Emotions

A Social Science Reader

Monica Greco, Paul Stenner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134719419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Are emotions becoming more conspicuous in contemporary life? Are the social sciences undergoing an an 'affective turn'? This Reader gathers influential and contemporary work in the study of emotion and affective life from across the range of the social sciences. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, the collection offers a sense of the diversity of perspectives that have emerged over the last thirty years from a variety of intellectual traditions. Its wide span and trans-disciplinary character is designed to capture the increasing significance of the study of affect and emotion for the social sciences, and to give a sense of how this is played out in the context of specific areas of interest. The volume is divided into four main parts:

• universals and particulars of affect
• embodying affect
• political economies of affect
• affect, power and justice.

Each main part comprises three sections dedicated to substantive themes, including emotions, history and civilization; emotions and culture; emotions selfhood and identity; emotions and the media; emotions and politics; emotions, space and place, with a final section dedicated to themes of compassion, hate and terror. Each of the twelve sections begins with an editorial introduction that contextualizes the readings and highlights points of comparison across the volume. Cross-national in content, the collection provides an introduction to the key debates, concepts and modes of approach that have been developed by social scientist for the study of emotion and affective life.

Part One

Universals and particulars of affect

1. Emotions, history and civilization

THIS IS THE FIRST OF three sections where we have gathered texts that share a concern with questions of universality and difference in the study of emotions. The concern is common across the disciplines of history, anthropology and sociology, as are some of the concepts through which it is articulated (e.g. ‘constructionism’). Debates in each discipline, however, are coloured by different emphases and priorities. The texts included in this section address the dimension of temporal continuity and difference through the work of historians and historical sociologists.

Historical research on the emotions can be broadly distinguished in terms of the focus on two very different kinds of object. One strand of research addresses theories or ideas about emotion as these have been developed by philosophers, theologians, psychologists and psychiatrists. This strand is exemplified here in our first extract, from Thomas Dixon’s From Passion to Emotions: the creation of a secular psychological category (2003). Ideas and theories of ‘emotion’ as such are relatively recent, as the term was not widely in use before the early nineteenth century. While much historical writing underplays the significance of this terminological point, sometimes to the point of ignoring it altogether, it is central to Dixon’s analysis. Dixon proposes that the shift from ‘passions’ to ‘emotions’ cannot be understood simply as the employment of a new word to describe the same thing. Passions and affections, especially since Augustine and Aquinas, were terms embedded in a theological semantic web. They resonated with other terms such as the soul and the will, and they operated within a normative moral framework at whose pinnacle stood a transcendental deity. ‘Emotion’, by contrast, has its provenance in the secularized idiom of the increasingly specialized and autonomous practices of science and medicine. As a concept, it is born of a quasi-empirical distinction between external and internal affections of the mind. As internal affections of the mind, emotions are in turn distinguished from thought or intellect. In this manner, emotions are dissociated from the dimensions of morality and ethics, and construed as non-rational feeling states with evident ties to the body. The text by Dixon included here points to the historical specificity of the concept of emotion, and to the methodological dangers implicit in the historiographical task of mediating between this modern concept and its equivalents in the past. Dixon’s argument in this work parallels anthropological deconstructions of Western concepts of emotion, such as the studies by Lutz (1986; see also extract in this volume), which seek to highlight the epistemological and normative assumptions these concepts imply, and the methodological pitfalls of ignoring them.

Another strand of historical research on the emotions addresses changes not in theories or concepts of emotion, but in the social norms regarding their experience and expression – changes in attitudes, standards, or what sociologist Arlie Hochschild named ‘feeling rules’ (see section 3 below) and what historians Stearns and Stearns called ‘emotionology’ (1985). Here the focus can be on the historical trajectory of individual emotions such as anger, jealousy or fear, or it can be on general styles of affect management typical of entire epochs. The work of Norbert Elias is the clearest example of this latter approach and, for better or for worse (see the critique by Rosenwein, 2002), it has been credited with providing something like a paradigm for subsequent historical and historico-sociological research on the emotions. The text included here comprises two short extracts from Elias’ magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, originally published in 1939. The theory of the civilizing process offers an account of the long-term correlation between changes in personality structure and socio-political changes since the late Middle Ages in Europe. In a nutshell, the theory describes how the increasing complexity of networks of human interdependence, as particularly evident in the emergence of the modern state with its increasing functional differentiation, goes hand in hand with the development of increasing capacities for foresight and calculation on the part of individuals. These capacities for foresight and calculation rely in turn on increasing measures of impulse restraint, of detachment and observation of self from the vantage point of others. Over time, both the quality of affective experience and the forms of its expression are profoundly transformed through this process. In relation to emotions, and contrary to some readings of Elias’ theory, it is important to realize that the theory of the civilizing process does not suggest changes in the direction of a wholesale repression of affective life. One key word to describe the direction of the overall process is ‘psychologization’; this involves an expansion of the occasions for the experience of emotions like shame and repugnance, for example, as much as it involves restraint over the physical expressions of, say, anger and joy.

