WHAT IS EMOTION?
A former patient dropped in for a session the other day. Head of his own immensely successful business, pillar of his synagogue, widely known for his work on a number of charitable boards, and justly celebrated for his remarkable ability to march into battles shunned by competitors, this man, for the better part of a week, had been troubled by anxiety. “I am afraid of everything,” he said. “Wherever I look I see danger.”
A decade earlier the sudden, unexpected, serious illness of his 12-year-old son had triggered more anxiety than even that crisis might have been expected to produce. Our work in psychotherapy had uncovered an earlier terror related to the death of his own mother. This tragedy, combined with a host of other childhood experiences, had led him to the decision that he must never let anything get out of control—his adult personality had been built around an ironclad attitude of self-control and the control of every situation in which he found himself. His extraordinary intelligence, energy, and talents had provided the tools that allowed success in business; an unquestionable ability to make those around him feel good had contributed to enormous popularity. He sought and enjoyed competition in a number of sports, and excelled at many. Anyone willing to accept his leadership profited by joining him; rarely did his actions inspire jealousy and envy in his peers. But he could no more control, cajole, or intimidate the virus that had reduced his son to temporary incapacity than as a boy he had been able to stave off the cancer that had plucked his mother from a happy home.
Therapy had been quite successful. He was able to see the link between these two experiences. It was reasonable for him to remain concerned and perhaps somewhat frightened until his son achieved full recovery. What had clouded his vision and made him far more fearful than appropriate to the situation was this overlooked piece of his own much earlier emotional reaction to an analogous experience. At the termination of his formal therapy I joined the long list of consultants to whom he maintained regular access in the course of his professional and charitable work. Now he came with a new and uncharacteristic complaint.
“What I learned when we worked together was that any time I’m overwhelmed by an emotion it is because I have been overlooking something that either I do not want to look at or I never knew how to examine. After a while I learned to internalize this process and take it over myself, so I really haven’t needed you to do this. But this one has me buffaloed. There have been very few times in my life I have been this anxious, and even then I knew what caused it. How can I be having a nervous breakdown when everything seems to be going well?” He sketched the current structure of his business life—complex matters requiring skill, daring, and tremendous financial resources, all of which would have daunted me but none particularly unusual for him. Personal life? Marriage, children, charitable work all ticking away with the required degree of intensity. Little here for our investigation.
I commented on his somewhat nasal speech. “Goddamned cold. Been taking cold pills all week. At least I can breathe, but I hate to take pills.” The “cold pills” turned out to contain pseudoephedrine, a synthetic compound that affects the body much in the same way as adrenalin, the naturally occurring substance that prepares the body for flight, fright, or fight. Whenever the adrenal gland releases its stored adrenalin we are ready for action with an alerted mind, tightened muscles, racing heart, cold sweaty skin, an instant surge of energy from the glucose reserves stored in the liver, and a peculiar type of breathing characterized by flared nostrils and widening of all the tubes in the respiratory system. Whatever else it does to our psyche, danger (by triggering the release of adrenalin) really clears the respiratory tree. Pseudoephedrine duplicates the effect of adrenalin on nasal stuffiness more than it affects the heart, but in high doses this difference is minimal. In his desire to control and suppress the normal symptoms of his upper respiratory infection, my friend had bought an adrenergic experience. Amused by my suggestion that he risk buying calm for the expense of sniffle, he discarded the medication. Within a few hours he was no longer frightened.
A host of chemicals can produce a similar picture. Too much thyroid hormone can make one anxious, whether this occurs naturally in the disease called hyperthyroidism or when too much is given as medication for the symptoms caused by an underactive thyroid gland. More than half of those later diagnosed as being hyperthyroid present to their physicians for complaints related to anxiety. Too much caffeine can produce a similar picture, even though most people who are chronically or even acutely anxious from overuse of coffee are completely unaware of the connection between what they drink to increase alertness and the discomfort they call anxiety. The chemistry and the psychology of these common aberrations can teach us a great deal about normal emotion.
Each emotion is characterized by some combination of thoughts and somatic feelings. The machine called a “lie detector” allows the examiner to know when an apparently calm subject has produced enough sweat (salty water) to allow better conduction of electricity on the surface of the skin; it also informs about variations in heart rate and breathing. It is, therefore, a machine for the detection of hidden fear, of the physiological activity associated with and perhaps responsible for the feelings associated with fear. What we think when we are afraid is a little different for each of us; that depends on our previous experience of fear. Someone who has been terrified in battle is likely to think about that earlier group of experiences when frightened years later, no matter what has triggered the current fear.
