|
|
A General Theory of Love (Paperback)
by Thomas Lewis , Fari Amini , Richard Lannon
| Category:
Relationship, Interpersonal skills, Emotions, Love and romance |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Three dedicated and gifted psychiatrists offer a challenging, eloquent, and passionate integration of insights from research in attachment theory, brain neuroscience, and memory, with profound implications for how relationships, culture, and psychotherapy function. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Thomas Lewis , Fari Amini , Richard Lannon
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: January, 2001
ISBN: 0375709223
Pages: 288
Measurements: 8.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01259
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0375709227
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- MSL Picks -
These three authors use creative literary style and scientific research to argue for the great importance and influence of the brain upon the nature and expression of love. The book is written for a general but scholarly audience. Our brains link us with those people to whom we love and as a consequence who we are, and who we become depends in great part on whom we love. It is the body's physiology that ensures our relationships and identities.
The authors lament that from the beginning of the 20th century to its end, the most influential accounts of love rarely, if ever, mentioned biology. Although the authors point to important links between physiology and love, they do not claim to have solved all of the mysteries of love. This book's thesis or agenda is described well when the authors asked this question: "What can the structure and design of the brain tell us about the nature of love?" (18)
One of the main theses of the book is that understanding love begins with understanding feelings rather than the reason. "Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another" (37).
The authors document well the profound effects that various regions of the mind have upon human behavior. For instance, the authors note that patients who have lost the hippocampi bear witness to the memory aspect of this region of the brain, because no explicit memories can be created without a hippocampus.
The authors note the profound importance of relationships. "The astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them" (144). However, the neurostructures responsible for emotional lives are not infinitely adaptable in relationship.
The book concludes with these words: "The adventure of seeking a theory of love is far from over. While science can afford a closer glimpse of this tower or that soaring wall, the heart's castle still hangs high in the heavens, shrouded in scudding clouds and obscured by mist. Will science ever announce the complete revelation of all love's secrets? Will empiricism ever trace an unbroken path from the highest stone to the heart's castle down to the bedrock of certitude? Of course not! We demand too much if we expect single-handed empiricism to define and lay bare the human soul" (230).
(From quoting Thomas Oord, USA)
Target readers:
Every coach, therapist, doctor, and businessman
|
|
Thomas Lewis, M.D. is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and a former associate director of the Affective Disorders Program there. Dr. Lewis currently divides his time between writing, private practice, and teaching at the UCSF medical school. He lives in Sausalito, California.
Fari Amini, M.D. is a professor of psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine. Born and raised in Iran, he graduated from medical school at UCSF and has served on the faculty there for thirty-three years. Dr. Amini is married, has six children, and lives in Ross, California.
Richard Lannon, M.D. is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine. In 1980, Dr. Lannon founded the Affective Disorders Program at UCSF, a pioneering effort to integrate psychological concepts with the emerging biology of the brain. Dr. Lannon is married and the father of two; he lives in Greenbrae, California.
|
|
From Publisher
Drawing comparisons to the most eloquent science writing of our day, three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. The result is an original, lucid, at times moving account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being.
A General Theory of Love draws on the latest scientific research to demonstrate that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.
|
What is love, and why are some people unable to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do?
Answering these questions, laying bare the heart's deepest secrets, is this book's aim. Since the dawn of our species, human beings in every time and place have contended with an unruly emotional core that behaves in unpredicted and confusing ways. Science has been unable to help them. The Western world's first physician, Hippocrates, proposed in 450 B.C. that emotions emanate from the brain. He was right-but for the next twenty-five hundred years, medicine could offer nothing further about the details of emotional life. Matters of the heart were matters only for the arts-literature, song, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance. Until now.
The past decade has seen an explosion of scientific discoveries about the brain, the leading edge of a revolution that promises to change the way we think about ourselves, our relationships, our children, and our society. Science can at last turn its penetrating gaze on humanity's oldest questions. Its revelations stand poised to shatter more than a few modern assumptions about the inner workings of love.
Traditional versions of the mind hold that Passion is a troublesome remnant from humanity's savage past, and the intellectual subjugation of emotion is civilization's triumph. Logical but dubious derivations follow: emotional maturity is synonymous with emotional restraint. Schools can teach children missing emotional skills just as they impart the facts of geometry or history. To feel better, outthink your stubborn and recalcitrant heart. So says convention.
In this book, we demonstrate that where intellect and emotion clash, the heart often has the greater wisdom. In a pleasing turnabout, science-Reason's right hand-is proving this so. The brain's ancient emotional architecture is not a bothersome animal encumbrance. Instead, it is nothing less than the key to our lives. We live immersed in unseen forces and silent messages that shape our destinies. As individuals and as a culture, our chance for happiness depends on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves-invisibly, improbably, inexorably-around love.
