DISSMELL AND DISGUST
Look again. If you pronounced it like “dismal,” you missed Tomkins’s point. Just as the word “disease” means “not at ease,” and “dissimilar” means “not similar,” dissmell conveys the sense of some interference with the act of smelling. We are leaping back in evolution to the era when a tremendous part of the information available to an organism was based on what could be smelled.
Odor was much more important to the life forms from which we evolved than it is to us today. On the island of Madagascar live many representative species of the life form called the prosimians, the group from which evolved the true apes that Darwin recognized as our more immediate ancestors. Sleeping by day and foraging at night, lemurs and tarsiers communicate not by visual signals from their facial affect display, but by bursts of scent from specialized glands. Anyone who walks a male dog has waited impatiently while this pet goes through the urgent ritual of sniffing communal posts to see who has preceded him that day, for canines identify each other by the specific odors in urine.
So important are the connections between the scent receptors in the nose and the brain centers where smell is analyzed that anatomists used to call a large section of the central nervous system the rhinencephalon, or nose-brain. (Later discoveries have led us to discard this label in favor of the more modern term limbic system.) Earlier, we discussed the amygdala, a knot of brain cells that seems to analyze information later to be involved in emotion. The amygdala is wired to receive data from all the sensory systems, but, except for smell, these inputs come from parts of the cerebral cortex that have already processed the raw data of sensation into highly refined interpretations of it. Alone of all the sensory reports, olfaction connects directly to the amygdala, placing the raw data of smell on a par with the processed messages of the others.
Data from the olfactory system can be used in many ways. Pheromones, scent-borne sexual messenger molecules, are known to transmit information about species, gender, and sexual availability in beings as disparate as gypsy moths, mice, rhinoceroci, and perhaps even man. After only a few months of living together in closed communities, like college dormitories, women note that their menstrual cycles tend to become synchronized. This phenomenon has been attributed to scent-borne information. Olfaction bears an important connection to the sexual drive—it is possible that part of our interest in perfume derives from our biologic relation to pheromones.
It might be suggested that the sense of smell guards the drive system that tells us we need oxygen, for in theory smell can inform us about the presence of bad gases. Nonetheless, there is not much an oxygen-starved organism can do about bad odor—rarely is a life-form offered a choice of gaseous environments. As far as breathing goes, what you smell is what you get.
The drive most intimately associated with the sense of smell is hunger, which is regularly informed about the quality of possible foodstuffs on the basis of their emitted odor. It is thought that the newborn infant moves toward the nipple because of its fragrance. Just as the growing child learns to differentiate between people by their visual characteristics, he or she will learn the smells of freshly baked apple pie and new-mown hay.
Tomkins points out that certain of these airborne molecules trigger a definite and repeatable program or series of actions. Confronted by noxious compounds, the infant wrinkles its nose, raises the upper lip, and withdraws from the offending odor. This is the recurrent pattern of activity, present from birth and visible on the face of the adult throughout life, that he calls dissmell. Dissmell will pull the infant away from whatever has triggered it; we are protected from some harmful foods by this mechanism. Thus dissmell operates to limit the hunger drive; odor can stimulate a protective mechanism that creates in us an immediate requirement for distance from its source.
We can wrinkle our noses at people we dislike and move away from them; at worst we can call them “stinkers” and reject them totally. Somehow, dissmell (which nevertheless continues to monitor food) turns into an affect as it enters our emotional life and especially as it begins to alter our interpersonal behavior. Tomkins calls this type of affect a drive auxiliary because it is a programmed mechanism originally operating to limit a drive. However, the more importance a society places on interpersonal closeness, the more emphasis it will place on the odors we ourselves emit and on those we sense arising from the intimate other. The enormous expenditure on underarm deodorants, perfumed soaps, perfumes, “toilet” water, cologne, after-shave lotion, mouthwash, toothpaste, lozenges to control “bad breath,” vaginal deodorants, and sprays to mask bathroom odors is but a casual indicator of the importance to civilized life of dissmell in the name of odor control.