What we have been discussing so far involves hardware and software, two of the three factors responsible for adult emotion. The way we sweat, the manner in which the heart pounds, the sudden alteration in breathing: all that is dependent on hardware. I know a woman who found herself shaking unaccountably, shivering in fear, immediately after hearing a melody from her childhood. Certainly that particular trigger for fear qualifies as software—it is a perfect example of a situation for which no animal is likely to have a genetic program.
There are lots of times that a computer program fails, and skilled technicians can often locate the error that has caused breakdown. In the world of human software, the art of locating errors in programming is called psychotherapy. Much of what we know about both normal and abnormal psychological function comes from data provided by psychotherapeutic sleuths. The gentleman discussed above is always susceptible to anxiety when anything threatens him with loss of control. In treating such patients one can use “uncovering therapy” to demonstrate the linkage between the current danger (one easily seen and understood) and the analogous trigger for fear that he might well have preferred to keep out of awareness.
The archaic fear carries all the terrible power and intensity one might expect in a small child. Reevaluating such experiences in the company of a trusted adviser allows the patient to reduce their power and thus to diminish their ability to magnify current fear. Such an approach is central to what is now called psychodynamic psychiatry—a method correctly traced to the work of Freud.
Quite in contrast is another (perhaps equally effective) school of therapy that helps people deal with their fears by outlining and then altering the thoughts or cognitions associated with fear without ever dealing with their significance in terms of prior experience. Rather than unlink the many experiences of fear that have occurred in the life of a patient, cognitive therapy, as developed by Aaron T. Beck and his colleagues, revises how an individual experiences fear. This may be regarded as alteration, rather than repair, of preexisting software.
Just as there are chemicals that simulate or trigger fear, there are many medications that can block the physiological mechanisms that produce fear. Some of these impede the effects of adrenalin itself (like the so-called β-adrenergic blocker propranolol). Others, like the tranquilizers, work on brain mechanisms related to the circuitry specific for fear. Such treatment involves manipulation of the hardware system.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT EMOTION?
No matter how you try to study emotion you run into problems. First of all, emotion is by definition a subjective experience, somewhat different for each person. It is not enough to ask people what makes them embarrassed, angry, or frightened, or even to describe their subjective experience of these emotions. This approach yields a great deal of information about the psychological range of emotional experience but nothing about its mechanics, about what is happening at the level of cells and synapses.
We have now accumulated a huge amount of information about the structure of the brain as well as its chemistry and physiology. For example, sudden bursts of anger, even to the point of murderous rage, have been traced to tumors in a region called the amygdala. The most celebrated such case is that of Charles Whitman. One evening he wrote a note describing his inability to control or understand sudden bursts of feelings that threatened to take over his personality and that interfered with his ability to think clearly and perform routine tasks. In this letter he stated that the world was no longer a place in which he could live, that he did not want to leave his beloved wife alone in such a terrible place, and that he planned to kill her in some way that would cause her the least amount of pain. He asked that after his own death an autopsy be performed to see if there was any physical cause for these unbearable emotional experiences. That night he killed his wife and his mother; the next morning he ascended a tower on the campus of the University of Texas, from which he shot 38 people, 14 of whom died. At autopsy the pathologists found a walnut-sized tumor near the amygdala.* In experiments on laboratory animals, stimulation of the amygdala can trigger astonishing degrees of ragelike behavior.
From this sort of data we can guess that anger has something to do with the amygdala. What it does not tell us is why Mr. Whitman decided to kill people as an expression of his rage, why people vary so much in the types and patterns of thoughts they experience when angry, or even the function of anger in the normal organism. And there are other people who have slaughtered similar numbers of innocent bystanders but in whom no abnormality of the amygdala was found. It is not enough to study only the pathways within the brain associated with emotion.
Infants cry, rage, and smile. Is this emotion? Can we really say that babies are distressed, or angry, or happy when we cannot prove that they know what they are feeling? Most attempts to study emotion in small children have been limited by the communication block—it is difficult to get information from a subject who cannot yet talk. And if this inability of infants to communicate about their feelings presents problems for such research, how much more difficult would it be to find an animal model for the study of emotion! Many people believe that it is impossible for “lower” animals even to have emotions, despite the fact that they seem to exhibit many of the same emotion-related behaviors as do adult humans.
THEORIES OF EMOTION
Charles Darwin
It was Darwin who first noted that the display of emotion in nonverbal creatures was similar, and often identical, to that seen in man. He realized, for instance, that the artless and untrained expressions of emotion easily visible on the face of the newborn infant were the same expressions observable on the face of the sophisticated and more highly controlled adult. Since many of these expressions could be seen in animals, Darwin was able to trace an evolutionary progression for the display of emotion. (Everything he saw was evaluated for its importance to the theory of evolution.) Although he did not incorporate his work on emotion in The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859, these ideas were beginning to occupy his attention as part of the specific consideration of human evolution. By 1871, when he published The Descent of Man, his research on emotion had grown too much for incorporation in that book, and so it was released the following year as The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.