The theory of the civilizing process constitutes much more than a historio-graphical endeavour. It also offers a diagnosis of typically modern forms of self-perception, which in turn provides the basis for a historically reflexive sociology of knowledge. For Elias, an historical movement in the direction of increasing capacity for detachment and affective neutrality was crucial for the development of modern science. This capacity occurred earlier in relation to the observation of natural phenomena, and only later in relation to the reflexive observation of human behaviour and relationships. The theory of the civilizing process should be read, on one level, as an expression of the very dynamics it describes: it is designed to bring a further measure of affective detachment (and thus what Elias called ‘reality congruence’) to the study of human beings. This is evident, for example, in the relationship between Elias’ theory and psychoanalysis. Elias borrowed and adapted many Freudian concepts, such as that of ‘repression’; but he was also critical of Freud for assuming that the structure of the mental apparatus as he had described it was universal and relatively ahistorical. Elias considered that Freud, like most of his contemporaries, was trapped (or still too ‘involved’) in the human self-image typical of modernity, one that regarded the opposition between ‘individual’ psyches and ‘social’ constraints as a static epistemological given. The constructionism implicit in Elias’ theory thus assumes a fundamental plasticity of emotional experience, while positing the availability of universal psychological mechanisms for the moulding of that experience.

The selections from The Civilizing Process that we have included in this volume touch on these multiple aspects and valences of the theory. The first part addresses changes in aggressiveness, underscoring the importance that Elias ascribed to violence and to the relative degree of pacification in a society for the purposes of explaining changes in emotional experience and expression. The second part of the text focuses on the concept of ‘psychologization’, illustrating the pivotal importance of the European courts as sites for the exponential development of capacities for emotional detachment, observation and self-observation.

Abram De Swaan is one of a group of Dutch sociologists who have applied and developed Elias’ insights to the study of more contemporary social phenomena. This extract from an essay entitled ‘The politics of agoraphobia’ (1990) presents an analytical framework for understanding how social developments ‘may have altered the intimate relations between people, so that the difficulties they experience with themselves and with one another may have become translatable into the vocabulary of psychotherapy and suitable for treatment as psychic problems’. The argument developed in the text speaks to a number of interrelated theoretical concerns. The broadest of these is the question of whether the relaxation of codes of behaviour and the ‘informalization’ of many social relations, especially evident since the 1960s, signifies a reversal in the direction of the ‘civilizing process’ – a movement towards decreasing self-restraint. The answer is a resounding ‘no’: informalization involves new and subtler forms of affective self-restraint and self-discipline, and these are associated to the proliferation of a range of psychic problems. De Swaan thus takes issue with the constructionist notion that the emergence of psychic problems in their contemporary form is a consequence of the rise of the profession of psychotherapy. According to the constructionist argument, professional and bureaucratic institutions have provided a vocabulary of troubles through which the lay public construct their definition and experience of everyday difficulties, and thereby also the presentation of their complaints. While this may be true on one level, argues De Swaan, the explanation is reductive and simplistic, for it fails to take into account the context of wider changes in the patterns of mutual interdependence between individuals. De Swaan focuses on a transformation in the management of power relations that is implicit in processes of ‘informalization’, which he describes as a transition from ‘management by command’ to ‘management by negotiation’. Against this background, a range of psychic problems can be interpreted as ways of ‘opting out’ of forms of social interaction that are not as liberating as their rhetoric often suggests.

The fourth and final extract in this section is from a chapter by Peter and Deborah Stearns, where the authors discuss issues of causation and timing in the historical study of emotions. In the chapter as a whole, Stearns and Stearns present a number of methodological choices in relation to the problem of causation in historical research. One choice is between taking changes in specific emotions the explanatory focus, or adopting a larger, meta-historical focus of analysis by looking at changes in general frameworks, or ‘emotional styles’. A focus on larger frameworks assumes ‘that changes in individual emotion follow simply from the larger innovations’. These issues of scale in causation have rarely been considered by historians, they claim, but are in fact methodologically crucial. A second choice involved in the analysis of historical change concerns the balance between ‘functionalist’ and ‘culturalist’ explanations. Functionalist explanations of emotional change interpret such change as an adaptation to novel social conditions (such as industrialization and urbanization, in the modern period). Culturalist explanations, on the other hand, examine change in connection with factors such as the nature of dominant discourses (e.g. religious vs scientific, and variations within these), and changes in the media employed by advice-givers and educators. While outlining these methodological and analytical alternatives, the authors stress that they are not mutually exclusive and that causation, in most instances, is ‘multifaceted’. Our selection from this chapter focuses on the discussion of causation in relation to changes in specific emotions.

