Download or read book How Pleasure Works The New Science of Why We Like What We Like written by Paul Bloom and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-06-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Engaging, evocative…[Bloom] is a supple, clear writer, and his parade of counterintuitive claims about pleasure is beguiling." —NPR Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing’s history, origin, and deeper nature.

Download or read book The Chinese Pleasure Book written by Michael Nylan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes up one of the most important themes in Chinese thought: the relation of pleasurable activities to bodily health and to the health of the body politic. Unlike Western theories of pleasure, early Chinese writings contrast pleasure not with pain but with insecurity, assuming that it is right and proper to seek and take pleasure, as well as experience short-term delight. Equally important is the belief that certain long-term relational pleasures are more easily sustained, as well as potentially more satisfying and less damaging. The pleasures that become deeper and more ingrained as the person invests time and effort to their cultivation include friendship and music, sharing with others, developing integrity and greater clarity, reading and classical learning, and going home. Each of these activities is explored through the early sources (mainly fourth century BC to the eleventh century AD), with new translations of both well-known and seldom-cited texts.

Download or read book Schadenfreude written by Wilco W. van Dijk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When someone suffers a mishap, a setback or a downfall, we sometimes find ourselves experiencing schadenfreude - an emotion defined as deriving pleasure from another's misfortune. Schadenfreude is a common experience and an emotion which is seemingly inherent to social being. This book offers a comprehensive summary of current theoretical and empirical work on schadenfreude from psychological, philosophical and other scientific perspectives. The chapters explore justice as an underlying motive for schadenfreude, and the role played by social comparison processes and envy in evoking pleasure at the misfortunes of others in interpersonal relations. Schadenfreude is also described as a common phenomenon in intergroup relations. This is a compelling volume on a fascinating subject matter that aims to increase our understanding of the nature of this emotion and the role it plays in social relations.

Download or read book Find Your Pleasure written by Cynthia Loyst and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From The Social cohost Cynthia Loyst, a deeply personal lifestyle book about how to take the guilt out of pleasure and get to the heart of what you need and want in all aspects of life—from family, home, and work to love and sex. Find Your Pleasure is a pleasure revolution: where society has told women to feel guilty or ashamed for embracing pleasures, Cynthia Loyst shows you how to get to the heart of what you need and want, in every aspect of life. Live: Uncover the beauty of everyday moments, celebrate family and friends, find fun and satisfaction in your workdays, and enjoy the immense rewards parenting has to offer—all while being mindful of taking care of yourself. Love: Cynthia reveals everything from learning to enjoy your body more, ways to feel intimate and communicate effectively with your partner, and the keys to having better sex. Inspire: Find out how to let your creative self bloom, seek out exciting new pathways in life, and let kindness guide you with Cynthia’s tips and tricks for mastering mindfulness and meditation. Through her insightful anecdotes, Cynthia empowers women to revel in all of life’s joys, even the messy ones. Filled with beautiful color photographs, Find Your Pleasure is a treat for the soul that you can devour in one go or savor in tiny bites.

Download or read book Living the Simply Luxurious Life written by Shannon Ables and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-07 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can you uniquely give the world? We often sell ourselves short with self-limiting beliefs, but most of us would be amazed and delighted to know that we do have something special - our distinctive passions and talents - to offer. And what if I told you that what you have to give will also enable you to live a life of true contentment? How is that possible? It happens when you embrace and curate your own simply luxurious life. We tend to not realize the capacity of our full potential and settle for what society has deemed acceptable. However, each of us has a unique journey to travel if only we would find the courage, paired with key skills we can develop, to step forward. This book will help you along the deeper journey to discovering your best self as you begin to trust your intuition and listen to your curiosity. You will learn how to: - Recognize your innate strengths - Acquire the skills needed to nurture your best self - Identify and navigate past societal limitations often placed upon women - Strengthen your brand both personally and professionally - Build a supportive and healthy community - Cultivate effortless style - Enhance your everyday meals with seasonal fare - Live with less, so that you can live more fully - Understand how to make a successful fresh start - Establish and mastermind your financial security - Experience great pleasure and joy in relationships - Always strive for quality over quantity in every arena of your life Living simply luxuriously is a choice: to think critically, to live courageously, and to savor the everydays as much as the grand occasions. As you learn to live well in your everydays, you will elevate your experience and recognize what is working for you and what is not. With this knowledge, you let go of the unnecessary, thus simplifying your life and removing the complexity. Choices become easier, life has more flavor, and you begin to feel deeply satisfying true contentment. The cultivation of a unique simply luxurious life is an extraordinary daily journey that each of us can master, leading us to our fullest potential.

