Me and my feelings

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James R. Averill, Elma P. Nunley

For most of human history emotion has been the province of artists, shamans, and our latter-day shamans--therapists. Recently it has become the province of scientists as well. In Voyages of the Heart, James Averill and Elma Nunley draw on a decade of research on emotion and on creativity by psychologists, biologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as on clinical experience, to construct a new model of emotional experience. Just as we develop our repertoires of intellectual skills through learning and maturation, the authors argue, so can we develop our repertoires of emotional skills to achieve our full human potential. Emotional creativity demands commitment to seek excellence in the affective as well as the intellectual domain. We can change and improve our emotional lives by acquiring knowledge about emotions--for example, recognizing and dispelling deeply ingrained myths about emotion, such as that we are "gripped", "seized", and "overcome" by feelings. According to the authors, we are not the victims of our emotions as these descriptions suggest. Rather, we actively construct our emotions, although on a preconscious level. We must seek then to become consciously aware of our own emotional lives. Research suggests that emotionally creative people are not only deeply involved in exploring the meaning of their own emotional experience, they also pay close attention to how their behavior affects others, while less emotionally creative people tend to focus on themselves. There is much to be gained from a better understanding of what exactly feelings are and where they come from. Our attitudes toward expression of emotion reveal high ambivalence: On the one hand, a person devoid of emotion is seen as cold and calculating; on the other, a person who becomes too readily emotional is regarded as childish. Some people feel empty on the inside, while others feel as though they are about to explode from the force of uncontrollable feelings. Even for those who lead more satisfactory emotional lives, a deeper understanding will enable us to manage our emotions in a simultaneously creative and disciplined way. Averill and Nunley explore differences in emotional experience between men and women, as well as fascinating historical and cross-cultural variations in the rules governing the display and management of emotion. Richly illustrated with examples from everyday life, Voyages of the Heart shows us how we can become more aware of our own thoughts and feelings, manage our emotions in a creative yet disciplined way, and live to the full extent of our human potential.

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Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones. How then does Eliot's internalized aggression, rooted in her early life, find its way into her characters? How and why is it, in turn, denied by the author? And finally, how does the process of writing fiction help resolve it? Eliot's inner rage, Johnstone argues, was transformed into works of art and gradually dissipated as she developed her creative gifts and finally achieved her sense of identity as an artist. The Transformation of Rage explores the connections between self-disorder and aggression, anxiety and creativity, and narcissism and mourning in the full range of Eliot's novels - Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. It will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the nineteenth-century British novel, the life and work of George Eliot, and the interdisciplinary study of literature and psychoanalysis.

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Danie Beaulieu

Les performances intellectuelles, les diplômes et le savoir-faire technique ne constituent plus aujourd'hui la clé infaillible du succès. L'ensemble d'aptitudes telles que la maîtrise de soi, la capacité d'entretenir des relations harmonieuses, l'adaptabilité, l'ardeur et la persévérance dans les difficultés rencontrées forme ce que l'on appelle l'"intelligence émotionnelle" et mérite qu'on y accorde une place d'importance dans notre vie personnelle et interpersonnelle compte tenu de son rôle déterminant. (4e de couv.).

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Valérie de Courville Nicol

Social Economies of Fear and Desire contributes to the study of emotional life as bound to social life. It shows that emotional experience is structured by forms of felt in/capacity₇emotional norms that emerge through the successes and failures of embodied beings in the exercise of autonomy, and that are acquired through emotional socialization. Economies of fear and desire are the social configurations within which particular kinds of urges to act can be placed, together with the danger and security signs that trigger their experience, the objects of fear and desire they designate, and the means in the exercise of power with which they become associated. Their study should aid in the understanding of contemporary forms of suffering and well-being.