Passions: How to Manage Despair, Fear, Rage and Guilt and Heighten Your Capacity for Joy, Love, Hope and Awe - Hardcover

Witkin Ph.D., Georgia

9780394579146: Passions: How to Manage Despair, Fear, Rage and Guilt and Heighten Your Capacity for Joy, Love, Hope and Awe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394579143 ISBN 13: 9780394579146

Publisher: Villard, 1992

An examination of the eight peak emotions guides readers through the effects of each of them, demonstrating how to manage negative feelings and nurture positive ones. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

How to accentuate the positive emotions and eliminate, or at least manage, the negative; by a master of the pop-psychology genre. Witkin (Psychiatry/Mount Sinai Medical College; Quick Fixes and Small Comforts, 1988), a frequent guest-expert on TV (Donahue, Oprah, etc.), here offers a program for coming to terms with overwhelming emotions. In Witkin's terminology, passions are the strongest emotions (those that seize both mind and body) and are to be distinguished from emotions that engage merely the mind (e.g., boredom and confusion) or the body (e.g., terror and shock). Readers are invited to take the author's ``Passions Survey'' and to compare their answers with those of some 400 respondents, whose replies are charted but given rather cursory analysis in the text. Women, it seems, are less likely to feel-- or to admit to feeling--rage, despair, and infatuation; men shy away from infatuation, contentment, and despair. Women reported their most frequent emotions, in order, as anxiety, contentment, and hope; men reported contentment, hope, and anxiety. Witkin speculates briefly about possible reasons for the differences between the sexes, and then shifts into what seems to be her most comfortable mode: telling others how to effect self-improvement. She devotes a chapter each to despair, fear, rage, guilt, joy, love, hope, and awe, studding the text with numerous real-life anecdotes, quizzes, and self-help lists that attempt to offer assurance that one can indeed change one's life by following simple, sure-fire techniques. Appendices list sources of help for specific problems, such as drug dependency and eating disorders, and chart the effects of such emotional crutches as stimulants, relaxants, and psychedelic drugs. Not likely to help those with serious problems, but bright and chipper and infused with a gung-ho spirit. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Defining passions as "emotions that seize both the mind and body," clinical psychologist Witkin ( Female Stress Syndrome , LJ 10/15/91) gives practical suggestions for gaining insight into the eight crucial passions named in the subtitle. Using information and anecdotes from her own surveys, Witkin describes each passion in a separate chapter, gives guidelines for distinguishing it from related emotions (e.g., despair from depression, love from infatuation), and provides suggestions for understanding and managing it. Witkin cautions against pseudopassions achieved through addictive substances and behaviors and includes a list of places for the addicted to seek help. Much of the information here is not new, yet Witkin's detailed presentation will give this book wide popular appeal. Recommended for self-help collections.
-Lucille Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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