Neel Burton - Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions (Ataraxia Book 3)

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

In my work as a psychiatrist, I help to treat mental disorderand, Im delighted to say, most of the people I see do get better.

But why stop here?

I believe that there is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder.

Mental health is not just about surviving, but about thriving, about developing and expressing our highest, fullest potential as human beings.

Before Christianity, there were, of course, the pagan gods, Zeus and Jupiter and their ilk. But, especially for the high-minded, there were also a number of philosophical schools, the major ones being cynicism, stoicism, skepticism, and epicureanism. Although each with its own outlook and method, all four schools aimed at the attainment of mental tranquillity and mastery, or ataraxiamaking them, in my view, much more similar than different.

Ataraxia [Greek, lack of disturbance or trouble] is also the guiding principle of this series, with each book, like each philosophy, adopting a distinct but complementary approach to peace of mind: exploring the deep origins of our distress in The Meaning of Madness; guarding against the demons of self-deception in Hide and Seek; refining our emotions in Heaven and Hell; regulating our relations with others in For Better For Worse; developing our thinking skills in Hypersanity; and, finally, redefining our concept of success in The Art of Failure.

To recap, the six books in the series are:

1. The Meaning of Madness
2. Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
3. Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
4. For Better For Worse: Essays on Sex, Love, Marriage, and More
5. Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking
6. The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide

Although the series is numbered, each book can happily stand on its ownmeaning that you can read just one or all six, and in whichever order you like.

Ataraxia is closely linked with eudaimonia, which is often translated as happiness but which is, in fact, a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing, or living a life that is worthwhile and fulfilling.

The stakes could not be higher.

With the decline of religion and traditional social structures, our emotions, though maladapted to modern times, have come to assume an increasingly dominant role in our lives. It has forever been said that we are ruled by our emotions, but this today is truer than ever. Much more than reason or tradition, it is our emotions that determine our choice of profession, partner, and politics, and our relation to money, sex, and religion. Nothing can make us feel more alive, or more human, than our emotions, or hurt us more. Yet, astonishingly, the emotions are utterly neglected by our schools and universities and broader society, leading to millions of mis-lived lives.

The core of this book has evolved from a series of articles for Psychology Today. The introduction is relatively dense and technical, and the casual reader might prefer to skip straight to Chapter 1 on boredom. The 26 subject chapters are intended to be read sequentially, beginning with boredom and ending, somewhat hopefully, in ecstasybut, because each chapter is fairly self-contained, you can easily dip in and out of the book and progress in any order or none at all.

As I go on to explain in the introduction, emotions are intimately related to traits, moods, desires, perceptions, and beliefs. For this reason, I have adopted a fairly loose definition of emotion and included chapters on, for example, desire, ambition, and laughter. But there are no chapters specifically on fear and sadness (or anxiety and depression), because I have already discussed these emotions in great depth in The Meaning of Madness, the first book in the Ataraxia series.

I hope that you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it, and that it helps you as much as it helped me.

To control our emotions is to control ourselves, and to control ourselves is to control our destiny.

What is an emotion? The answer is not entirely clear. Emotion is a relatively recent term and there are languages that do not carry an equivalent. Historically, people spoke not of emotions but of passions. The passions encompass, or encompassed, not only the emotions, but also pleasure, pain, and desire. Passion, like passivity, derives from the Latin patere, to suffer. It has often seemed that the passive passions are not within our control, and today the term has come to refer to a powerful or compelling feeling or desire, especially love or lust, while also retaining the more restricted medival meaning of the suffering of Christ on the Cross and the martyrdom of the saints. This notion of passivity is retained in emotion, which derives from the Latin