Download or read book Pleasure Activism written by adrienne maree brown and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

Download or read book With Pleasure written by Anna Katz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and expansive survey of a groundbreaking American art movement that overturned aesthetic hierarchies in a riot of color and ornamentation The Pattern and Decoration movement emerged in the 1970s as an embrace of long-dismissed art forms associated with the decorative. Pioneering artists such as Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942), Robert Kushner (b. 1949), and others appropriated patterns, frequently from non-Western decorative arts, to produce intricate, often dizzying or gaudy designs in media ranging from painting, sculpture, and collage to ceramics, installation art, and performance. This dazzling book showcases an astonishing array of works by more than 40 artists from across the United States, examining the movement's defiant adoption of art forms traditionally viewed as feminine, craft-based, or otherwise inferior to fine art. In addition to offering an overview of the Pattern and Decoration movement as it is commonly recognized, this volume considers artists of the period who are not typically associated with the movement. Rethinking the significance of patterns and the decorative in postwar American art, this panoramic view provides new insights into abstraction, feminism, and installation art. Essays explore the movement's feminist methods and values, including Miriam Schapiro's "femmage" practice; its impact on contemporary abstract painting; and its relationship to postmodern architecture and design. Artist biographies, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings further establish With Pleasure as the most expansive publication on the subject.

Download or read book The Birth of Pleasure written by Carol Gilligan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-08-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the classic In a Different Voice offers a brilliant, provocative book about love that has powerful implications for the way we live and love today. “Compelling ... A thrilling new paradigm.” —The Times Literary Supplement Carol Gilligan, whose In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now asks: Why is love so often associated with tragedy? Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns? Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels.

Download or read book The Pursuit of Pleasure written by Rudi Matthee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ancient times to the present day, Iranian social, political, and economic life has been dramatically influenced by psychoactive agents. This book looks at the stimulants that, as put by a longtime resident of seventeenth-century Iran, Raphaël du Mans, provided Iranians with damagh, gave them a "kick," got them into a good mood. By tracing their historical trajectory and the role they played in early modern Iranian society (1500-1900), Rudi Matthee takes a major step in extending contemporary debates on the role of drugs and stimulants in shaping the modern West. At once panoramic and richly detailed, The Pursuit of Pleasure examines both the intoxicants known since ancient times--wine and opiates--and the stimulants introduced later--tobacco, coffee, and tea--from multiple angles. It brings together production, commerce, and consumption to reveal the forces behind the spread and popularity of these consumables, showing how Iranians adapted them to their own needs and tastes and integrated them into their everyday lives. Matthee further employs psychoactive substances as a portal for a set of broader issues in Iranian history--most notably, the tension between religious and secular leadership. Faced with reality, Iran's Shi`i ulama turned a blind eye to drug use as long as it stayed indoors and did not threaten the social order. Much of this flexibility remains visible underneath the uncompromising exterior of the current Islamic Republic.

Download or read book Building Communities of Engaged Readers written by Teresa Cremin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading for pleasure urgently requires a higher profile to raise attainment and increase children’s engagement as self-motivated and socially interactive readers. Building Communities of Engaged Readers highlights the concept of ‘Reading Teachers’ who are not only knowledgeable about texts for children, but are aware of their own reading identities and prepared to share their enthusiasm and understanding of what being a reader means. Sharing the processes of reading with young readers is an innovative approach to developing new generations of readers. Examining the interplay between the ‘will and the skill’ to read, the book distinctively details a reading for pleasure pedagogy and demonstrates that reader engagement is strongly influenced by relationships between children, teachers, families and communities. Importantly it provides compelling evidence that reciprocal reading communities in school encompass: a shared concept of what it means to be a reader in the 21st century; considerable teacher and child knowledge of children’s literature and other texts; pedagogic practices which acknowledge and develop diverse reader identities; spontaneous ‘inside-text talk’ on the part of all members; a shift in the focus of control and new social spaces that encourage choice and children’s rights as readers. Written by experts in the literacy field and illustrated throughout with examples from the project schools, it is essential reading for all those concerned with improving young people’s enjoyment of and attainment in reading.