Some years ago a dentist asked me to see a patient who had already consulted half a dozen of his colleagues in an attempt to rid herself of a mouth odor only she could perceive. Claiming with great intensity that her breath smelled like “dragon dung,” she had avoided people for over a year rather than be summarily rejected by them. I knew that epileptic seizures involving the uncus, the tip of the temporal lobes of the brain (these are called “uncinate fits”), typically involve the hallucination of odor, but this seemed different in that the offending smell was constant rather than episodic. For some years she had been taking the antihypertensive drug reserpine, which will often give people a sense of being guilty about something or even produce a full-fledged depression. In cooperation with her treating physician we stopped the medication, and the symptom disappeared. This seems to have been a disorder involving the affect dissmell (she distanced other people in order to protect them from having to do the same to her), with more than a little shame thrown in as a secondary reaction. It is the only biological disorder of dissmell I have ever seen.
Smells, by their associations, can produce a mood, as when incense recalls to mind one’s early experiences in church; similarly, one would expect noxious odors and dissmell to do the same. Dissmell figures prominently in the experience and the phenomenology of interpersonal rejection. It is a primitive mechanism by which we keep something at a distance from us, something or someone we define as too awful or too foul to get near. Whenever one person decides that another person is unacceptable at the level of dissmell, it is very difficult (if not nearly impossible) to get them together, to find a way for them to get to know each other. Dissmell is the cornerstone of prejudice.
Fig. 9.1. Upper lip wrinkled, head drawn back in the display of mild dissmell. We know this is not the beginning of a cry because the comers of the mouth are level. If you simulate this affect with only one side of the mouth you communicate the attitude of contempt.
Haughtiness, a way of looking down your nose at people, is often accompanied by the face of dissmell. The British custom of making a “stiff upper lip,” which we discussed earlier as a learned modulation of distress–anguish, may also be understood as a dissmell response to crying.
“Uggh! Eeeooo! Yucchh!” said Cleo about two years ago when speaking about her estranged husband. All during the session she had been telling me how much she wanted to “put things together again,” to restore their marriage to its once-happy state. They did get together every once in a while, mostly to talk about the children; occasionally they hugged. “I can’t stand his smell,” she said. As a psychotherapist, I have never seen a marriage, a business partnership, or any working relationship survive once dissmell has entered the picture.
One of my patients, an enormously successful entrepreneur who seems always ready and able to turn ideas into lucrative schemes, suggested that there was money to be made from Tomkins’s concept of dissmell. “You therapists spend too much time helping patients get close to others. Imagine all those people who just want to be alone. You could market a product called ‘Repel’ or ‘Away!’ that allowed someone the peace and quiet of privacy. Yeah, you could even call it ‘Privacy.’“ I wonder whether some of those who go through life unwashed and unperfumed are trying to achieve the same effect.
An issue of Science News carried a story about the possibility that garlic contained a substance capable of reducing high blood pressure and preventing other diseases. Six weeks later, the following letter appeared in response:
In “Garlic medicine: Cures in cloves?” (SN: 9/8/90, p. 157) the researchers seem to overlook the obvious. Garlic may not have any direct chemical influence on hypertension, heart disease and cancer. But garlic’s ability to repel other human beings may.
For instance, I use at least three cloves of garlic a day. The result is that my boss will not come into my office to abuse me. When I go to a bank or retail store, my transactions are handled quickly and efficiently, even abruptly, and any questions or complaints I have are always granted. Neighbors bid me hello from across the street or not at all.
I am blissfully happy and healthy. The only people with whom I have any real concourse are other garlic eaters, and these are equally blissfully happy and healthy.
Therefore, in my experience, garlic counteracts the stress and morbidity of unnaturally dense human populations. It does so by repelling unhealthy and unhappy individuals and by attracting healthy and happy ones.
Martin Donovan
Salem, Mass.
By inverting normal experience under conscious control, the writer calls attention to our point. Whenever someone treats us as if we smell bad we suffer a profound decrease in self-esteem; therefore, those who are treated with dissmell must experience shame. And when people accept this label, if they are forced to agree that they are so foul as to deserve the innate response of avoidance, henceforth these people will live with chronic shame that becomes a part of the very structure of their personalities. Just as you can see people who walk around turning up their nose at everybody, wrinkling the upper lip and withdrawing from contact with strangers as if they were contaminated with filth, so you will see people who feel that they are indeed the filth that triggers such a response. On occasion I have worked in therapy with adults reared by mothers who expressed dissmell at whatever displeased them; never have I seen one of these people achieve a comfortable, loving interpersonal relationship. The way they withdraw from themselves as well as others will occupy us as we discuss the clinical manifestations of shame.
