The Hidden Genius of Emotion
Lifespan Transformations of Personality

This 2002 book discusses how emotion powerfully influences our moment-to-moment thoughts, behaviours, and interpersonal interactions.

Carol Magai (Author), Jeannette Haviland-Jones (Author)

9780521129534, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 February 2010

548 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.1 cm, 0.8 kg

"Ambitious, textured, and elegant... This book is a tour de force demonstration of how one can indeed carry out a study of the whole person in all his or her complexity. Highly recommended." Choice

This thoughtful and beautifully written book demonstrates compellingly that emotions are central to personality development across the lifespan. Carol Magai and Jeannette Haviland-Jones draw on a wealth of textual and film material to forge an original empirical and theoretical analysis of the dynamics of emotion in human development. For its content, the work examines the lives of three mid-century psychologists, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls. Each man adopted a unique stance on the question of emotion in personality and in therapeutic interventions and, tellingly, the therapeutic methods they developed necessarily reflected their own emotional dynamics. Drawing on the most important research in clinical, social, and personality psychology, the authors reveal the pervasive influence of emotional organization in the lives of these individuals. Having presented a new approach to personology, autobiography, autobiography, narrative studies, psychotherapy and the theory of emotions on its publication in 2002, this book is essential reading.

Preface
Part I. Introduction: 1. Challenging the prevailing view
2. Affect, human development, and dynamic systems
Part II. Emotion as the Integrative Link in Social and Personality Development: 3. Lives attracted to shame and longing: Rogers
4. Lives repelled by fear and distress: Ellis
5. Lives repelled and attracted by contempt and shame: Perls
Part III. Emotion as the Link in Intellectual Work: 6. Wisdom and passion
7. Cognitive stages and joy, surprise: Rogers
8. Cartesian logic and anger, fear: Ellis
9. Dialectical logic and excitement, disgust and shame: Perls
Part IV. Emotion as the Link in Therapeutic Behavior: 10. Postures and climate in dyadic interaction
Part V. Presenting a New View: 11. Summarizing the emotional links
12. Lives and change: emotional energy in linear, complex, and chaotic personality systems.

Subject Areas: The self, ego, identity, personality [JMS]