Human Feelings

Reviews / Votes

"Human Feelings is essential reading for all mental health works who wish to free themselves from those archaic, 19th-century conceptions that still haunt psychoanalysis. Here, gender differences in the exprience and expression of emotion are finally discussed. We are introduced to a variety of approaches and emphases: emotions from the physiological point of view, emotions in relation to modified states of consciousness, emotions as they develop beyond adolescence and into old age. We see emotions in the context of meditation, music, and poorly understood states of the self. In short, this is a book that is bound to expand rather than limit the reader's mind."

- Henry Krystal, M.D., Author, Integration and Self Healing: Affect, Trauma, and Alexithymia (Analytic Press, 1993)

"I wish that Human Feelings had been published before I completed my PBS series, Healing and the Mind, as it is a feast of plenty for a hungry seeker. A wealth of insights spreads through these pages, the gift of an audacious and original exploration by pioneering researchers into the core of human experience. We can be grateful these men and women did not stand apart from their subject, satisfied with merely observing and dissecting the feelings of others. Instead, during five years of collaboration they allowed their own emotions - over the death of colleagues, personal hurts and wounds, their private and communal joys, the life cycle as each encountered it - to instruct their rigorous scholarly thought with the transforming realities of personal experience. There is much here to stimulate the mind, including some fresh perspectives on gender differences in feeling, but there is also much here to affect the heart."

- Bill Moyers, Public Affairs Television, Inc.

"With exquisite dedication to Human Feelings, Steven Ablon and his collaborators explore the terrain of affect from Charlotte's Web through transcendental states. The focus is always on the inner experience of the human, 'feeling,' and is thus quitessentially relevant both clinically and figuratively."

- James Michael Herzog, M.D., Boston Psychoanalytic Society

"This interdisciplinary dialogue of members of the Harvard Affect Study Group is eclectic but remarkably integrated, comprehensive, and engaging. Affect, like art, is conducive to genuine contact and engagement - the glue of interrelation, mutuality, and community. In the light of a current world situation threatened with such destructive forces as pseudospeciation, every thrust toward interdependence and integration must be vigorously promoted. This study presents such a timely contribution."

- Joan M. Erikson, author, Legacies