Exploring the Emotional Life of the Mind

A Psychodynamic Theory of Emotions

Daniël Helderman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429575280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This highly innovative new book reconsiders the structure of basic emotions, the self and the mind. It clinically covers mental disorders, therapeutic interventions, defense mechanisms, consciousness and personality and results in a comprehensive discussion of human responses to the environmental crisis.

For openers, a novel psychodynamic model of happiness, sadness, fear and anger is presented that captures their object relational features. It offers a look through the eyes of these specific emotions and delineates how they influence the interaction with other persons. As regulation of the emotional state is the core task of the self, dysregulation can lead to mental disorders. Clinical cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression are discussed, using the model to outline the emotional turbulence underneath. Finally, the elaborated theory is used to analyse personal responses to the environmental crisis and political strategies that capitalise on them.

This book will appeal to scholars, psychotherapists and psychiatrists with an interest in emotions and who wish to challenge their own implicit theory of emotion with an explicit new model. It will also be of interest for academic researchers and professionals in fields where emotional processes play a pivotal role.

Part I
What to think of something that is subjective, multifaceted and fluid

Chapter 1
Recurring themes in rivalling theories of emotion

During my first years as a military psychologist in the Royal Netherlands Army, I saw deployed soldiers who displayed more anger than fear. Men full of suppressed rage, occasional breakthroughs of aggressive impulses, sometimes at work but more often within the guarded sphere of their homes. Holding on to their body armour in personal relations and in a constricting love–hate relationship with themselves. As I was captivated by the brooding glance that subverted any expression of vulnerability, an enduring interest in the puzzling connection between anger and fear was born within me. The usual explanations – like: anger can be used to camouflage fear, the exhausted stress system makes someone agitated as well as irritable, the body reacts like it is still in a war zone – are useful for psychotherapy but didn’t give me a satisfying answer to my more fundamental question. I suspected that some sort of underlying principle could be discovered and I searched for theoretical insight. Also I had an intuitive aversion to the distinction between positive and negative emotions, based on my belief that all emotions should be “psychologically owned” before labelling them desirable or unwanted. Back then I didn’t have a clue though of alternative ways to think about basic emotions. Besides having my work as a therapist, I was fortunate to be trained as a clinical psychologist, gaining knowledge from different theoretical frames of reference. After completion I started training in psychoanalysis, being the most comprehensive body of psychological knowledge in my opinion. By now, seventeen years after I started my professional career, I want to present what I have found. I propose a new model for basic emotions, mapping not only anger and fear but happiness and sadness as well. In this chapter, I will delineate their underlying principles and some basic forms of emotion regulation.

Maybe you can imagine that my learning curve was bumpy to say the least. The more I learned, the more the perplexing nature of emotions baffled me. For instance, basic emotions provide us with a “quick and dirty” way (LeDoux, 1996) to orient ourselves in our surroundings and provide us with attentional focus, physical energy and external direction. What do I need to focus on? Where will I go to and what do I distance myself from? What will I hold on to and what will I let go of? These can be pressing questions that need an immediate answer, if you find yourself in a situation that is critical for your survival or the survival of your loved ones. A rational evaluation of the pros and cons of different reactions is a cognitive luxury that the natural world simply doesn’t always permit. The primary reaction (of nature’s choice) is an emotional one, in humans as well as other animals (Darwin, 2009, originally published in 1872). But how does a “quick and dirty” emotional system accomplish such a complicated feat? How does it make sense of a world that is diffuse and complex and prioritise inner motives that collide and diverge (Kris, 1985) in mysterious ways?

A vital model of emotions should shed at least a dim light on these various aspects. Fortunately, scientists from various disciplines are focussing their research on emotions and the way information is processed. Advanced brain imaging techniques make it possible to study former indecipherable connections between the mind and the brain (Solms & Turnbull, 2002). This rapid progress in the field of neuroscience doesn’t go by unnoticed. Inspired by this scientific achievement, there is an upsurge of academic interest in the workings of unconscious processes (Dijksterhuis, 2007), though it has been the cornerstone of psychoanalytic thinking for more than a century. The opportunity now presents itself to combine insights from adjacent fields, from psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioural therapy and the neurosciences, to name a few, and to do justice to the multifaceted character of emotions that transcends each separate perspective. I owe a lot to the rigorous scientific work done in these different fields and I feel obliged to apologise in advance for the way I make use of it. I will pick what I believe are the key components and will combine them in a new way in the Maelstrom model. I can’t completely refute the critique that my behaviour resembles that of a shameless bear, who eats the spawn of the salmon and leaves the rest of the fish untouched. Hopefully there is some justification in the readability of this book. Precisely because of the multifaceted character of emotions, the possibilities to digress are endless. By sticking to the bare essentials of key concepts, I try to cover just enough ground to introduce a new theoretical connection between them. And if all goes well, you might subsequently experience a similar “Aha-Erlebnis” as I did, and the intuitive practicality of the model opens up new vistas for your personal and professional life.¹

