Ludwig also provides a brief, quite brilliant exposition and critique of the concept of an "authentic" self, noting that it is rooted in a male Victorian ethos and that it has been overshadowed by the more contemporary American notion of self-invention. Ludwig's beautifully written and intellectually provocative book is one of those rare works that offer fresh, profound insights, moving the reader to think probingly about his or her own life and self.
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Kirkus Reviews on How Do We Know Who We Are?: A Biography of the Self (1997)Arnold M. Ludwig
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Ludwig's book is outstanding. It pulls together a mound of pertinent data, much of it new, into coherent patterns...Throughout the book the reader is offered a wealth of insights and serious questions...Ludwig's development of a Creative Achievement Scale [is] a valued contribution in its own right, allowing researchers a comprehensive objective tool for scoring subjects' degree of achievement... Ludwig has cleared up much of the confusion and opinionated muddleheadedness... that has been attached to the topic and the thinking regarding a relationship between psychopathology and creativity.
Arnold M. Ludwig
He never made the obligatory journey south to study in Rome; his subject matter was the foggy and precipitous vista, sublimely expansive and filled with premonitory brooding. The writer Ludwig Tieck believed Friedrich was the Nordic genius incarnate, whose mission was "to express and suggest most sensitively the solemn sadness and religious stimulus which seem recently to be reviving our German world in a strange way." ... Friedrich's work, the Dresden painter Ludwig Richter remarked in 1825, does not deal with "the spirit and importance of nature ... Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, using the forms of nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs."
Caspar David Friedrich
When one read’s Kierkegaard’s profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche’s amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.
Rollo May
Ludwig’s penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace.
Arnold M. Ludwig
He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced."
Hermann Hesse
Ludwig, Arnold M.
Ludwig, Emil
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