A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion (Medicine) [Hardcover]

Jerome Neu (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195123379 | ISBN-13: 978-0195123371 | Publication Date: February 10, 2000

Is jealousy eliminable? If so, at what cost? What are the connections between pride the sin and the pride insisted on by identity politics? How can one question an individual's understanding of their own happiness or override a society's account of its own rituals? What makes a sexual desire "perverse," or particular sexual relations (such as incestuous ones) undesirable or even unthinkable? These and other questions about what sustains and threatens our identity are pursued using the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. The discussion throughout is informed and motivated by the Spinozist hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jerome Neu is at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195123379
• ISBN-13: 978-0195123371
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,097,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review, March 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion (Medicine) (Hardcover)

I very highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the emotions, i.e., everyone. Professor Neu was Editor of the "Cambridge Companion to Freud," and his fellow philosophers and psychologists will (or ought to) know they should read this book. My must read suggestion is for non-academics who care deeply about philosophical issues and want to be jealousy, pride, love, self-deception, boredom and, as the title indicates, even crying. He does so through adept philosophical analysis and readings of Freud. I note that he reads Freud neither with uncritical acceptance nor relentless rejection, but to glean what is of value, what is most useful. The author's taxonomies of the emotions recall the elite company of Proust, Stendhal and Montaigne. One of the essays is entitled "Does the Professor Talk to God," a quote from Freud's patient, Little Hans. I have no idea whether Professor Neu does, but his nuanced insights and his powerful expression of them are certainly inspired.