Happiness

At a time when consumerism has become our raison d'être, and pharmaceutically aided quests for calm are the norm, perhaps it is time to reconsider the pursuit of happiness. And to wonder if, as at least one author of a recent spate of books on human emotion argues, sanity, rather than happiness, is a truer gauge of one's well-being. After all, it may be the best any of us can hope for.

How to be Sane

According to veteran psychotherapist Adam Phillips, our modern obsession with attaining happiness is more likely than not to drive us insane. Indeed, Phillips makes a cogent argument that our traditional understanding of happiness is most often defined in contrast to madness. So "it is worth wondering why, given the sheer scale of contemporary unhappiness, there are no accounts of what a sane life would look like," he writes in Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (Fourth Estate, $24.95). "Or of why a sane life might be more worth living than, say, a happy life, or a healthy life, or a successful life."

Madness and insanity are inherently dramatic, and therefore have all but pushed aside meaningful discussions of sanity and its close connection to happiness. For example, in popular literature through the ages, ranging from Shakespeare's tragedies to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels, writers typically employed madness or insanity as an easy, photo-negative way of describing happiness. In Phillips's view, the dearth of literature and language surrounding sanity has created a dynamic in which we all believe we know what sanity is, simply because we generally define it as being the opposite of insanity. Yet that shorthand may leave gaps in our understanding of what constitutes the "sane self," Phillips argues. "Perhaps we should value sanity now for the questions it forces us to face about how we want to live and who we want to be. . . . It can make us wonder not merely how we can temper the unacceptable things about ourselves, but also how we can release the good things, the things that matter most to us." Phillips's musings, a brisk combination of existentialism and research, provide a new way of looking at what we choose to believe about happiness.

Nothing More Than Feelings

In A Natural History of Human Emotions (Grove, $25), Stuart Walton, a journalist and cultural historian, revisits Charles Darwin's landmark survey of human emotions, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , published in 1872, and repositions it for the 21st century. Darwin theorized that "the emotions of human beings the world over are as innate and as constitutive and as regular as our bone structure . . . manifested in the universality of the ways in which we express them."

Darwin separated emotions into six basic categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. To this list, Walton adds jealousy, contempt, shame and embarrassment, the final two perhaps in recognition of our postmodern predilection for public disclosure of a host of once taboo behaviors. In any event, Walton's goal is to assess Darwin's theory in a modern context. "It is often instructive to reflect on the cultural codifications that these emotions have undergone in response to events in our history and to key works of art," writes Walton. "Does not sexual jealousy take on a new cast after Othello , and yet another after The Sorrows of Young Werther ?" Walton doesn't delve into the apparent contradiction between this idea and Darwin's "innate" emotions, perhaps as an acknowledgement that his repositioning of Darwin's work necessarily gives rise to gaps.

The chapter on happiness arrives last, by which time readers may be made miserable by Walton's dense, circuitous discussions of the nine other emotions. Yet readers stalwart enough to make it to the final chapter soon find that if nothing else, Walton is consistent: He takes the long way around to redefine Darwin's examination of happiness, beginning with a tedious debate about the Old Norse origin of the word itself. But soon we arrive at an intriguing idea, the possibility that hope and happiness are linked -- or should be, anyway. He relies on a 20th-century German philosopher to highlight the connection: "For . . . Ernst Bloch, happiness emerges as the reward for enduring hope." His theory of the connection between hope and happiness is instructive, Walton points out, in no small part because Bloch, exiled in America from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, nevertheless found "the glimmer of spiritual cheer in some unexpected places -- in the plots of pulp fiction or in the neon lights of advertisements."

In analyzing previous works by Bloch, Nietzsche, Horace and others, Walton sets their explorations of happiness next to Darwin's quite effectively. But where Darwin's language was dry in the service of science, Walton oddly fails to use vivid, active language to bring freshness to his material. And he never gives us his opinion of how these old-time debates fit into our increasingly frenzied attempts to attain happiness.

What You Really Want

Gregory Berns, however, leads a discussion that is meaty, contemporary and expansive in his book Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment (Henry Holt, $24). A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University, Berns artfully blends social critique with technical expertise. He also is a whiz at translating complicated psychological theorems into language that is clear and often vividly funny. "What do humans want?" he asks right up front. "Forget about the usual suspects like sex, money, and status. Is there something more basic, a drive that trumps pleasure or pain or happiness -- that, if understood, would provide the key to a lifetime of satisfying experiences?" With that, we are off on a winding search for satisfaction spiritual and corporeal. Berns's calm, bemused voice expertly guides us through the conundrums of our often unrealistic desires and the landscape of real opportunities for happiness and satisfaction that present themselves in myriad forms. "It is easy to take for granted the pleasure derived from . . . sex, food, and money," Berns writes. However, "digging below the transience of the pleasures these pursuits offer, I have found that great, even transcendent, experiences can arise if they are juxtaposed with novelty and challenge."

After mixing personal anecdotes -- including a quirky odyssey to Iceland to hang out with a sleep-deprivation expert on the trail of a nexus between endorphins and happiness -- with research, history and brief reviews of scientific surveys on human emotions, Berns makes a good case for just learning to relax. In other words, as Charles Bukowski, the eloquent sinner who drank himself to death in 1994, observed in his poem "pastoral," even lowlifes know happiness when they see it -- the challenge is to let it find you: "I lean back in the chair and smile/to myself/for myself/ for everything,/and nothing. This is absolutely great./this is as good as it is ever going to get." ·

Amy Alexander is co-author of "Lay My Burden Down: Unraveling Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans." She lives in Silver Spring, Md., where she is working on a book about race and the American media.