Download or read book Pleasure written by Alexander Lowen and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's leading innovators in the field of psychology shows you how to expand and realize your capacity to feel your body's aliveness, natural freedom, and spontaneity. A more creative life through pleasure is the promise of this revolutionary book. Defining pleasure as a bodily experience, Dr. Alexander Lowen states that there is no such thing as pure mental pleasure and points out that the capacity for pleasure is also the capacity for creative self-expression. In most adults, however, the struggle for power competes with the striving for pleasure, undermines creativity, and causes muscular tensions. Pleasure offers a way out of this dilemma through a series of bioenergetic exercises. These exercises are described in easy-to-follow detail. Their aim is to help the body regain its natural freedom and spontaneity and to release not only pleasure but also joyous creativity.

Download or read book The Healing Power of Pleasure written by Julia Paulette Hollenbery and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Shares seven easily accessible spiritual “medicines”--slowing down, embodying, deepening, relating, pleasure, power, and potency--so you can discover more sensual pleasure and delight in your body, relationships, and way of being as well as inner confidence, instinctual power, and aliveness • Presents reflections, practical somatic and breathing exercises, prompting questions, meditations, and energetic transmissions for each medicine • Explores body awareness, managing emotions stored in the body, the five realms of relationship, the different kinds of love, sexuality, passionate intimacy, and pleasure as a source of nourishment and healing Hidden just below the surface of ordinary day-to-day reality lies an abundance of pleasure and delight. By learning to look beyond your daily challenges, you can ease your stressed mind and body and rediscover the magic, mystery, sensuality, and joy that is possible in everyday life. Taking you step by step through a sensual journey of healing and transformation, Julia Hollenbery explores seven easily accessible spiritual “medicines” or pathways to discover more sensual pleasure and delight in your body, relationships, and way of being. Journeying through slowing, embodying, deepening, relating, pleasure, power, and potency, each medicine invites you to engage through reflections, practical somatic and breathing exercises, prompting questions, and meditations. Energetic transmissions help you reconnect body, mind, and soul in an integrated way and reclaim your innate source of pleasure. A visionary call to action to inhabit your universe of deliciousness, The Healing Power of Pleasure combines scientific fact with ancient spirituality, insight, humor, and poetry. This book presents an invitation to reawaken your body, realize the depth and web of relationships within which we live, and embrace the pleasure, power, and potency that arise when we look inward as well as confidently relate outward with the world around us.

Download or read book The Trouble with Pleasure written by Aaron Schuster and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan. Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure." Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other things, a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.

Download or read book Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life written by Daniel Russell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Russell examines Plato's subtle and insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value and human psychology. Russell offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics, and shows that, for Plato, pleasure cannot determine happiness because pleasure lacks a direction of its own. Plato presents wisdom as a skill of living that determines happiness by directing one's life as a whole, bringing aboutgoodness in all areas of one's life, as a skill brings about order in its materials. The 'materials' of the skill of living are, in the first instance, not things like money or health, but one's attitudes, emotions, and desires where things like money and health are concerned. Plato recognizes thatthese 'materials' of the psyche are inchoate, ethically speaking, and in need of direction from wisdom. Among them is pleasure, which Plato treats not as a sensation but as an attitude with which one ascribes value to its object. However, Plato also views pleasure, once shaped and directed by wisdom, as a crucial part of a virtuous character as a whole. Consequently, Plato rejects all forms of hedonism, which allows happiness to be determined by a part of the psyche that does not direct one'slife but is among the materials to be directed. At the same time, Plato is also able to hold both that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that pleasure is necessary for happiness, not as an addition to one's virtue, but as a constituent of one's whole virtuous character itself. Plato thereforeoffers an illuminating role for pleasure in ethics and psychology, one to which we may be unaccustomed: pleasure emerges not as a sensation or even a mode of activity, but as an attitude - one of the ways in which we construe our world - and as such, a central part of every character.

Download or read book Gender Pleasure and Violence written by Agnieszka Kościańska and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

Download or read book The Pleasure Trap written by Douglas J. Lisle and published by Book Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors offer unique insights into the factors that make us susceptible to dietary and lifestyle excesses, and present ways to restore the biological processes designed by nature to keep us running at maximum efficiency and vitality. A wake-up call to even the most health conscious people, The Pleasure Trap boldy challenges conventional wisdom about sickness and unhappiness in today's contemporary culture, and offers groundbreaking solutions for achieving change. Authors Douglas Lisel, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., provide a fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being. Inspired by stunning original research, comprehensive clinical studies, and their successes with thousands of patients, the authors construct a new paradigm for the psychology of health, offering fresh hope for anyone stuck in a self-destructive rut. Integrating principals of evolutionary biology with trailblazing, proactive strategies for well

Download or read book Pictures and Tears written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.