In 1867 Darwin sent a questionnaire to missionaries and others who lived among “primitive” peoples or in cultures vastly different from his own Victorian England. He wanted to know whether certain expressions were universal. In your country, in the people you see, he asked, “Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being raised? . . . Does shame excite a blush when the colour of the skin allows it to be visible? and especially how low down the body does the blush extend? . . . When a man is indignant or defiant does he frown, hold his body and head erect, square his shoulders and clench his fists? . . . When considering deeply on any subject, or trying to understand any puzzle, does he frown, or wrinkle the skin beneath the lower eyelids? . . . Is extreme fear expressed in the same general manner as with Europeans? . . . Is laughter ever carried to such an extreme as to bring tears into the eyes? . . . Is the head nodded vertically in affirmation, and shaken laterally in negation?”† and so on. From 36 correspondents all over the world he learned that the expression of emotion is essentially universal.
Oscar Reglander, the celebrated photographer whose portraits of Lewis Carroll and his Alice remain icons of their era, collaborated with Darwin to produce a series of pictures of actors posed to show these expressions. Wherever these photographs were shown, Darwin found agreement with his basic premise.
He interpreted emotion in three ways. (1) Part of the emotional response was habit—“generally inherited” but little different from reflex actions. “When certain actions are carried out in order to relieve or gratify certain states of mind,” he said, “there is a tendency for them to become habitual and to be evoked whenever the same state of mind is once again experienced” even though “they may not then be of the least use.” Emotional habits were vestiges of behavior once useful to our remote ancestors but now only useless reflexes.
(2) Next, Darwin offered the principle of “antithesis,” the idea that certain postures are designed as opposites to whatever the organism is really feeling. He noted that when a stranger approached, a dog might assume the posture of threat, with tail held high, head stiffly erect with a threatening scowl. But when the stranger turned out to be friendly, the dog might communicate the gestures of affection with wagging tail—the body crouched, supple, and relaxed. These latter expressions of affection, thought Darwin, had little biological significance other than their existence as opposites to the initial display of threat. (3) And finally, he believed that most of the facial expressions he had described resulted from the direct action of the nervous system, independent of habit or will.
No matter how trenchant his observations, Darwin’s attempts at theory were doomed to failure simply because they could not be linked with what we now know to be the normal development of the child. He had discovered the group of mechanisms I call firmware, understood intuitively their dependence on hardware, but had no concept of software!
Although it is true that these facial and bodily expressions remain consistent throughout life, the mind of the infant is not the mind of the adult. Ignored completely in his work was the question of the inner experience of the organism gripped by these patterns of expression. We cannot know what the dog or the infant “feels,” simply because both are unable to communicate with us in words. Similarly, we may not merely assume that these emotional expressions maintain the same significance throughout life. It is difficult to imagine that such complex emotional states as love, scorn, contempt, and humiliation can be experienced by the infant; yet each of these is associated with characteristic external expressions that may be seen in babies. His theory depended on the organism’s ability to perceive and to understand what then triggered emotion and what next triggered these habitual and autonomic reactions.
Darwin’s immense contribution to the study of emotion was his discovery that the expression of emotion remains consistent throughout life. What prevented him from forming a useful theory, capable of providing a valid explanation of all emotional phenomena, was his ignorance of human development. Adults differ from children partly because the body itself, including the brain, changes during the first decade or so of extrauterine life, and also because the layering of experience makes for vast changes in our inner makeup.
The James-Lange Hypothesis
Like Darwin, most investigators also assumed that what we experience as adults is pretty much what we experienced as children, that emotion is consistent throughout life. Ignoring completely this work by Darwin, many authors have tried to build theory from their understanding of the adult. One of the earliest and most important of these was offered independently by William James in America (1884) and Carl Lange in Denmark (1887) and is still known today as the James-Lange hypothesis. They felt that the mind, which they saw as an apparatus for perception and cognition, perceived and assessed something that then triggered a group of physical manifestations, following which the thinking brain assessed the pattern of these bodily changes and labeled it as an emotion.
In the James–Lange system I know I am frightened because I see myself running away; I know I am happy because I laugh. Perception and assessment (hardware and software) have triggered a somatic reaction (firmware) that is interpreted and labeled as an emotion (software).
