Dr. Elena Mustakova

Dr. Elena Mustakova

Publications

Discovering Our Health: Rethinking Mind, Consciousness, and Thought

This paper focuses on the emergence, in the field of psychotherapy, of a new level of
therapeutic understanding, deeply consonant with the world view of the wisdom
traditions that affirm the spiritual nature of the human personality and the spiritual basis
of authentic mental health.

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Beyond Competing Identities and Ideologies: Building Resilience to Radicalization in a World in Transition

Paper presented to the NATO Advanced Research Workshop ‘Indigenous Terrorism: Understanding and Addressing the Root Causes of Radicalization Among Groups with an Immigrant Heritage in Europe’, Budapest, Hungary, 7-9th March, 2008.
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Clash or Meeting Between East and West: An Analysis of the Post-9/11 Challenges

This article adopts a macrocultural approach to understanding complex current global tensions and the way they may account for recent acts of terrorism. It proposes that the recent conflict between the West and radical militant Islam can be understood as the polarization of 2 partial perspectives on social justice
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Addressing racism as a psycho-spiritual disorder

Given the current statistics of racial hate crimes in the US, and the pervasive experiences of racism in the daily lives of minority groups in this country, as Clark et al point out in the October 1999 issue of The American Psychologist, it is a psychologically interesting question why the study of the phenomenon of racism does not hold a more central place in psychological research.
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Education for critical moral consciousnes

This paper proposes a lifespan developmental model of critical moral consciousness and examines its implications for education in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Mature moral consciousness, central to negotiating the challenges of the 21st century, is characterized by a deepening lifelong integration of moral motivation, agency and critical discernment
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Global Challenges Are Directing Us Toward a Unity of Purpose

We find ourselves awash in oceans of misinformation, with millions detached from reality. The world endures a pandemic that has fully exposed lingering social and economic injustices. Current adversities make opposing forces even more pronounced, resulting in deeper divisions everywhere.
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Critical Consciousness: An Alternative Pathway for Positive Personal and Social Development

This paper presents a conceptual model of the integrative psychological construct of critical consciousness (CC), defined as a moral awareness which propels individuals to disembed from their cultural, social, and political environment, and engage in a responsible critical moral dialogue with it, making active efforts to construct their own place in social reality and to develop internal consistency in their ways of being.
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The Bahá’u’lláh Impulse

The mid-19th century was the most recent period of such historic upheaval. The establishment of industrialisation in Western societies and the rise of the scientific method propelled the Romanticism movement in literature and art to give voice to the deep disillusionment with the deadening impact of mechanisation on the human spirit. In response to some of the troubling implications of modernity, there arose in the early 19th century a host of messianic movements in Judeo-Christian and Islamic communities in different parts of the world. They anticipated the appearance of a new prophetic figure, understood as the return of the earlier one in each tradition, who would redeem the human spirit.

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