Customer Reviews

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

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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.