From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. The body's physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities. Love makes us who we are, and who we can become. In these pages, we explain how and why this is so.
During the long centuries when science slumbered, humanity relied on the arts to chronicle the heart's mysterious ways. That accumulated wisdom is not to be disdained. This book, while traveling deep into the realm of science, keeps close at hand the humanism that renders such a journey meaningful. The thoughts of researchers and empiricists join those of poets, philosophers, and kings. Their respective starting points may be disparate in space, time, and temperament, but the voices in this volume rise and converge toward a common goal.
Every book, if it is anything at all, is an argument: an articulate arrow of words, fledged and notched and newly anointed with sharpened stone, speeding through paragraphs to its shimmering target. This book-as it elucidates the shaping power of parental devotion, the biological reality of romance, the healing force of communal connection-argues for love. Turn the page, and the arrow is loosed. The heart it seeks is your own.
|
|
| View all 12 comments |
Amazon.com (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
Poor, poor science-it gets blamed for everything. While it might be true that some of our alienation and unhappiness stem from a too-rational misunderstanding of emotion, it's also true that science is its own remedy. A General Theory of Love, by San Francisco psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, is a powerfully humanistic look at the natural history of our deepest feelings, and why a simple hug is often more important than a portfolio full of stock options. Their grasp of neural science is topnotch, but the book is more about humans as social animals and how we relate to others-for once, the brain plays second fiddle to the heart.
Though some of their social analysis is less than fully thought out-surely e-mail isn't a truly unique form of communication, as they suggest-the work as a whole is strong and merits attention. Science, it turns out, does have much to say about our messy feelings and relationships. While much of it could be filed under "common sense," it's nice to know that common sense is replicable. Hard-science types will probably be exasperated with the constant shifts between data and appeals to emotional truths, but the rest of us will see in A General Theory of Love a new synthesis of research and poetry. -Rob Lightner
|
Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
The Beatles may have sounded naive when they assured us that "all you need is love," but they may not have been far off the mark. New research in brain function has proven that love is a human necessity; its absence damages not only individuals, but our whole society. In this stimulating work, psychiatrists Lewis, Amini and Lannon explain how and why our brains have evolved to require consistent bonding and nurturing. They contend that close emotional connections actually change neural patterns in those who engage in them, affecting our sense of self and making empathy and socialization possible. Indeed, the authors insist, "in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own." Yet American society is structured to frustrate emotional health, they contend: self-sufficiency and materialistic goals are seen as great virtues, while emotional dependence is considered a weakness. Because our culture does not sufficiently value interpersonal relationships, we are plagued by anxiety and depression, narcissism and superficiality, which can lead to violence and self-destructive behaviors. It is futile to try to think our way out of such behaviors, the authors believe, because emotions are not within the intellect's domain. What is needed is healthy bonding from infancy; when this does not occur, the therapist must model it. The authors' utopian vision of emotional health may strike some as vague or conservative to a fault, and the clarity of their thesis is marred by indirect and precious writing. Yet their claim that "what we do inside relationships matters more than any other aspect of human life" is a powerful one. Agent, Carol Mann. 9-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. |
Library Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
A traditional subject of poetry and pop psychology is treated here as a scientific construct. Three psychiatry professors (Univ. of California, San Francisco) cover an impressive vista of research and clinical insights from Freud to contemporary neuroscience. They focus on the limbic brain as the source and conduit of emotions like love. The link between the development of the limbic brain and the development of personality are described here in confident prose. Society is castigated for failing to encourage full-time parenting and other policies that support limbic development and the human need for love. Although the authors sometimes substitute metaphor for empirical support and easily dismiss other perspectives, the book is well written and provides a credible introduction to the neuroscience of emotions. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-Antoinette Brinkman, Southwest Indiana Mental Health Ctr. Lib., Evansville
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. |
The New York Times Book Review, USA
<2008-03-26 00:00>
Just as you begin to imagine them as spoiled New Age sages, forgathered in the courtyard of a rented Tuscan villa, spinning a modern Symposium as they dip biscotti in vinsanto - they slug back double espressos and stride through the doors of the villa into a state-of-the-art love lab....Like it or not, all of us know only how to play the kind of love our brains have already practiced. In the manner of the best popularizers of science - like Daniel Dennett, author of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," or Stephen Pinker, untangler of linguistic mysteries - the authors break a path that lay readers can safely follow. |
View all 12 comments |
|
|
|
|