References

Rosenwein, B. H. (2002) ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, 107 (3): 821–845.

Stearns, P. N. and Stearns, C. Z. (1985) ‘Emotionology: clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards’, The American Historical Review, 90 (4): 813–836.

Chapter 1

Thomas Dixon

From Passions to Emotions

[…]

IN THIS BOOK I INVESTIGATE the creation of ‘the emotions’ as a psychological category. By seeing how this category was conceived, and by looking at the different psychological categories it replaced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I aim to provide readers with resources that will help them to step back from the contemporary obviousness of the existence and importance of ‘the emotions’ and to ask fundamental questions about this category’s meaning and value. In other words, I hope my historical account will stimulate philosophical and psychological reflection. Of particular importance to this story is the displacement, in the history of systematic psychological theorising, of more differentiated typologies (which included appetites, passions, affections and sentiments) by a single over-arching category of emotions during the nineteenth century. Perhaps these past typologies will give readers pause for thought, and encourage them to ask whether the emotions, as we think of them today in psychology and philosophy, really form a coherent category.¹ I will suggest that a more differentiated typology would be a useful tool, and would help us to avoid making sweeping claims about all ‘emotions’ being good or bad things, rational or irrational, virtuous or vicious. …

My argument about the historical provenance of modern theories of the emotions is revisionist, especially with respect to Robert Solomon’s thesis in his influential book The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (1976, 1993).² Solomon’s thesis is, in short, that Western thinkers have been prone, right up to the late twentieth century, to take a negative view of the emotions and to think of them as inherently bodily, involuntary and irrational. Solomon blames this negative view of emotions on the influence of rationalist views (in which reason and the emotions are antagonists) that have been dominant among Western philosophers in general and certain Christian theologians in particular.

Solomon’s was the first in a spate of books in recent decades that all seek, in one way or another, to rehabilitate the emotions. … Many of these writers also echo Solomon’s thesis that from antiquity up until the late twentieth century philosophers and psychologists have generally, and misguidedly, thought of reason and the emotions as antagonists. … One of my aims in this book is to show how these views on the history of ideas about passions and emotions are themselves, in certain respects, mythical and erroneous.

The historical story I tell here turns Solomon’s view on its head. I argue that it was in fact the recent departure from traditional views about the passions (not the influence of those views) that led to the creation of a category of ‘emotions’ that was conceived in opposition to reason, intellect and will. The category of emotions, conceived as a set of morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings, is a recent invention. Prior to the creation of the emotions as an over-arching category, more subtlety had been possible on these questions. The ‘affections’, and the ‘moral sentiments’, for example, could be understood as both rational and voluntary movements of the soul, while still being subjectively warm and lively psychological states. It is not the case that prior to the 1970s no one had realised that thinking, willing and feeling were (and should be) interwined in one way or another. Almost everybody had realised this. Too many contemporary writers still appeal, nonetheless, to the idea … that either a particular individual, or school of thought, or period, or even the entire history of philosophy has been characterised by the view that the emotions … are entirely insidious and are to be subjected at all times to almighty reason. Anything more than the briefest of glances at the history of thought establishes that this is a thoroughly untenable idea, even when applied to Stoic or Christian philosophers (those most often accused of passion- or emotion-hatred).³ […]

It is an immensely striking fact of the history of English-language psychological thought that during the period between c.1800 and c.1850 a wholesale change in established vocabulary occurred such that those engaged in theoretical discussions about phenomena including hope, fear, love, hate, joy, sorrow, anger and the like no longer primarily discussed the passions or affections of the soul, nor the sentiments, but almost invariably referred to ‘the emotions’. This transition is as striking as if established conceptual terms such as ‘reason’ or ‘memory’ or ‘imagination’ or ‘will’ had been quite suddenly replaced by a wholly new category.

The puzzling historical question, then, at the heart of this book (a question that, equally puzzlingly, has rarely been posed before, let alone answered) is: when and why did English-language psychological writers stop using ‘passions’, ‘affections’ and ‘sentiments’ as their primary categories and start referring instead to the ‘emotions’? …

One important element of my answer to this central historical question is that it was the secularisation of psychology that gave rise to the creation and adoption of the new category of ‘emotions’ and influenced the way it was originally and has subsequently been conceived. […]

The initial backdrop I provide to this story of gradual, complex and incomplete secularisation, takes the form of an analysis of patristic and scholastic Christian theologies of the soul. Classical Christian theologians, especially St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, … produced models of the human soul in which the passions and appetites, which were movements of the lower animal soul, were distinguished from the affections, which were acts of the higher rational soul. The appetites were hun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: emotion and social science
• Part 1 Universals and particulars of affect
• Part 2 Embodying affects
• Part 3 Political economies of affect
• Part 4 Affect, power and justice
• Guide to further reading
• Index