DISGUST
While the nose may act as the sentinel of the mouth, not every noxious food has a foul odor. Just as the olfactory system operates to detect and identify airborne molecules, the gustatory system evaluates and identifies chemicals in water. Sometimes what smells great tastes simply awful.
Were we investigating only the eating behavior of adults, our study of the reaction to bad tastes might be quite tame. Should some morsel fail to meet our standards for taste, as adults we are capable of putting fork or spoon back to the mouth, discreetly removing the now unwanted food (while covering this transaction from view with a napkin), and placing food and utensil back on the plate. Much of adult eating behavior derives from our awareness of other people and the social mores dictated by custom.
Not so the infant, whose need for food has been initiated by the drive hunger amplified powerfully by distress or perhaps interest. The drive, which “knows” only that blood or tissue levels of glucose are too low, is sending a continuous, insistent signal of hunger. If the gustatory sense is to be granted the ability to protect life by limiting the urgency of the push to omnivorous devouring that we call hunger, taste must trigger a mechanism capable of interfering with the hunger drive when hunger is at its height.
Tomkins points out that there is such a programmed response triggered by the gustatory sense and uses the common word disgust to indicate a second powerful auxiliary mechanism that limits the drive hunger. Like dissmell, it is a drive auxiliary that has also evolved to the status of an affect. In disgust, both tongue and lower lip are protruded, and the head thrust forward. As with all the innate affects, the infant is not “mildly” affected by disgust. When the affect hits, it clearly garners the totality of the child’s attention. The child is simply “taken over” by disgust, all interest in food temporarily suspended as the offending substance is expelled with vigor.
The affect disgust is as compelling a force as the drive it reduces, and is powerful in direct proportion to the degree of preceding desire for that food. As soon as the noxious substance has been removed from the mouth, the infant is ready to respond to the drive-borne information informing (reminding) it that food is still needed. But not the food just spit out.
This patterned activity may be seen on the face of the newborn and its expression is constant throughout life. Later, of course, as with all affects, its display may be modulated to fit the social structure of the culture to which each person adapts. Yet no matter how refined an individual, the affect retains all its archaic power.
Not only do we react with disgust to any substance that tastes foul or unpleasant, but we can retain memory of our reaction to it and develop an intelligent aversion to that compound. Disgust then becomes part of a system of aversion, an attitude chosen to avoid this negative affect. Repugnance may be thought of as the assembly of disgust affect with memory to produce a specific realm of learning. It produces a host of associations giving rise to the general group of things believed capable of causing what is called contamination.
Fig. 9.2. Head forward, tongue protruded, lower lip pushed down. Disgust favors the expulsion of an offending morsel of food.
We can also develop an aversion to things we have never tasted but which for other reasons give us a feeling of repugnance. As Drs. Paul Rozin and April Fallon have pointed out in their meticulous studies of disgust (1987), the overwhelming majority of people will refuse to eat such psychologically “contaminated” things as a cockroach, even if sterilized and even though they have never tasted one. In particular, most American adults have a disgust response to substances that have come from the interior of the body, like saliva, urine, feces, and mucous. Such specific aversions are culture-bound and by no means innate or inherently linked to the human condition. There are, for example, Middle Eastern cultures in which camel dung is regularly used as cooking fuel, and at least one culture in which compressed dung is used as a roofing material. Yet in every culture there are substances commonly considered to be disgusting and to contaminate whatever is associated with them.
Do you find yourself “turned off” by such facts? If so, your avidity for new information has been affected by disgust.
Had disgust remained only a food-centered drive auxiliary, we might not be discussing it here in a book about emotion. The ease with which any affect can be combined with any thought (or indeed any human function) has produced for disgust a wide range of emotion completely unrelated to food and hunger. We have a remarkable ability to understand complex situations as concepts or ideas and a natural tendency to represent these ideas by symbols. Whenever any of these higher-order mental processes bears a resemblance to the process of food ingestion, it is capable of being assembled with food-related affect. Thus, we talk about our beloved as being inside us, and the process of intimacy as incorporating the other person. “I love you so much I could just eat you up.” “You look good enough to eat.” “You make me feel good in my tummy.” “She gave me a delicious smile.”
