Available from Hybrid Publishers & Amazon

A unique memoir and an urgent blueprint for change

After surviving the Holocaust, a little boy makes a pledge. He will understand war so it is not repeated. So begins Paul Valent’s life’s work, an investigation into the reasons why humans, who can love and care for each other, too often hate and hurt each other.

Over the next eight decades of his life, the world-respected doctor, psychotherapist and traumatologist, utilising major discoveries of how the brain works, comes to understand the workings of his own mind, the minds of patients, victims, and – eventually, with courage and sensitivity – the minds of perpetrators.

Valent reveals how the bulk of our brains conceals a mindset evolved in our jungle heritage, its challenges and traumas. He then describes how this mindset manifests itself in today’s world, in violence that ranges from bullying to war and includes the Holocaust and other genocides.

In our relatively affluent times with potential resources for everyone, our evolutionary mindset is redundant, unnecessary and dangerous. It constitutes our so called ‘neurosis of civilisation’ that now threatens the existence of life on earth. Utilising recent knowledge of the hidden (unconscious) parts of the brain, alongside developments in ethology, psychology and sociology, Valent gives words, meanings and a scientific framework for this extant neurosis.

This is an optimistic book. After all, each portion of our neurosis has its opposite fulfilment potential. This book points to those potentials. Perhaps the world, like even the most traumatised patients can, through knowledge, save itself and actually prosper.

Know Thyself  lays out a universal framework that allows us to make the world a better place. It is both a remarkable legacy … and our most important challenge.