A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE.

AuthorHYATT, RALPH
PositionReview

A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE BY THOMAS LEWIS, FARI AMINI, AND RICHARD LANNON RANDOM HOUSE 2000, 272 PAGES, $23.95

Love. Throughout history, humans have been experiencing that unique emotion. Stories, songs, poems, art of all kinds, hugging, touching, kissing, and just plain affectionate talk express its magic. Theologians and romantics may refer to it as a godly emotion, some hypothesizing that God created humans in order to give Him something to love, and His children the means of reciprocating that feeling through praise, adoration, and worship. Still, in the new millennium, we continue to ask ourselves: What is the nature of love? Where is such a powerful force initiated? Is it an emotion of cognition, biology, or both?

Enter Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, three professors of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who have been working together since 1991, with A General Theory of Love a summation of their collaboration. While they don't provide the final answer, they move readers to a deeper level of understanding regarding the central human emotion called love, stating that, "As long as the brain remained a mystery, as long as the physical nature of the mind remained remote, and inaccessible, an evidential void permitted a free flow of irrefutable statements about emotional life."

The non-glitzy title of their book reflects the straightforward, scholarly approach to this important issue. "The development of the human brain," they maintain, "was neither planned nor seamlessly executed. It simply happened." The mammalian brain has three distinct sub-brains: reptilian, limbic, and neocortical. These...

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