So now we can start with what I believe to be the key concepts for understanding basic emotions. I will take you through this possibly somewhat arbitrary-looking list as an introduction on seven-league boots. From a large array of theoretical concepts, these are the ones I found most instructive and I will link them to their scientific mothers and fathers. Then I will use them to build the Maelstrom model, adding some theory of my own. In Chapters 1, 2 and 3 a clinical case is presented, to illustrate the workings of the model as a therapeutic tool. Throughout the whole book, clinical material is written in italics.

Pleasure and displeasure

***

A non-commissioned officer enters my treatment room in uniform.² He is so formal in his choice of words that I immediately get the impression that he doesn’t want to be here. His commanding officer has sent him to the military psychological unit after an incident with the police. He was pulled over after he took an illegal exit at the very last moment. The traffic fine he got made him furious and there was a heated scene at the side of the road. In my room, he rants on about the abundance of rules in the Netherlands and the bureaucratic “pencil licking” (in Dutch: pennenlikkerij) of the local police. Although he describes the scene as “awkward and inconvenient”, he steers clear from every form of self-reflection. I get the impression that he thinks that by giving this account he is paying me more respect than I deserve. For him this whole exercise seems to be superfluous.

There is something intriguing going on here. If emotions serve an evolutionary purpose, how come this soldier is so conflicted in his affective attitude towards me? If there is such a thing as an emotional quick and dirty way to adapt to a personal situation, why does he burn his fingers so badly? And how can I understand that he seems to contemn me? Maybe he can’t imagine gaining something of value for himself, so he just files complaints against others. But even if that is true, there are too many unanswered questions for a quick fix of his predicament. As I wrote earlier, not only did I start therapy with him, but I went looking for answers in the interlining of basic emotions.

***

The rapid ability to discern things that are good for you from things that are bad is a crucial element of our emotional equipment. Together with providing us with a rapid adaptive response, it forms the core activity of our basic emotional system. No wonder the polarity of positive–negative is a recurring theme in emotional theory.

Russell devised an influential model that categorises emotions along two axes (Russell, 1980; Posner, Russell & Peterson, 2005). On one axis, emotions are rated on a pleasure–displeasure continuum; the other axis specifies the level of emotional arousal.³ In his line of reasoning, emotions distinguish themselves in their specific levels of valence and arousal. Joy, for example, consists of a strong activation of a pleasurable sensation together with a medium level of arousal. Other emotions are categorised along these axes as well, and this way a clear-cut two-dimensional model is constructed.

The simplicity of Russell’s model is powerful, but it obscures a far-reaching assumption. Emotions are categorised by the way we label “the feel of the emotion” as pleasurable or unpleasurable. This division though can only be made from an observing viewpoint in the psyche, from a cognitively conscious recognition that “this feels good and that feels bad”. Russell implicitly underscores his assumption that the prime function of emotions is to inform consciousness about the state of the inner world (that feels good or bad). And by being a part of the inner world, emotions logically should be classified as pleasurable or unpleasurable as well. I think that this claim needs some fine-tuning. First, it is far from decided what “the feel of each emotion” is. Because of the fact that we are multi-layered organisms and realistic situations rarely are not ambivalent, an emotion seldom comes alone. What an emotion feels like depends on a lot of things, such as personal history, actual context and subjective meaning. To feel sad is listed as unpleasurable, but it can be much worse if one is not able to feel sad at all. Being sad in some instances can feel good.⁴ Above and beyond this, one can hardly claim that the prime function of an emotion is to inform consciousness of an inner state when one sees the intimate preverbal communication between a mother and her baby. When seeing a baby react to his available mother (as opposed to a stranger, for example), laughter or crying is a sure sign of his reaction to his environment. And this reaction has a direct and communicative function towards the one he is attached to (Stern, 1985). As a parent it is very hard to ignore cries of pain and anguish from your child, and they invoke an tendency to comfort and console. Also it is hard not to smile when you hear your baby giggle. So, the positive and the negative side of emotions have a communicative and interactional function that colludes with the informational function about the state of the inner world towards consciousness. And this communicative and interactional function is very much dependent on the immediate context. Therefore, “the feel of the emotion” doesn’t match the inner state completely but also is indicative of the subjective experience of the context. When emotions are not only about the inner state, they shouldn’t be categorised in the way we categorise our bodily states. Maybe I can make a comparison here with taste, for which the continuum delicious–foul is relevant. The tastiness of food also has little to say about its sweetness, saltiness, bitterness or acidity. The underlying principles stay in the dark. It doesn’t shed light on the reasons that something sweet sometimes tastes good but sometimes tastes really disgusting.

