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We have all experienced regret. Most of us are able to accept what the regret refers to and move on. Occasional reminders may reawaken the regret situation, but reality readjusts our emotional screen and the regret phenomenon once again becomes memory. In more extreme situations, the “regret” is never resolved, and the person can torture himself or herself about the long-ago, even brief, occurrence.
There has been a proliferation of publications dealing with the psychotherapies, newer hypotheses, clinical and technical guides, and additional revised labeling/diagnostic categories in the so-called mind sciences. Keith Oatley, who has studied and written about the psychology of emotions, notes on the dust cover of this book, “I have two main criteria when reading: I want a book to engage my attention and make me look forward to reading more; and I want it to allow me to think thoughts that I would not otherwise have thought.” I can confirm Oatley's observation from my own experience in reading, thinking about, remembering, and questioning some authors' ideas.
Landman has written a stimulating, tightly packed treatise that is easy to read and addresses a universal psychological state almost everyone has experienced but that usually is not classified as pathological unless it exists in an extreme form. She approaches her topic from many perspectives. First, she challenges the commonly held negative, useless view by advancing the idea that regret can have its positive values, for it can be dynamic, causing mobilization for change. Also, it can be retrospectively stimulating, resulting in introspection into the multiple factors and possibly less conscious factors involved in the “regret” phenomenon.