When love turns sour, something that had been taken into us with full confidence in its ability to nurture has now turned foul. In our humiliated rage at the confidence man we say we were “taken in,” a defensive reversal of the more accurate observation that we took him in. It was we ourselves who had accepted him into our system as if he were good for us. There is a terrible sense of betrayal, of being made a fool, when the magic is taken from love and the person we held so dear turns out to regard us poorly. In each of these situations we are likely to react with disgust to—spit out with violence—our relationship with this significant other. Alternatively, should we feel unable to regard and reject the other person with disgust, we may accept the idea that we are worthy of such treatment and then regard ourselves with disgust. No matter what happens, when what has previously been “ingested” becomes unpalatable, a violent reaction is triggered—a reaction whose power comes from the affect disgust.
Recall, though, Tomkins’s idea that disgust operates to limit the drive hunger when that drive is at its height. Disgust is powerful because it creates intense conflict over our continued desire for what had appeared so tasty and has now become nasty. Disgust, then, is a good model by which to examine the phenomenology of divorce, in which people who have loved now turn against each other. The extraordinary force and tenacity of marital hate is dependent on the power of the preexisting marital bond, of the “drive” to be close, of the need for each other, of the warmth each once gave the other, of the degree of nurturance each represented to the other. In every moment, however brief, that an estranged person thinks of his or her partner, the affect of disgust will now intrude.
In the interpersonal world, wherever there is disgust there will be gross alteration of self-esteem or in our esteem for another person. Divorce can be experienced as victory if we view ourselves as perfect and the other as the pure object of disgust, and as defeat if we must maintain as pure our internal representation of the other. Lurking at the corners of consciousness then will be self-contempt and self-loathing as explanations for such a huge defeat, along with the chronic shame that accompanies the chronic loss of self-esteem.
A generation ago one of my senior colleagues, Reuben Robert Pottash, startled a study group by stating that when a couple divorces and later remarries, “at least one of them is crazy.” We pressed him further. “Think about what has gone on in people who divorce. All the love turned to hate, all the fighting through lawyers. Who can go back to someone you have hated so much? Only people who are so crazy that they can ignore hatred or forget their recent history. You have to be pretty crazy to be willing to overlook something like that.” Today, thinking of divorce in terms of mutual disgust, and understanding disgust as an affect that protects us by destroying our wish to incorporate something that we used to want, I agree with him all the more. Who can eat what has been spat out in disgust?
Yet often we do hear about such cycles of divorce and remarriage. I suspect that all of us are forced to swallow many things we would like to reject. Apparently there is no limit to our socially constructed ability to disavow or hide our innate reaction of disgust. Often I find that the “suppressed anger” emerging in psychotherapy is a reaction to long-hidden disgust.
Even though affect is far more than facial reaction, you can make some pretty shrewd guesses about what is going on in someone when you watch the face. There are lots of ways to express anger, but someone who yells at another by jutting his head forward with the lower lip protruding is demonstrating the combination of anger and disgust.
Have you ever watched the audience during a horror movie? Turn around in your seat some time and look at the faces people make as the horrific events unfold. Often I see the blanched and frozen face of fear, combined with the upper lip of dissmell and the lower lip of disgust. Most likely, as for all the emotions, each of us has a personal definition of horror, but I think that combination of facial displays appears regularly enough for me to ask you to consider the possibility that, for some people, horror is a combination of those three affects. You can test my observation by mimicking the facial displays yourself. First draw up and wrinkle your upper lip and nose, then draw down and protrude your lower lip, and, finally, stare at something with widened eyes. Doing this you may experience a moment of horror.
Tomkins has pointed out that the sneer of contempt may be a clue to its origins from innate affect—at one corner, the mouth is raised as in dissmell, while at the other corner it is pulled down as in disgust. Contempt is a form of anger in which we declare the other person, this object of our negative affect, as far beneath us and worthy only of rejection. The purpose or function of contempt seems to be to instill in the other person a sense of self-dissmell or self-disgust and therefore shame at self-unworthiness.
There are lots of times you can observe people making strange faces when they don’t know we are watching. Sometimes they are at a height of emotion, while at other times they believe their feelings to be invisible. You can draw your own conclusions about the relation between the innate affects and the various styles of anger you see around you. Paying attention to the face can be a rewarding occupation.
