What does it mean to love? Can Romeo's love for Juliet be explained? What is desire? What are pleasure and pain? What is the love of power and of domination?Transcending the usual mind-body split, Jean-Didier Vincent's new theory of the emotions offers a harmonious view of human beings.

“Rather than reducing love to a series of chemical combinations, the biologist Jean-Didier Vincent humbly acknowledges that the human soul is largely mysterious.” Psychologies magazine

“This epicurean wanderer knows how to arrange special rendezvous in the museum of Desire.” Télérama magazine

Jean-Didier Vincent is notably the author of La Chair et le Diable (1996). A member of the French Academy of Sciences, he is a professor at the Institut Universitaire de France and at the Faculty of Medicine Paris-Sud. He was formerly the director of the Alfred Fessard Institute of Neurobiology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

He is the author of Voyage extraordinaire au centre du cerveau (2007), Désir et Mélancolie (2006), Pour une nouvelle physiologie du goût (2000), Qu'est-ce que l'homme? (2000), Faust (2000), La Vie est une fable (1998), Celui qui parlait presque (1993) and Casanova, la contagion du plaisir (1990).