Exuberance: The Passion for Life

There’s a lot more published about psychological pathology than there is about positive emotions. Jamison follows up her breakthrough memoir An Unquiet Mind with a multidimensional study of exuberance, a bubbly, playful, extremely joyful emotion that seems inextricably tied to what we consider the good life.

Jamison weaves together literary analysis of classic children’s stories (Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows), with biographies of exuberant men (Teddy Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum), and summaries of the psychological research. Exuberance is associated with play in almost all mammals, and play seems to serve key functions in learning, socialization, and allowing organisms to cope with risk. Exuberance may be even more fundamental, as Jamison links it to the burst of life in the spring and summer, and to the human ability to experience divine creation. Exuberance has a dangerous side, wearing out people and trending towards mania.

But for all the bubbles, this book offers little insight about exuberance itself, coming down to the safe psychological conventional wisdom that it’s a mood that ranks high on both sensation (it feels good) and energy (you want to do more). Exuberance seems like one of those innate traits that are stable from birth, either you’re exuberant or you’re not.