Of ongoing interest and debate in psychoanalysis are the “what? where? when? and why?” of the emotions. Questions of their essence, source, function, and meaning have defined much of the conversation about differing psychoanalytic models of the mind and about clinical process. It is, I suggest, a particularly interesting time in psychoanalytic history to discuss emotion because advances in highly relevant disciplines offer new challenges to our psychoanalytic current knowledge. Especially as we consider the emergent nature of self organization, the interaction of the innate and the acquired, of temperament and experience, the relation of brain and mind, and therefore of the unanalyzable and the analyzable in psychoanalytic process, we are guided by the limits of our understanding of the emotions.

In this massive and ambitious reference text, Lewis and Haviland seek to give the study of emotion appropriate scientific legitimacy, to document the explosion of new knowledge about the