Can we carry further the alimentary analogies suggested by Tomkins? Good-tasting food can become toxic after it leaves the mouth and hits the stomach, in which case it triggers nausea and vomiting. If food becomes toxic in the lower intestines, it triggers diarrhea. Often we see people whose reaction to “stress” is of these latter types, and perhaps their gut symptoms are an emotional response related to dissmell and disgust. In the movie An Unmarried Woman, Jill Clayburgh portrayed a woman whose husband was involved in an extramarital affair. During a luncheon which she thought might have dealt with their possible reconciliation, he announced his intention to marry his paramour. Moments after leaving the restaurant, she vomited. This is an example of the disgust family of affects operating to extrude something deep inside her—the internalized husband she must now push away. It is the degree of the prior need or wish that determines the violence of the reaction that will be created by disgust.
In the passages above I have sketched some of the feelings and emotions that can accompany the affect disgust. Just as with the other affects, memory can trigger a mood of disgust that lasts until something distracts us from our preoccupation with what was once loved and is now toxic. People with chronic nausea from gastrointestinal illness or from medication experience a chronic feeling of self-disgust. Few people can tolerate such medications for very long.
Is there such a thing as an inborn organic disorder involving the affect disgust? Are there situations in which feelings of disgust and fantasies of contamination may be traced to problems in the biology of affect? On several occasions I have treated or evaluated patients with what is called obsessive-compulsive disorder, more popularly known today as OCD. A common symptom of this illness is an incessant desire to rid one’s hands of something dirty, to remove an invisible, fantasized contamination. In addition to compulsive hand-washing, these patients may complain that “dirty words” come to mind, words which, if said aloud, would cause terrible embarrassment.
One of my patients, an otherwise comfortably heterosexual gentleman, experienced bursts of “homosexual thoughts,” in which he would think of sucking a penis—an idea he found disgusting. I am, of course, aware that conventional psychoanalytic thinking would dictate that “the wish is father to the fear,” and that his symptom represented a covert homosexual wish. Other symptoms of OCD prominent in his case included a desperate need to check literally everything in his apartment that could be a source of danger. Each time he reached the door he was seized by the need to check the stove to make sure the burners were off. He might go back to the bathroom a dozen times to make sure the toilet was not running or the faucets leaking. And he was unable to leave his apartment without returning as many as four or five times to check whether he had locked the door properly. All of these symptoms vanished when he began to take the drug fluoxetine.
Some years ago, before the arrival of these new medications for OCD, I saw a distinguished, elderly banker who had been plagued for more than thirty years with a recurring group of thoughts that formed a highly specific obsessional symptom. Whenever he thought about his beloved and mused about the pleasure of their sexual relationship, he was seized by images of her previous lovers and the possibility that they had in some way contaminated her. Each time, he became overpowered with disgust and horrified that he was in a relationship with so filthy a person.
Traditional psychoanalytic lore suggests that such fears derive from the anal phase of psychosexual development, viewing feces as the primary contaminant, the basic precipitant of disgust. Unfortunately, psychoanalytic treatment aimed at the understanding of such issues has rarely proved useful in diminishing either the intensity or the frequency of such recurring clusters of thoughts. Pharmacologic agents capable of increasing the amount of certain neurotransmitters seem more effective.
On the basis of the many years I have spent observing patients with OCD, I believe that some portion of the symptoms described may represent a biological disorder of the affect disgust, interpreted by the central assembly system as the need to avoid a contaminant. How the affect becomes part of such a specific script is not known, but it seems reasonable to consider some forms of OCD as a script disorder in which the impelling or irresistible force to action involves a disorder of affect.
THE LANGUAGE OF AFFECT
A moment ago, in recounting the story of Cleo, the death of whose marriage was foretold by her dissmell response to her husband, I rendered her vocalizations as “Uggh! Eeeooo! Yucchh!” If you say these words in front of a mirror (with all the emphasis they normally carry) you will see the facial display of disgust accompanying uggh! and yucchh! and the display of dissmell accompanying eeeooo! Affect, which itself is not a matter of words, does tend to shape the face in patterns that lend themselves to the pronunciation of certain words.
Every once in a while I have mentioned that the growing child shifts gradually from a communication system based on the display of innate affect to one based securely on verbal language. Much scholarly work has been done on the nature of language, most of which seems to indicate that (just like affect) words, grammar, and syntax seem to come from their own quite specific location within the brain. The science of linguistics has identified some of the earliest forms of language and traced the path of certain words over large sections of our planet. Many linguists have attempted to show that, despite the importance of emotion, it has no connection to the language system except as a modifier of already existing language.
