Emotion, Thought, and Therapy (review)

114 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Costa's treatment of German antiquity in Italian culture, from Machiavelli to Vico, is a thorough one. It provides the scholar with rich bibliographical material. The author demonstrates clearly that historical narrative depends upon the guiding principles and directive concepts assumed by the investigator. Interpretations of the past were used pragmatically to validate the present and to influence the future. Sometimes a directive concept, such as "Republican liberty," was ascribed to nonexistent or misrepresented origins. The liberty of the Northern tribes became sanctified by a portrayal that omitted cruelties and atrocities. Reality thus depended upon and developed out of a belief in a noble primitiveness that actually did not exist. Costa's "demythologizing " is useful, for it reveals that legend, not reality, has served as a determinant of too many past narratives. MYRA MOSS Claremont Men's College Jerome Neu. Emotion, Thought, and Therapy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. 194. Hume's theory of the passions (Treatise, Bk. 2) hardly ranks as one of his most persuasive or satisfying achievements. Nor is Spinoza's account of the emotions (Ehica, Pt. 3) fully intelligible apart from the complex metaphysics of the work as a whole. Neither of these facts need trouble Jerome Neu, whose purpose in Emotion, Thought, and Therapy is only tangentially to explicate Hume and Spinoza. As it happens, Neu's subtitle, "A Study of Hume and Spinoza and the Relationship of Philosophical Theories of the Emotions to Psychological Theories of Therapy," is misleading to the extent that a contribution to the history of philosophy is expected. For Neu, Hume and Spinoza furnish "examples" of "types" of theory, that is, of thought-independent and thought-dependent views of emotion," respectively. We learn from Neu that "an extreme feeling theory of emotion, such as the one with which Hume is invested, is immune to psychotherapy aimed at altering beliefs and, mutatis mutandis, states of mind. The alternative to mind-directed therapy is some sort of manipulation of the environment in order to eliminate disfunctional behavioral effects. Not only does Neu's modernized Spinoza recognize that to feel emotion one must have particular beliefs (p. 93), he seems to earn Frau Lou Solomr's encomium for being the "Philosopher of Psychoanalysis" (p. 150-51). By contrast with Spinoza's prescience, Hume's attempt to reduce emotions to mere "'impressions" or "affects" proves dismally inadequate to account for the richness of human emotional experience , along with being gratuitously complex, internally inconsistent, and in no way prophetic of that Freudian psychology to come. "Analytic therapics make philosophic sense" (p. 2), or ought to, according to Neu. It is Spinoza, and emphatically not "Hume and the behaviorists," to whom one must turn in order to understand how psychoanalysis works, when it works (p. 3). Emotion, Thought, and Therapy is divided into three sections, the first and second purport to give "a detailed analysis of the theories formulated by Hume and Spinoza," while the third surveys psychological therapies, distinguishing the role each assigns to thoughts. To this consort of voices is added three appendices, which ought to have been integrated into the text. There are also very few notes----Neu prefers internal footnoting and copious use of parentheses--a bibliography, and and index. In the bibliography, Spinoza's work is cited only twice, in translation, and Flume is represented by the Treatise alone, but there are eleven references to Stuart Hampshire and seventeen to Freud. What Neu describes as "detailed analysis of Hume and Spinoza" emerges as two reviews of the more recent literature about their respective theories of the emotions. Where Hume is concerned, BOOK REVIEWS 115 the author has much to say about association of ideas by resemblance, simplicity, the dual impressions of pleasure and pain, sympathy and the knowledge of other minds, and the so-called calm passions. To my mind, lengthy excisions from ,~dal, Passmore, and Warnock, for example, are not sufficiently exciting to compensate for the virtual obfuscation of Hume himself. Nor is the enthusiasm with which Neu mediates among the commentators as satisfying as clear exposition of the primary material might have been. For while Neu's discussions are second...