Description
Mindful of the human potential for violence, particularly to their own kind, as well as their potential for empathy and helpfulness, Breggin, called “the conscience of psychiatry,” and best-selling author of Talking Back to Prozac, among many others, describes how guilt, shame, and anxiety serve an adaptive evolutionary function by inhibiting willfulness and violence in personal and family relationships. Calling them “negative legacy emotions,” he exhorts the identification of the negative emotion, rejection of its influence and its replacement by common sense, national values, and empathetic love. There are 32 chapters divided into three parts: understanding negative legacy emotions; achieving emotional freedom; freedom to love. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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With the first unified theory of guilt, shame, and anxiety, this pioneering psychiatrist and critic of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs examines the causes and effects of psychological and emotional suffering from the perspective of biological evolution, child development, and mature adult decision-making. Drawing on evolution, neuroscience, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Breggin analyzes what he calls our negative legacy emotions—the painful emotional heritage that encumbers all human beings. The author marshals evidence that we evolved as the most violent and yet most empathic creatures on Earth. Evolution dealt with this species-threatening conflict between our violence and our close-knit social life by building guilt, shame, and anxiety into our genes. These inhibiting emotions were needed prehistorically to control our self-assertiveness and aggression within intimate family and clan relationships. Dr. Breggin shows how guilt, shame, and anxiety eventually became self-defeating and demoralizing legacies from our primitive past that no longer play any useful or positive role in mature adult life. He then guides the reader through the Three Steps to Emotional Freedom, starting with how to identify negative legacy emotions and then how to reject their control over us. Finally, he describes how to triumph over and transcend guilt, shame, and anxiety on the way to greater emotional freedom and a more rational, loving, and productive life.
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