Marc Ian Barasch

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Marc Ian Barasch (born 1949 in New York) is a non-fiction author and television writer-producer. Major books written by Barasch are The Healing Path (1992), Remarkable Recovery (1995), Healing Dreams (2001) and Field Notes on the Compassionate Life (2006).

As editor-in-chief of New Age Journal in the early 1980s, he was a spokesman for what demographer Paul Ray labelled "the cultural creatives." Barasch's generally cogent, critical, and not infrequently witty perspective influenced a movement which, dismissed by mainstream media at the time, has made itself felt throughout American society. Barasch, a practicing Buddhist, spoke of an "emergent civilization" whose spiritual and environmental values would inform social, economic, and political practice. At the same time, Barasch wrote skeptically of what he called "new-age Calvinism" and of what he viewed as the woolly mindedness of some of his cohorts.

After a bout with thyroid cancer in 1985, his work seemed to acquire a new gravity. The Jungian analyst Claire Douglas, writing in the Washington Post, cites "a poetic intensity" and "trail-blazing contributions to dream research." Barasch's co-study of spontaneous remission was the subject of a Newsweek article, and garnered wide, sometimes controversial attention in the medical world. Recent work on empathy, altruism, and conflict resolution has attracted the support of figures like South African Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Barasch's script for the 1992 global television special "One Child, One Voice" addressed world environmental issues with a blunt urgency. When sponsors shunned it, maverick broadcaster Ted Turner distributed the show minus commercials to 160-odd countries, introduced by his own on-camera appeal, and a 2002 re-edited broadcast won an Emmy Award.