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This post is a review of Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. By Daniel Smith. Simon & Schuster. 227 pp.$28.

When he has been beset by “unruly and offensive emotions,” Daniel Smith acknowledges, he has looked for only one thing: “a way out,” a “vacuum to clear away the debris, and some help.” But he now realizes that “no emotion is inherently bad.”

In Hard Feelings, Smith (a psychotherapist and author of Monkey Mind and Muses, Madmen and Prophets) draws on works of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, literature, art, and, most of all, his personal experiences, to examine six dark emotions: annoyance, shame, envy, boredom, regret, and despair. To vilify or reject these emotions, he argues, is not only futile, but “a kind of psychological abuse.”

Especially when “emotional regimes (ethnic, national or denominational cultures) and “emotional communities” (families, college friends) have codes governing how emotions should – or should not – be expressed. Moreover, emotions contain essential information we can’t get elsewhere “about........

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