The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Stage 1, Chapter 2

Stage 1, Chapters 3-4

Stage 2, Chapters 5-6

Stage 2, Chapters 7-8

Stage 3, Chapters 9-10

Stage 3, Chapters 11-12

Stage 4, Chapters 13-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: The Life of Martha Beck

Martha Beck, the author of The Way of Integrity, is a prominent voice in self-help circles, to which she brings a level of professional expertise and an informative perspective based on her own personal experiences. Her academic training is in sociology, in which she holds a PhD from Harvard University. She previously taught as a professor in institutions of higher learning in Utah and Arizona but no longer pursues an academic career in teaching or research publications.

As a field, sociology gives Beck unique insights into the way that human behavior interacts with broader cultural realities—insights that she also develops through her experience as a life coach with an active clientele. It is important to note, however, that while Beck makes frequent use of psychological and neurological concepts in her writing, she is not trained or licensed in psychology, psychiatry, or neurology. As such, the counsel she gives is best understood through the context of self-help advice such as one might receive from a life coach, and not as counsel from a professional psychiatric assessment.

Beck also brings a unique set of personal experiences to her writing, which she candidly addresses. Her perspective on the pursuit of integrity is mediated by those personal experiences, and they color some of the terminology that she employs. Beck was raised in the strict rigors of an outwardly devout Mormon family, in which her father was a celebrated Mormon apologist, but it was in that familial/religious context that she reports experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of her father. As such, Beck understandably bears a starkly negative view of the way that familial or religious cultures might impinge on one’s inner life, and this perspective carries over into the counsel she provides. For Beck, “culture” usually stands as a conceptual framework of outward repression that one must cast off in order to pursue the integrity of inner wholeness.

Depending on the reader’s perspective, this feature of Beck’s writing could be characterized in two very different ways: either as an asset, by relaying her unique personal insight into the negative potential of cultural pressures toward conformity, or as a limitation, if her experience restricts her from seeing potentially positive features in the communal aspects of familial, religious, and social cultures.

Literary Context: Self-Help and The Divine Comedy

The Way of Integrity is a self-help book, and most of its content fits recognizably within the parameters of that genre. Most of its literary features are common to the self-help genre, including the frequent use of personal anecdotes (both from the author and her anonymized clients) and the inclusion of thoughtful exercises for the reader to complete. Beck openly relies on, and quotes from, other self-help authors whose work she has found valuable, particularly emphasizing the contributions of Byron Katie. In the final section of the book, however, The Way of Integrity addresses content that is more typically found in books of mysticism or New Age spirituality than in self-help books.

The Way of Integrity is also unusual for a self-help book in the way that it regularly interacts with concepts from literary classics and philosophical traditions to the point where some such interactions become structural features of the book itself. Frequent mention is made of the writings of Immanuel Kant, an Enlightenment-era philosopher, and the ancient Chinese classic Tao Te Ching, both of which contribute important conceptual elements to The Way of Integrity. Primary among these is the idea that nothing can be known for certain (from Kant), and that all things exist in an underlying unity that can be experienced by disassociating oneself from the active pursuits of normal human living, and instead seeking harmony with oneself and the world (from the Tao Te Ching).

The manner in which The Way of Integrity employs Dante’s Divine Comedy is especially striking, adopting it as an allegorical framework for the reader’s inner journey toward integrity. Beck is forthright in stating that she does not intend to offer an interpretation of Dante’s work based in theological, cultural, historical, or literary analysis. Rather, she makes use of Dante almost entirely in an illustrative manner. As such, Beck’s analysis is not tied to authorial intentions—that is to say, it does not so much matter to Beck what Dante intended to communicate in his book, because that is not Beck’s intention in dealing with his material. She has no interest, for example, in exploring the traditional Roman Catholic doctrines that lie at the center of Dante’s exposition.

There is one aspect, however, in which Beck does make a case that she is reading The Divine Comedy according to the intended meaning of the text: Insofar as it is an account of Dante’s personal transformation throughout his journey, she reads it as such and applies that limited aspect to the structure of her book. The strongest form of this reading—taking The Divine Comedy as an account of inner transformation—comes in the final stage of The Way of Integrity, where Beck argues that Dante’s Paradiso recounts a mystical enlightenment from his own personal experience.