This system requires an intact and highly developed group of organs that allow one to acquire information and to process it—a functioning computer. With it, emotional life is seen as secondary to advanced cognitive life, to the processing of information. Babies, then, who have no verbal language, cannot know names for their emotions and therefore cannot be said to have emotions, even though they make all the facial expressions, gestures, and noises we associate with adult emotion.
Developed in the days when we didn’t know much about the circuitry of the brain—the intricate connections between individual neurons and groups of neurons—the James-Lange theory depended on the ebb and flow of “humoral substances,” of chemical compounds coursing through the bloodstream. It can never explain the rapid shifts in emotion that occur in ordinary day-to-day living. Some emotional experiences last only a few hundredths of a second. Often we find ourselves gripped by emotions that oscillate far too swiftly for any substance that must flow through something as sluggish as the circulatory system.
Sigmund Freud
Another major system for understanding emotion was offered by Freud, whose work spanned the decades between 1895 and 1938. In keeping with the science of his time, Freud postulated the existence of a life force he called libido, energy that traveled throughout the brain to power or drive the mental apparatus. Freud thought he had found a concept around which he could organize all our knowledge of the human mental and emotional systems. In the fully developed adult, this libido energy was seen as normal sexuality. While the terms libido and sexuality are not precisely interchangeable, for practical purposes they are taken to be so.
His original statement of this theory was elegant, poetic, and beautiful. Infants, of course, were by no stretch of the imagination viewed as sexual beings; libido energy was first expressed as activity around the locus of the mouth and called orality, or oral sexuality. Somewhere in the second year of life, right about the time we adults begin to ask the child to take control of excretion, Freud said that the libido shifts to the rectum and ushers in the anal phase of development. A year or so later, babies become more interested in their genitals, and the libido energy comes to be attached to them. Freud believed that children from birth through this so-called phallic period remained more involved with themselves than others—this genital expression of libido is not yet the same as interpersonal sexuality. Occurring between ages three and five is the family romance, the passionate attraction little girls feel for their fathers and little boys for their mother. Named the oedipal phase in honor of the classic Greek play Oedipus Rex from which Freud deduced the importance of this developmental process, it is declared the period during which libido energy becomes truly sexual.
All of Freud’s conclusions were derived from his meticulous study of those disturbed adults who came to him for relief of their symptoms. The brilliant scheme described above was a marvel of deduction assembled by him from bits of data gleaned in his analysis of adults. Freud never studied infants—his own children had grown up well before he developed these theories.
The more disturbed a patient the more likely was that person to experience emotions with the uncontrolled ferocity of an infant. Freud understood the symptoms of mental illness to be caused by patterns of improperly or incompletely channeled libido energy. Children were by nature more emotional than adults, and infants by nature more emotional than children. In 1915‡ he suggested that it seemed logical to assume that emotion itself occurred whenever libido energy was prevented from achieving its natural aim of sexual congress. What powered emotion was the same energy that drove every other mental function.
Always looking for a simple unifying structure around which could be arranged a complex group of observations, Freud divided all emotions on the basis of their pleasant or their unpleasant quality. In his clinical work he had noticed early that anxiety could often be traced to certain sexual practices. For instance, it was common for men to engage in intercourse to a point just short of ejaculation—this was a form of contraception. Masturbation, a possible outlet for sexual energy, was widely regarded as a sin, a religious and social concept that went far deeper than a modern reader might think. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a non-psychoanalytic contemporary of Freud, had a passionate interest in sex, sexual crime, and the forms of madness associated with sexuality. Many of his case reports begin with statements like “This 20-year old confessed masturbator . . . .” Reading Krafft-Ebing—a psychiatrist purporting to liberate emotionally disturbed patients from their troubles—one contemplates masturbation with gravity and trepidation. One early benefit brought by the psychoanalytic movement was a tremendous reduction in the guilt associated with the feeling of sexual release.
How exciting this must have been for the discoverer of psychoanalysis! The logical equation, the syllogism, was simple: (1) The sexual drive (by his definition) was the basic force that powered all human activity; (2) when this drive was prevented from achieving its goal, people complained of anxiety; (3) therefore, all anxiety was caused by sexual tension. It is a flawed syllogism, actually (as any college student knows), a classic example of the error called “the undistributed middle.” There are lots of causes for anxiety, not just sexual tension. But it served an important purpose for Freud—it focused attention on sexuality, and it answered his need to find a theory for emotion. Not just painful emotion, either, for clearly the achievement of libido’s goal produced pleasure.
