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Emotions reflect an internalization of the outer world.

Angry protests often begin with a perceived injury against an individual.

Shame depends on norms established by other people and institutions.

Review of Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel, by Eva Illouz (Princeton University Press), 261 pp., $29.95.

Emotions are often regarded as the products of unique experiences and our biological and psychological makeup. Nonetheless, Eva Illouz points out, as they externalize our inner world, emotions also reflect an internalization of the outer world.

In Explosive Emotions, Illouz (a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, and author of 18 books) argues that with their therapeutic techniques and lucrative industry of self-improvement, psychologists have “obfuscated the ways in which modern life makes us implode within the echo chamber of our interiority.”

Drawing on psychology, philosophy, sociology, and literary classics, including The Odyssey, Othello, Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter, and Remembrance of Things Past, Illouz provides an in-depth examination of 12 emotions. Explosive motions, she argues, respond to key features of modernity, individualism, equality, meritocracy, democracy, capitalism, consumer culture, nationalism, and immigration, which often conflict with each other, and to an assumption that we “are entitled to an emotionally pain-free life.” Located at “the seamline between the collective and personal,” they enact and illustrate “the distinct malaise” of our times.

Informative and insightful, Explosive Emotions........

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