Love and Other Emotions

'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