Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Heaven and hell are not merely places we may go to.
They are states of mind.
Every day, we move between them.
Love can transform a life. Loneliness can diminish it. Gratitude can sustain us through adversity, while envy can quietly erode achievement. Hope can carry us forward; humiliation can shape a lifetime.
The events of our lives matter. But how we experience them matters just as much.
Yet despite their extraordinary power, few of us ever learn to understand our inner emotional life.
We study the world but neglect ourselves.
Even after training as a doctor and specializing in psychiatry, Neel Burton realized he had never been taught to think systematically about the emotions. That realization led him to explore one of the most important—and neglected—subjects in human life.
Heaven and Hell draws on psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, literature, history, and clinical experience to examine more than twenty-five emotions and emotional states, including boredom, loneliness, shame, pride, humiliation, gratitude, envy, greed, hope, nostalgia, ambition, anger, forgiveness, empathy, love, self-esteem, wonder, and ecstasy.
Along the way, Burton shows that emotions are not obstacles to reason, but the framework within which reason operates.
They shape what we notice, value, and choose.
Emotional suffering, Burton argues, is often not caused by feeling too much—but by failing to understand what one is feeling, or what that feeling is for.
Insightful, provocative, and deeply humane, Heaven and Hell offers a richer way of understanding human life—one in which emotion is not the enemy of reason, but its foundation.
Because the forces that most shape us are not external.
They are the ones we carry within.
About the author
Dr Neel Burton FRSA is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He is a Fellow of Green-Templeton College in the University of Oxford, and the recipient of multiple literary awards. His work has appeared in Aeon and Psychology Today, and has been translated into several languages.
Editorial reviews
A wide-ranging and impassioned survey.
—Publishers Weekly
A fascinating read. Challenges our understanding of emotions we experience but do not really think about.
—British Medical Association Book Awards
A fascinating work. Emotions propel all of human life, yet few people take the time to understand their power.
—BookBub
An entirely new way of looking at the emotions.
—Readers' Favorite
I do love to read a book that gives me a mental workout, and this one certainly had my brain doing calisthenics!
—Jamie Bee, Amazon Top 50 Reviewer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emotions "have come to assume an increasingly dominant role in our lives," argues psychiatrist Burton (Hypersanity) in this wide-ranging and impassioned survey. In 29 essays, he considers feelings including ecstasy, pride, and anger, as well as "emotional expressions" such as kissing. In "Embarrassment, Shame, and Guilt," he teases out the difference between the three, explaining that embarrassment is a feeling of discomfort, while "shame says, ‘I am bad,' guilt says, ‘I did something bad.' " In "Boredom," he meditates on the "deeply unpleasant state of unmet arousal" as being universal, and recommends meditation to cope with it, while in "Ecstasy" he writes that the defining trait of euphoric joy is "the dissolution of boundaries, with the ego merging into all of being." Most of his analyses lean on philosophy more than psychology, and some of his interpretations are dubious: he considers depression as a mental disorder to be little more than "a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering," and in "Sadomasochism," he writes that "in almost every relationship, one partner is more attached than the other." Still, there is much to ponder, and lay readers will enjoy most of Burton's entertaining theories. (Self-published)
