The Fifth Influence: or, The Dialectics of Pleasure

THE FIFTH INFLUENCE OR, THE DIALECTICS OF PLEASURE "Th is book is about everything you ever wanted to know about pleasure, but did not know where to fi nd the answers." - Alexander Ovsich Ecclesiastes 3-12 and 3-13: 3I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; also that it is God¹s gift to man that every one should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil². - 8-15 it says. ²And I commend enjoym- ent for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink, and enjoy himself, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of life which God gives him under the sun²; "To my knowledge, only one psychological theory of motivational interactions has been put forward: Cabanac holds that pleasure is the common currency guaranteeing the trade-off necessary for achieving the ranking of concurrent motivations. In other words, in his view, organisms decide to commit to the activity that maximizes pleasure." - Patrick Anselme "Th e reasons that Michel Cabanac gives for his views on pleasure are good reasons, because they are supported by arguments about evidence, and not simply opinions based upon introspection. Indeed, the main pleasure that I gained from this book came from reading about the very elegant experiments that Michel and his colleagues have conducted over the years. In this respect, I fi nd it hard to believe that other people's experience will be diff erent from mine." - David McFarland

The forty years of Michel Cabanac's scientific research and interest in pleasure, started in France where he studied medicine and biological sciences, There, he succeeded number one to 'agregation, ' the national competitive examination for university professorship in the faculties of medicine. After years of teaching physiology and research at University Claude Bernard, in old Europe's Lyons, he was seduced by North America and moved to Quebec where he is Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Laval University. His experimental reseach on the nervous system of temperature regulation began with his thesis on the temperature sensitivity in the depth of the body, in the hypothalamus, at the basis of the brain. After some years in that field he became chairman of the Temperature Commission at the International Union of Physiological Societies. Then he moved towards the experimental study of behaviors and motivations. Thus, his conclusions regarding mental pleasure are solidly grounded in physiology and biology and hundredth of original research papers. He wrote several books before the present one that is a translation of the French version published by Laval University Press. He is blessed with a wonderful wife, Marie-Claude Bonniot, who is also a colleague, and they have together five children and nineteen grand-children."