From psychoanalytic literature, I found the works of Melanie Klein to be illuminative for comprehending intense emotional states (Klein, 2002, originally published in 1952). In her study of the emotional life of the infant, she describes how the baby reacts differently towards the breast that feeds and the breast that frustrates. The feeding breast and the pleasurable fulfilling of an inner need (hunger) create the image of “a good breast” within the baby. The frustrating breast and the unsatisfied need create an inner image of “a bad breast”. Dependent on the consistency (among others) of the “good breast image” the baby learns to react within a frame of trust (“the good is existent but can be lacking”) or out of distrust (“I am confronted with badness and that is unbearable”). The latter experience causes intense feelings of hatred that are projected onto the breast. In an immature mix-up of feeling states, not the self but the breast is experienced as hateful and persecuting, causing it to be feared and attacked. In short these are the two basic positions that infuse the infant’s (and adult’s) emotional states. Klein calls them the depressive position (acknowledging the goodness as well as the possible absence of the other) and the paranoid-schizoid position (experiencing one’s own hatred as persecuting). The splitting of the object (breasts or persons for that matter) in “all good or all bad” is an innate and elementary mechanism according to Klein. And it is a lifelong task to come to terms with one’s own feelings of love and hatred within our most intimate relations.

There has been a longstanding debate in the psychoanalytic world about the ability of babies to make such an adaptive division between a good breast and a bad breast. Wasn’t that reserved for the main seat of conscious control, the psychoanalytic concept of the ego? And isn’t it a fallacy to assume that babies are born with rational thought and functional egos? I suggest that it is not thoughtful deliberation that achieves this distinction, but it is a consequence of the way we emotionally react to frustration and fulfilment, to pain and pleasure. For example, when the interaction with another stirs up anger in you, the other person is experienced as bad or at least is eligible to be filed under that category. Missing in the work of Klein is the specification of exactly this link, how the interaction of specific emotions create these fundamental categories of good and bad objects.⁵ Probably this missing piece of theory is also the reason that the good–bad distinction is so closely linked to the object. While Russell claims that it is the emotion itself that should be categorised as pleasurable or unpleasurable, in Kleinian theory the good–bad distinction is experienced in close connection with the other, opening up the social dimension of emotions. Russell maps the subjective evaluation of the emotional inner world; Klein focusses on the subjective experience of the outer world.

I think that what these theoretical views lead up to is to connect the positive–negative distinction to the interaction between the emotional person and the involved other.⁶ For it is the interaction that is experienced as good or bad, depending on the match (or mismatch) between inner needs and outer world. When I am hungry, feeding will give me pleasure. But when I am full, the sight and smell of food can make me nauseous and cranky. My emotions will vary in accordance with the interaction between the needs and wants of my inner world and what I meet in the outer world. The smell of fresh coffee in the morning puts a smile on my face. But the lingering odours of the greasy banquet from last night fill me with disgust and grumpiness and will lower my eyebrows. It is a surplus of this interactional viewpoint, shedding new light to the interconnectedness of basic emotions, which I will try to point out in the rest of this chapter.

Emotional parts of the evolutionary toolkit

If positive and negative subjective experiences with others are so closely intertwined with emotions, then what are these subjective experiences aiming for? And if bodily sensations of pleasure or pain, of basic emotions and positive and negative experiences with others are members of the same band, what sort of music are they playing? The answer to this question has been around for quite some time, and Darwin ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Inflow
• Part I What to think of something that is subjective, multifaceted and fluid
• Part II Emotional turbulence
• Part III No emotion, no sense
• Outflow
• References
• Index