Love and Other Emotions: On the Process of Feeling

This book is an account of the psychology of romantic love in the context of a theory of emotions. The account develops out of studies in brain psychology and the extension to topics in process-philosophy, such as the nature of value and belief, and the central role of feeling in mental process. The approach is subjectivist, that is, from the internal standpoint, and in this respect it differs greatly from the externalist and objectivist trends in modern cognitive science and empiricist philosophy. Love is the ultimate in value, so that a theory of love is also a theory of the nature of value and its relation to feeling, belief, and to drive and desire. The role of intention, reason, and appraisal is critiqued. The relation to other feelings, such as jealousy, envy, anger, loss and grief is discussed in terms of a general theory of emotion and the basis in a process account of the mind/brain state.

Table of Contents:
Preface , Falling in love , Theory of the emotions , Love and desire , The reconciliation of the emotions: love, envy, and hate , Desire for things , Love and pathology: a note on psychoanalytic theory , Pornography and perversion , Kindness and compassion , Belief and value , Philosophy of romantic love

About the Author :
Jason W. Brown has for many years been clinical professor of neurology at New York University Medical Center, with academic appointments in behavioral neurology at Boston University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and Rockefeller University. He has been adjunct professor at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the recipient of the prestigious Copernicus Award in Poland and has received fellowships for research study in Bonn, Paris, Bucharest, and Moscow, in addition to laboratories in the US. Dr Brown has published ten books and over 200 articles in behavioural neurology and philosophy of mind.

Review :
'Jason Brown is a philosopher-scientist in the tradition of Goethe. His profound reflections in this book on the topic of love and other emotions, like so many of his best works on the life of the mind, somehow float timelessly above the fray of contemporary science - despite their deep roots in evolutionary biology and behavioural neurology. It is impossible to understand his microgenetic theory of emotion without rethinking some of your most basic assumptions.'- Mark Solms, Director of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuro-Psychoanalysis, New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute'Jason Brown's text is deeply academic (touching the phenomenological side of academism), it is founded on good brain science (that of nomothetical genre), rooted in apt neurological art (that of idiographical genre), and - last but not least - the book reads as a gripping personal essay.'- Professor Talis Bachmann, University of Tartu, Estonia'In this book, Jason Brown does for emotion what he has already done brilliantly for thought and language, imagery and perception. Microgenetic theory, his unique unifying account of mind/brain process, is particularly well-suited to elucidate the edges of ineffability. In Love and Other Emotions Brown applies the theory to those realms where words and conscious thought so often fail us. Only poetry can bring us as close. With mature erudition, wisdom, and compelling logic, Brown shares his profound insights into what must surely be the most mysterious dimension of mind/brain function and human experience. Savour and reflect.'- Stephen E. Levick, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine'The dialectic between the knowing subject and the known object - played out broadly as East vs West - is once again mined by its principal contemporary contributor in this compelling ontology of love. A brilliant psychologist/philosopher in the tradition of William James, Brown elaborates his foundational perspective ("The object of love is in the world, but love begins in the imagination") with seminal distinctions ("feeling is not something an organism has, it is what an organism is") and koan-like questions ("Is pain in a dream real pain?"), as he painstakingly navigates a safe passage through the Scylla and Charybdis of love: sentimentality and cynicism.' - Jonathan Bricklin, author of Sciousness