Unfortunately, all of these studies have failed to take into account any aspect of the affect system as described by Tomkins. Even though I am well aware that the overwhelming majority of words derives from the brain mechanisms well known within the field of linguistics, it is important to describe those few that are clearly connected to innate affect.
Take, for instance, surprise–startle, which normally produces the vocalization “OH!” If startle occurs when your mouth is closed, this will be rendered as “wha,” the forerunner of “what?” and “wow.” We call such words echoic or onomatopoeic, for they echo sounds found in nature, like the “whoosh” of the wind or the “plop” of something falling into water.
For distress–anguish we have an entire family of long-drawn-out words that mirror the profile of both the affect and its triggering source: whine, wail, weep, whimper. They are onomatopoeic because they evoke both the sound and the feeling of distress. Growl, roar, and arrgh! are echoic for anger-rage. And for dissmell we have a full range of words that, when uttered, require that the upper lip be drawn back and upward just as it is when we are in the throes of the affect: snide, snot, snivel, snarl (dissmell and anger), snicker (dissmell and enjoyment–joy manifested as contempt), sniff, and snit.
Kids and adults alike say words like puke, yuccky, icky, and york when they mean to indicate their disgust for something or somebody. And I suspect that there is a connection between the full-blown expression of Yayyy! or Yippee! and the experience of excitement, just as the relieved outpouring of previously arrested breathing we know as whew may be an expression of the relief and release accompanying enjoyment–joy.
All of these words are common in contemporary American culture. I suspect that similar vocalizations may be found in Chinese, Hindi, and all of the Indo-European languages. This realm of linguistics is another realm of study made possible by affect theory.
DISMISSIVES
The study of dissmell and disgust reveals yet another linguistic category, to which I have given the name dismissives. This term lends a peculiar potency to our understanding of the affective roots of prejudice and discrimination.
In order to reject individuals it is sometimes easier to declare them to be members of a disgusting or dissmelling group, after which it is more logical to distance them. Thus I may pronounce my unloved neighbor to be Jewish, obese, a warmonger, a coward, a Nazi, nouveau riche, stupid, an egghead intellectual, or a member of any one of an endlessly long list of categories that make easier his or her dissmell. In such cases, rejection has actually been based on dissmell or disgust triggered by reasons much more deeply personal, motives more specific to our own relationship with that person but attributed to membership within that category. I have noticed that those who are most likely to place others within dismissive categories are those with the greatest frequency of the facial gestures we might call disgust and dissmell tics.
The history of our African-American subpopulation, for example, is made much more comprehensible by an understanding of dismissive language. The habit of comparison, one of the cardinal features of the human cognitive apparatus, leads us to assess new precepts on the basis of their resemblance to the old. Thus, when Caucasians first encountered African members of their own species, they were struck by such differences as skin color, hair texture, and facial structure. But humans have more skin than hair, and it was their pigmentation (which had allowed these tribes to become so well adapted to tropical life) that formed the basis of categorization. Darkness of skin was described as blackness, latinized as niger, translated as negro, and corrupted in slang to nigger. And it was by these pigment-based indicators of difference that this great mass of our fellow humans was organized and dismissed for several centuries.
It was not for reasons of actual odor that bigoted Southern Caucasians claimed that “niggers smell bad.” This was always a violent dismissive based on the affect dissmell and falsely attributed to smell itself. The affective roots of prejudice always involve dissmell and disgust. Enough shame and rage have evolved along with our societal use of the word “nigger” that now, even to use it in a scholarly discussion of affect triggers so much negative affect that an audience becomes unable to think about its affective history and its use as a justification for the socioeconomics of slavery!
Powerful mechanisms, these affects. The more you examine disgust and dissmell, the more you realize the breadth and extent of their power. It is fascinating that some people can be trained to ignore disgust, to accept what they revile. Also can people be made to ignore dissmell, to accept that which might naturally turn them away. One way this can be accomplished is through shame, which can reduce, limit, or even turn off any affect. Now that we have presented Tomkins’s idea that dissmell and disgust operate to limit the drives when they are at their height, let us investigate shame–humiliation, for this is the affect that interferes with other affects when they are at their height.