Announcement: Ph.D. Alum Jessica Grogan to Speak at BookPeople

After a long and delightfully restful hiatus over winter break, AMS :: ATX is back in action! We're kicking off the semester with an announcement about Ph.D. alum Jessica Grogan, who will be speaking about and signing her new book, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture,  and the Shaping of the Modern Self, at Austin's own BookPeople (603 N. Lamar) on January 16 at 7pm. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.Here are some more details about Grogan's book from BookPeople's announcement:

The expectation that our careers and personal lives should be expressions of our authentic selves, the belief that our relationships should be defined by openness and understanding, the idea that therapy can help us reach our fullest potential—these ideas have become so familiar that it's impossible to imagine our world without them.In Encountering America, cultural historian Jessica Grogan reveals how these ideas stormed the barricades of our culture through the humanistic psychology movement—the work of a handful of maverick psychologists who revolutionized American culture in the 1960s and '70s. Profiling thought leaders including Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and Timothy Leary, Grogan draws on untapped primary sources to explore how these minds and the changing cultural atmosphere combined to create a widely influential movement. From the group of ideas that became known as New Age to perennial American anxieties about wellness, identity, and purpose, Grogan traces how humanistic psychology continues to define the way we understand ourselves.

Grogan is also blogging regularly at Psychology Today about the book and related topics.