and can’t seem to make decisions that work for them. While I am not a professional in the area and thus can’t give a professional opinion about people’s psychological health, it also is hard for me to believe that my experience can be all that unique. It may be that others to are under the power of the unconscious and have buried feelings that therapy can help uncover and give them greater degrees of freedom over their lives. If this book can help even one person to experience a more fulfilled and rewarding life it will have been worth writing.

About the Author

Rogene A. Buchholz is currently the Legendre-Soule Chair in Business Ethics Emeritus at Loyola University New Orleans. He held this endowed chair at Loyola for thirteen years until his retirement in 2002. Prior to this position he taught at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he was also Associate Dean, Undergraduate Program Director, and Department Head; at Washington University in St. Louis where he had a half-time appointment to teach in the School of Business and the other half as Research Associate in the Center for the Study of American Business; and at the University of Minnesota. He was also a Visiting Hilton Professor of Business Ethics for two semesters at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and Lynette S Autrey Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Rice University in Houston, Texas for one semester. Dr. Buchholz received a B.S. Degree from North Central College in 1959, a M.S. Degree in Economics from the University of Illinois in 1960, an M.Th. Degree from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in 1964, and a Ph.D. Degree from the Business School at the University of Pittsburgh in 1974. His dissertation received an honorable mention from the American Institute for Decision Sciences in its 1975 dissertation competition, he was awarded a U.S. Steel Foundation Fellowship while in the doctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh, he won an M.B.A. teaching award while at Loyola University New Orleans and was twice awarded the research award at the same institution, and received the Summer Marcus Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Business and Society and outstanding service to the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management. He served on many committees at the schools where he taught and was primary advisor and chairman for nine doctoral students who received their Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas. He served on the editorial board of several academic publications and held numerous positions in professional academic organizations during his career. He is still a member of the Academy of Management, the Society for Business Ethics, the International Association of Business and Society, and the Society for the Philosophy of Technology. During his career he made well over a hundred presentations at academic conferences and other professional groups and published well over a hundred articles in scholarly journals, chapters in edited books, proceedings, and other professional publications. He is the author or co-author of 14 books that were mostly textbooks while in academia and has had three scholarly books published by Routledge in their Business Ethics Series and one in their Frontiers of Political Economy series since he retired. He was a consultant for various companies on business ethics and environmental matters, including a three-year project with the Corporate Conservation Council of the National Wildlife Federation working on a Curriculum Development Project to incorporate environmental issues and concerns into the business school curriculum. Dr. Buchholz currently lives with his wife, a former philosophy professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, in Denver Colorado.