Meaning And Void: Inner Experience and the Incentives in People’s Lives

The author presents a wide-ranging theory of the way people function: how their inner lives--their thoughts and feelings--depend upon and influence their commitments to goals or incentives. He discusses such subjects as the flow of thought, emotion, creative thought, depression, alienation, satisfaction and dissatisfaction with marriage and work, aging, the mass media, drug use, suicide, the nature of values and the sense that one’s life is meaningful. Drawing on both the clinical and experimental literature of psychology on evidence from studies of animals as well as humans, it brings together many strands of contemporary psychology.