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A General Theory of Love

Amazon.com Price:  $14.06 (as of 05/05/2019 17:46 PST- Details)

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Description

This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research. 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.

A General Theory of Love demonstrates that our nervous systems aren’t self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains in truth 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 in point of fact works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this can be a work of rare passion and eloquence that will ceaselessly change the way you take into consideration human intimacy.

Poor, poor science–it gets blamed for everything. Even as 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 treatment. 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 frequently 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 in point of fact 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. Even as 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

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