Emotion

""I wake in the night and the emotions are there. I am afraid of the future, alone. I am tormented by my incapacity to meet what is expected of me. It would be easier just to be dead." What is the meaning of such emotions? What is emotion itself? What is really happening in therapy when people "express their emotions"?" "As James Hillman writes in his new preface to this sweeping study, he intends nothing less than "to vitalize a standard topic of academic psychology by making the theory of emotion as crucial as is emotion itself in our lives." The central part of the book offers an informative and readable survey of a range of theories of emotion. Although Hillman focuses on the twentieth century, he moves with ease from Greek thought to early Christianity to nineteenth-century German physiology. Hillman's "phenomenology of theories" uncovers the intellectual heritage that underlies the concepts used by therapists today. Whenever we conceive of emotion in terms of equilibrium and disturbance, tension and release, or conflict and resolution, we are taking part in complex traditions which for the most part remain unspoken or misunderstood. Hillman's work challenges us to rethink our concepts and thereby to re-experience emotional phenomena." "Hillman reunites the insights he has discovered into an integrated understanding of emotion.