The Literary Mind

Recent research on emotion has shifted the traditional focus away from the "basic" emotions to another set of emotions which are thought to be more distinctly human. Focus has turned to the "self-conscious" emotions, which are sometimes also referred to as "moral," "social," or "higher-order" emotions. These are the emotions that an organism can only feel if it has a highly developed sense of self-reflection. Usually, the "self-conscious" emotions are listed as these four: guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride. Read More

Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we're all poets. That's because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story. Read More

Alain de Botton is a writer who appreciates the value of psychotherpay. In that spirit, he recently opened a bookstore in London that doubles as a therapy office, called The School of Life. The bookstore offers sessions with bibliotherapists (who find you books that are likely to change your habits), offers weekend “holidays,” with titles Holiday to Heathrow, and Philosophy by Bicycle, and hosts courses, not in abstract topics like “science” or “philosophy,” but in “How to Have Conversation” and “How to Die.” De Botton thinks traditional schooling has let us down and that overspecialization has shaped a lot of us into brilliant loners. Read More

 A new book, On Kindness, by psychologist Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor, asks why we generally see independent people as strong and charitable people as dumber or less developed. It asks how we got to a place in human history in which heroism is most often depicted as independence, and in which we interpret small acts of random kindness as suspect--as a repressed need to be recognized, as a sign of an overly submissive nature, or even as a symptom of mental illness. Read More