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Psychoanalysis has been challenged of late to shed its past elite insularity and embrace an interdisciplinary outlook. A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing allows us to partake in a philosopher's contemplative journey into the world of emotions, a world familiar to us from the clinical perspective. I found the journey rewarding beyond my expectations. Philosophic discourse has tended to focus on the general phenomena of emotions. Neu's essays target particular emotions, their many facets, their complex relations to other emotions, and how they are connected to varied aspects of human life. These may be the pursuit of happiness, social and political ideals, or the development of identity. Neu's outlook is explicitly interdisciplinary. If we are to understand human nature, we must learn what we can from the natural sciences (including biology) but also from psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and literature.
Neu's language is delightfully direct. “One can do many different things with emotions,” he writes, “have them, express them, cultivate them, repress them…. I propose here to think about them, in the belief that thinking about them can transform them” (p. 13). He can transform them because emotions are in part constituted by thoughts, beliefs, judgments, and the like, and changing one's belief can be a way of transforming one's emotions. Spinoza understood that the great power of reflexive knowledge makes room for human freedom.
The book is an inquiry in essay form. Given the larger target area of emotion, which includes thought and belief, the specific point of inquiry could be almost any question one happens to ask. All questions are worth examining. A few chapters have some continuity. The ones entitled “Jealousy” and “On Hating the Ones We Love” are related, as are the ones on Freud and psychoanalysis. We meet recurrent themes throughout the book. The relation of the normal and the pathological is of special interest. Psychoanalysis developed its insights f