More Notes on Feelings and Emotions

When I asked Google Ngram to chart the phrase “getting in touch with your feelings,” I discovered that use of that phrase began after 1960. I used only part of the phrase because Ngram only permits a maximum of five words in each phrase one submits for comparison. And for contrast I used the word “iPhone”; it seemed to me that that brand name should have quite a rapid spike in these latter days. I got the following result:

This sort of thing—the popularization of concepts derived from psychology—had earlier cause me to speak here about “the Culture of Emotion.” 1960 is very recent, but, as I’ve endeavored to point out (here), the origin of this emphasis on feelings, thus the belief that authenticity is linked to feelings and emotions, dates back to the Enlightenment; for details see that post.

Emotions and feelings are, to be sure, used synonymously. In fact, however, feelings are milder, emotions much stronger. The root of emotion is “movement” and, that movement, is from inside out, thus from the body outward. Emotion always hints at action to come; feelings do not; thus there is a difference. The stronger a feeling becomes the more it looks like an emotion.

I got to wondering about the origin of that phrase, that “getting in touch.” The usual “origin of phrase” web sites did not in the least help me, but I managed, finally to discover something meaningful in a book. The following quote comes from there (link). The text that comes just before this quote points out that affective states, which are linked to the body, are able to influence our state of mind—if for no other reason than that conflicts can arise, e.g., between pleasure in eating and decisions to diet.

But exactly how the emotive or bodily component plays a role in psychotherapy and mental health is open to debate. For Freud, it was a matter of “getting in touch with” primitive childhood fantasies that carry an emotional charge. In other therapies, such as primal therapy (Janov, 1970), it is a matter of getting in touch with a buried reservoir of pain and then expressing and discharging it. In many existential or humanistic approaches, it is a matter of “getting in touch with feelings,” which means being willing to acknowledge and label one’s anger, sadness, or fear.

     Client-centered therapy, based primarily on Gendlin’s theory of experiencing (Gendlin, 1969), has a somewhat different view of the role of the affective component. Experiencing is a broader construct than “emotion.” People are said to experience feelings and to listen to their experience. In the process of experiencing a feeling, it is more important to listen to the experience of the feeling than to the feeling itself.

     [Judith Todd, Arthur C. Bohart, Foundations of Clinical and Counseling Psychology, 2005, p. 200.]

The quote is mildly revealing. I took a glance at Eugene T. Gendlin’s work; he is a philosopher and psychotherapist. Here, for instance, is a link to one of his essays which will serve to link him to my subject (link). Considering his influence and the time when he was most active, it seems that psychology owes that phrase to him, albeit by popularization. The quote also makes clear that the roots of this concern with emotion go straight back to Freud and are derived from Freud’s own ideas of repression; revealing repressed contents of our consciousness appears to have a healing effect, in the context of pathology—and perhaps an enlightening effect if nothing is otherwise wrong.

Words, words, words. In Hume’s day people contrasted reason and passion, in Jane Austen’s (who was born just eight months before Hume died) it was sense and sensibility, in ours it is feeling and cognition. As the words change, something new seems to be happening. The truth is that the underlying references are to very ancient and basic facts about human experience.

I am into Ngrams today, so herewith one contrasting sensibility and emotion. It is well to keep in mind that, in the eighteenth century sensibility meant “emotional consciousness, capacity for higher feelings or refined emotion.” The emphasis is on emotion. Sense by, contrast, meant “mind” to Jane Austen; the meaning of “that which is wise” became attached to this word in the seventeenth century. The emphasis here, we would say today, is on the intellect, the cognitive.

The word sensibility was used more frequently in 1800 than emotion, which is interesting. By 1820 the two words were crossing each other, emotion rising, sensibility sinking. Sensibility no doubt underwent a change as it was perhaps benignly neglected. When we say, these days, that so-and-so acted sensibly, we do not associate emotionality with use of that word. What we mean is that the person acted reasonable.

Another example of the way in which words linked to psychology change, take the following Ngram which charts hysterical and neurotic. Hysterical, as a descriptor, was once closely linked to psychology; it was assumed to be dysfunction of the uterus; by now it has come to mean out-of-control emotionality; neurosis, however, never took as strong a hold in ordinary language and has dropped precipitously since its heyday (it peaked in 1952), a period that corresponded to my own most active years in the world.

Writing, Handwriting, Essays

Here a maddening—but also enlightening—fruit of experience. Mine. If I research a subject and then struggle to write my findings down well enough to make them understandable to the public in general, I will remember the basic facts and relationships for a long, long time. I will remember—but the reader might not. I know that also—from experience. Time and time again I remember reading about something complicated; I will have a vague sensation of understanding it; but when push comes to shove, I can’t reproduce that understanding properly.

My education in the United States began as a junior in high school. Until then I had been required to write essays—not after my Father enrolled me in school here. We learned recently that the teaching of cursive writing has been abandoned; children are taught to write, but not to “flow,” if I make myself clear. Demands to reproduce knowledge in writing had already begun to yield the field to questionnaires in my time (early 1950s). In college we were still expected to write answers to tests in little blue books; that was, in my case, at a Jesuit college, and I’m not sure how widespread that sort of testing was—or whether it still survives.

In the world of work—certainly at research institutes—writing was required to report results. My own interesting personal experience was that our Masters and PhD’s often lacked this skill so tangibly that I spent substantial parts of my time rewriting other people’s incoherent reports at the behest of my frustrated Director. I knew how. Time and time again, I was forced, eventually, to absorb the basic research, interview the researchers, and then do the work all over again—frequently changing the very conclusions—the thinking behind the authors’ conclusions having been too shoddy.

And that was then.

When we seek the causes of decadence, they are not hard to find. They hide in such details. Knowledge thins, understanding follows, and Emotion comes to rule. What is Counselor Deana Troi’s favorite question? “Yes. But how do you feel about it?” What is true at the level of knowledge is also true at the level of ethics. And then we throw up our hands at “the times.”