A General Theory of Love
2000 book by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon
A General Theory of Love is a book about the science of human emotions and biological psychiatry written by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, psychiatric professors at the University of California, San Francisco, and was first published by Random House in 2000. It has since been reissued twice, with new editions appearing in 2001 and 2007.
Overview
The book examines the phenomenon of love and human connection from a combined scientific and cultural perspective. It attempts to reconcile the language and insights of humanistic inquiry and cultural wisdom (literature, song, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance and philosophy) with the more recent findings of social science, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
A General Theory of Love has been compared to the work of Steven Pinker and Oliver Sacks. Since its first publication, the book has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, Latvian, Croatian, and Persian.
Contents
The book surveys scientific understanding of emotions and particularly intimacy and love, from Freud through modern neuroscience, with a focus on the emerging understanding of the limbic brain and the development of personality. The authors put forward the idea that our nervous systems are not separate or self-contained; beginning in earliest childhood, the areas of our brain identified as the limbic system (hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, and limbic cortex) is affected by those closest to us (limbic resonance) and synchronizes with them (limbic regulation) in a way that has profound implications for personality and lifelong emotional health. The authors maintain that various forms of therapy are effective not so much by virtue of their underlying theory or methodology, but to the degree to which the therapist is able to empathetically modify these set patterns (limbic revision). The authors go on to examine how many aspects of our society and social institutions have been constructed in a way that is incompatible with our innate biology, which gives rise to individual and social pathologies.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “A General Theory of Love” as 2000 book by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2000 book by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4656949. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2001 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “A General Theory of Love” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.