Here, indeed, was a neat system to explain all emotion. All positive feelings were created by the satisfaction of libidinous needs; all negative feelings by the denial of those needs. In the language of classical psychoanalysis, all unpleasant emotions are considered to be subdivisions of anxiety, the primary negative emotion. Thus, guilt is the anxiety caused by the two-year-old child’s recognition that certain sexual wishes are wrong and may be punished by the parent. And shame cannot appear until the child understands guilt and knows he or she should not use nakedness (or other forms of what psychoanalysis called sexual exhibitionism) to attract the parent of the opposite gender into some sort of fantasized sexual liaison. Shame, then, is seen as a specific form of anxiety, a learned behavior acquired by the three-year-old.
This elegant scheme was destined to survive neither the onrush of information provided by the psychoanalytic revolution itself nor that provided by other branches of science. Freud himself made frequent alterations in theory to handle data pouring in from many sources. From the constant observation that some people seem determined to destroy themselves and those they love, it proved necessary to add a life-destroying force called aggression to the life-affirming force he had earlier called libido. Anger and certain destructive forms of sexuality were attributed to this new driving force, and the language of psychoanalysis shifted from discussion of libido to an even more vaguely defined form of energy called the drives.
The problem grew even worse. No other science was able to find evidence for drive energy or to detect structures that might resemble the little channels through which Freud thought this energy traveled to make emotion. The failure of these theories to find scientific confirmation became even more significant as the physical sciences discovered more and more forms of energy and as the biological sciences demonstrated the actual channels along which information traveled.
Psychoanalysis was faced with a major crisis. Psychoanalytic treatment benefited a great many people, and within every case each clinician could always find data that confirmed these theories. This consistent internal validation of the Freudian system convinced the overwhelming majority of psychoanalysts that drive theory was essentially correct, that science would one day demonstrate what they knew in their hearts was really true. From the death of Freud in 1938 up to the present time, psychoanalytic theory has become increasingly defensive about this position.
Central to the idea of science itself is the search for the errors and inconsistencies that force us to reappraise any theory. It is through this honorable process that new science evolves from and replaces the old. To the extent that psychoanalysis continues to claim that its critics are enemies rather than colleagues, and rejects as irrelevant the data of other sciences, it retires to the status of a system of belief—a religion rather than a science. Sober scientists and clinicians are always astonished when their papers are summarily rejected by the leading psychoanalytic journals with the criticism that the data are not from the psychoanalytic investigation of adults. While psychoanalysis remains a valid—and often wonderful—form of treatment for many emotional disorders, its theoretical base in drive theory is simply outdated, a relic of a physiology long ago disconfirmed. We must look far beyond the invisible drives in our search for the nature of emotion.
Transformation of Energy Theories
There is another group of theories for emotion, also involving various types of transformation of energy. Updated in 1961 by James Hillman, but introduced earlier by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1923), is the idea that emotion is instigated when the conscious and unconscious selves are united by a symbol, thus releasing psychic energy and transforming it into experienced emotion. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) said that emotion occurs when a person discovers that he or she cannot act in the experienced world, thus transforming consciousness to the more primitive attitude of a magical world. Karl Pribram (1969) said that emotion arises when some stimulus unbalances the plan by which the neural system has organized behavior. He said that there are two basic types of emotion, one which operates to adjust the stimulus to make it conform to our plans, and another which adjusts our internal plan to conform to the stimulus input. Lastly, Joseph DeRivera (1977) believes that emotions are instructions that tell the organism how to behave in relation to the situation that triggered them—toward or away from self, or toward or away from the other.
All of these theories share similar defects. No one has found anything even vaguely resembling psychic energy, making the Jung–Hillman theory obsolete. Sartre’s theory depends on the idea of “discovery,” which is a cognitive act, and speaks more about the unpleasant emotions than about pleasure and excitement. Neither Sartre nor DeRivera can explain the type of emotion we see in the infant. By none of these theories can we explain the type of emotion experienced by the patient described in the beginning of this chapter—there is no room for variations in emotional experience caused by alterations in biology.
The trick is to use all the data. Each of these theories explains some of what we know about emotion; none explains everything we know about emotion. One path remains, and that is the system we will discuss in the next chapter. It starts with what we can observe in the infant, takes into account what we have learned from the physiologists and biochemists, and offers an opportunity to integrate all known systems of psychology and psychotherapy. I know of no information that must be ignored in order for it to be useful. Best of all, it explains shame and pride.
*As reported by Ross Buck in The Communication of Emotion.
†Darwin (1872), 15–16. The great surgeon George W. Crile (1915), whose interest in these matters was initiated by his experience operating on the thyroid gland, devoted many years to a study of the biological mechanisms underlying Darwin’s observations.
‡Charles Brenner (1955) gives an excellent summary of Freud’s theories in this area.