The Love and Power Institute posits a few fundamental ideas about the crisis threatening our sustainability as a species today: that overpopulation and unprecedented technological capabilities have led us to destabilize and despoil the earth until very drastic measures will
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | Of all the basic inborn emotions joy may be the closest to love. There are pathways to joy from many other inborn emotions, but we will explore the physical sources first. These are the
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | While visual pleasure may move us with or without associated meaning, sound can affect us on a different level. For sound may seem simpler than the complex features of a face or landscape, yet
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | Touch, caresses, holding another’s hand or arm for steady support in a crowd or on a careening bus; all these meetings of skin begin connection that can bring us as close as family once
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | Is Joy necessarily fleeting? Is joy imagined in heavenly art as a place only found after death? And even then is it only if we humans (meaning mostly men) make few enough mistakes, despite
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | Enjoyment forms the emotional basis of developing habits and attachments to familiar people and other living as well as inanimate things and even abstract goals, such as values and ideas. Anyone can learn to
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | We submit that it is not likely for men and women endowed with significantly different hormonal makeup to “naturally” understand each other without considerable learning about the ways they function differently. And it is
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | Now we’ve been on a long journey through the dynamics of joy and some of the other emotional colors involved in relations between the sexes. We can finally bring together the positive and
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | “Don’t take this heaven from one” carries on the combination of demand and pleading from the first stanza—without any “please” that might tilt the meaning towards request instead of demand. “Heaven” also suggests that
by Norman M. Brown Ph.D. | Indeed, in mainstream American culture, boys have been raised to shun or dampen down over half of the nine inborn emotions (interest/excitement, joy, surprise, fear, anger, distress/anguish, shame/humiliation, disgust/dislike, dissmell/contempt). Older boys and men