Category Archives: Emotions

The Medicalization of Emotional Life

Jeremy Safran in “Psychiatry in the News“:

It is one thing to hypothesize that psychological and emotional problems are associated with changes at the biological level (e.g., specific patterns of brain activity or levels of neurotransmitters) or that symptom remission is associated with biological changes. It’s another to assume that the underlying causes of mental health problems are always biological in nature and that meaningful improvements in treatment will only take place when we can directly target the relevant brain circuitry. While it may be the case that biological factors play a more significant causal role in some mental health problems (e.g., schizophrenia) than others, the assumption that the major causal factor for mental health problems is always biological is a form of simplistic reductionism.

I want to be perfectly clear that I do not question the potential value of brain science research. What I do question is the single-minded emphasis on brain science research to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of mental health research. The new NIMH paradigm for research means that the amount of funding available for the development and refinement of treatments such as psychotherapy that are not targeted directly at the brain circuitry (although they do influence it indirectly), is likely to continue to shrink. It is important to recognize that funding priorities shape the programs of research pursued by scientists, and thus the type of research findings that are published in professional journals and disseminated to the public. This in turn shapes the curricula in psychiatry and clinical psychology training programs, which shapes the way in which mental health professionals understand and treat mental health problems. It also influences healthcare policy decisions and the type of coverage provided by third party insurers.

In concrete terms, the explicit NIMH policy shift is likely to mean that despite the large and growing body of evidence demonstrating that a variety of forms of psychotherapy (e.g., cognitive therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy, psychoanalytic therapy, emotion focused therapy) are effective treatments for a range of problems, we are likely to continue to see a decreasing availability of the already diminishing resources that can provide high quality psychotherapy for those who can potentially benefit from it.

Can Sexless Love Be Fulfilling?

Modern Emotions and Perennial Drives: Love and Sex

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By Liah Greenfeld

If you ever wondered, love–the identity-affirming one we all desire–is not dependent on sex and can well thrive without it. Love, as already Shakespeare said (and Shakespeare–see Modern Emotions: Love–was the expert on the subject) is a marriage of minds, after all, and the bodily element in it is at most secondary. Of course, the experience of that love we are discussing here is essentially erotic in the sense that the emotion is ecstatic and self-transcendent–finding that perfect understanding (the understanding that allows one to understand and accept oneself) in another person implies virtually merging with the other person in one’s innermost self, making the other person an essential, vital part of one’s identity. And this self-transcendence, merging of the minds, is naturally felt as a physical longing, a desire to become physically one–expressed as sexual desire. But sex, in this case, is an expression of love, not the other way around, and love can have numerous other expressions, it does not necessitate sex under all circumstances.

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Modern Emotions: Love

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By Liah Greenfeld

Surprise! Surprise! Love, too, in the sense we understand it now, is not a universal human emotion. Even today it is not universal: some cultures are familiar with it and some are not. And, historically, only the last five hundred years in human history have known it — the same five hundred years that have known happiness, aspiration, and ambition. The first humans to fall in love also lived in the 16th century and were English. Today, of course, this most powerful feeling is familiar everywhere within the so-called “Western” civilization (which includes all societies based on monotheistic religion, i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and it has penetrated into other civilizations as well. But it has spread from England, accompanying other experiences (such as ambition or happiness) which were at first specifically English, and reached other societies in translation from the English language. Love as we understand it, therefore, also does not spring from human “nature”: it is essentially a cultural phenomenon.

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Modern Emotions: Happiness

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By Liah Greenfeld

Our Declaration of Independence includes the pursuit of happiness among the inalienable human rights, alongside life itself. It is so included because the founding fathers evidently assumed that such pursuit was a human universal of the most important, that human beings, in other words, have always and everywhere had the capacity for experiencing happiness and have been naturally drawn to it. The readers of this blog would, probably, agree with this assumption and it is quite likely that many would consider happiness the very purpose of human existence. And yet, this assumption is wrong. Happiness is a modern emotion. No one – no society, no language – had a concept of it before the 16^th century, when the idea of happiness first appeared in England, and this means that it was inconceivable for people who lived before the 16^th century and to those who lived outside of England even for some time after it. If it was inconceivable, it could hardly been experienced, and certainly could not be consciously desired and pursued. As to whether it could be felt, desired, and pursued unconsciously we cannot know, because for obvious reasons, we cannot have any evidence regarding this possibility.

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Modern Emotions: Aspiration and Ambition

Are Human Emotions Universal?

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By Liah Greenfeld

It is widely believed that human emotions, from love to ambition to pride or desire for freedom, for instance, are hardwired into our brain and that, therefore, both their range and their nature are universal, shared by humanity as a whole. This belief is wrong and itself reflects the fundamental universalism of modern Western, particularly American, thought and its tendency to consider all human consciousness and behavior as a function of biology. Both comparative zoology and comparative history show that, above the limited range of emotions we share, as animals, with other animal species, what moves human beings and makes them suffer in one culture or society may be dramatically different from the emotions shaping the living experiences in another one.

Emotions, or feelings, as the name suggests, are experienced through physical sensations. In this they differ from other mental experiences, usually called “cognitive.” The part of sensations in an emotion allows us to place it into one of three categories: primary emotions, secondary emotions, and tertiary emotions. Primary emotions are experienced through specific sensations and represent the direct reaction of the organism to the stimuli of its physical environment. They include such experiences as pain and pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement (joy and anxiety), hunger and satiation, and their biological function is to increase the individual organism’s survival. It is clear that these primary emotions are common to humans and other animals.

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