THE REALM OF VERY DENSE AFFECT: MECHANISMS OF INCREASE
Item: “You dance like a faggot,” said one high school senior to another at the prom. Whirling suddenly, the boy pulled a knife and killed his jeering classmate. The event occurred 30 years ago, but was told me by a patient in therapy for whom it remains a terrifying example of the relation between shame and rage.
Item: A lawyer discusses a client who raped repeatedly his 14-year-old daughter and threatened to beat her senseless unless she then cooked his dinner.
Item: On 13 March 1964, 28-year old Kitty Genovese parked her car and began to walk toward her apartment, at which point she was stabbed by an assailant. She screamed, “He stabbed me!” A neighbor looked out his window and said to the attacker, “Let that girl alone.” The assailant looked up, shrugged, and walked to his car. No one called the police, and while his victim was struggling to get to her apartment he returned and stabbed her again. “I’m dying!” she shrieked. Thirty-eight neighbors heard her scream, but none called the police. The killer returned a third time and then stabbed her fatally. Now one neighbor did call the police—well after she had died. Her death has formed the basis of a cautionary tale designed to shame those who are too cowardly to act with even a minimal sense of civic or human responsibility. Surely (we are told) someone could have done something to distract, dissuade, or limit the severity of his attack. Yet I have never heard anyone enquire what might have been going on in the mind of the perpetrator to power so prolonged and persistent a murderous attack.
Item: Last year a stranger entered a neighborhood tavern in my city and for several hours held its customers at gunpoint. Selecting one 18-year-old man as his special victim, the perpetrator forced him to strip naked and dance before them on a pool table, after which he killed him.
Item: A recent trial laid bare the story of a man who killed the chronically schizophrenic daughter who had made his life a living hell by her constant and unpredictable attacks with knives and clubs. Interviewed later, the jurors thought that these extenuating circumstances might have led to his exoneration had he not then proceeded to chop into her body small chunks, which he then cooked. How can someone remain so angry at his victim that he continues to cut, chop, saw, and cook her body for hours—long after the actual moment of her death and his consequent release from the danger she had presented?
Item: Joy, too, can be of prolonged duration and great intensity. When any of the professional sports franchises achieves transient dominion by winning a championship game, entire cities have been known to revel in the streets for hours. Of interest, too, is the fact that police officers line the route of revelry, containing it within limits determined by bureaucratic decision. As any student of history can attest, for more than 25 centuries such victory celebrations have been choreographed by civic decree. And redemption from the terror of wartime is even more dramatic a source of prolonged joy. I was ten years old when World War II ended; nobody then alive can forget the extended nationwide sense of relief, release, and joy that accompanied the signing of the armistice agreement. There is plenty of newsreel footage available to anyone who wishes to confirm my observations of that sustained societal outpouring of love.
It is very easy to accept the occasional burst of joy or violence. Why, how, affect can be maintained at such high intensity for so long a period of time is less apparent. We prefer to think about disquieting themes only when we wish, often treating criminal activity as a macabre source of entertainment. Actually, I suspect that the immense popularity of gangster movies and the entire genre of film violence is largely dependent on our fascination with the prolonged display of affect. As far as I have been able to determine, attack other scripts are a way of life in the criminal world—what we see in the movies is little more than a dramatic version of this approach to life. Real criminal activity requires a blend of highly magnified affect (for which we seek societal controls rather than understanding) and some sort of entrepreneurial skill (which is, indeed, capable of limitation by law). The equation of crime and punishment does act as a deterrent, but only in those situations where affective magnification is much lower than in the incidents cited here. There has been very little work done on the affective roots of violence.
Always there is some popular theory offering an easy explanation for such phenomena. An earlier, more righteous era thought such “excesses” possible only in cases of moral failure, with shame and guilt acting to prevent wrong-doing. Today, however, it is fashionable to say that violent or cruel behavior is both abusive and based in shame. Therapists, teachers, preachers, and politicians who declaim about “abuse” (whether of spouses or children, by pain or sexuality, or of oneself with any number of drugs or activities) are avoiding the task of figuring out what really is going on. The word itself is a clue to its failure to explain anything—to abuse means “to use improperly.” No child, no spouse, no employee, is meant to be used. Most of the experts involved in this sort of work speak as if once we stop ab-using people we can use them properly!
The literature of “abuse” is awash in moral judgment and condign punishment. Abuse has become a code word for any behavior that is to be treated or managed or distanced with dissmell and disgust in order to produce shame and guilt in the perpetrator, thus justifying some form of “cleansing anger.” It should be obvious that these tactics merely shift people toward the attack other pole of the compass of shame and away from the attack self, avoidance, or withdrawal poles. Rather than a valid explanation of the mechanisms involved, such systems are actually part of the current cultural drift toward machismo. What they really do is declare machismo as normative, place the accused in the category of reviled things, and shuck any responsibility for study. Needed is an approach that allows a deeper understanding.
I think we can do a bit better. We can figure out how people get this way.
THE ROOTS OF MADNESS
There is a cultural stereotype, a sturdy myth around which we build our false understanding of childhood. According to this widely believed fiction, parents accord special treatment to their children, giving them the benefit of kindness and sensitivity they would not show to strangers, competitors, or enemies. The story line includes subtexts about mother love, paternal protectiveness, and the sanctity of the family. But to whom is this narrative applied? From what “central casting” reservoir are these actors drawn? What is the raw material from which parents and families are constructed?
We are taught from earliest childhood to compete, to be “number one” at all costs, to cheat, take, trick, push, strive, connive, to reduce anyone whose success brings us shame, to win, enlarge ourselves, build an image, resist any effort to reduce us in any way. Life is complex, demanding, sometimes pleasant, often harsh. All of us live with our own library of scripts, each of which has been devised to manage scenes both wonderful and terrible.
Some of us marry when we have “won” at courtship, often competing for love and striving for social success in climates characterized by the entire range of negative affect. Many others consider marriage and its constellation of responsibilities to be a “trap.” For them, to marry is to lose, rather than to win.
But as if a switch had been thrown, in the moment of marriage two individuals who had been living and competing in such a noisy world are expected to change suddenly into warm, sensitive, caring, stable, and empathic adults. For better or worse, those who enter into the state of marriage are seen from without as part of a culturally defined romance. Notwithstanding whatever adjustments to each other were made during the courtship, throughout the first phase of marriage the new partners must learn to merge their lives.
While it is true that each of us brings to marriage some stock of idealized scripts, of roles we hope to play with the consenting adult of our choice, our ability to live within these sets of expectation is limited by many factors. We who become parents were once children born with our own roiling symphony of innate affects and wordless drives. No one emerges from the birth canal with the slightest idea about the modulation of anything—and we cannot teach what we have not learned. Almost everything we know about soothing, calming, relaxing, consoling, comforting, satisfying, cheering, or loving others has been learned from someone else and adapted for our own use within highly personal affect modulation scripts.
We need to discuss what happens when the world of the infant is not soothing, not calming, not relaxing, not consoling, not comforting, not satisfying or cheering or loving. Several questions emerge: What happens when those who are responsible for the nurturance of children fail at the task of teaching the attenuation and modulation of affect? What happens if the general effect of parental attention is an increase in the density of affect? How much intensification of affect can one handle? To what stratagems do we turn in order to handle the higher realms of emotion, mood at the maximum?
There is a subtle and wrenching problem that bothers everybody who has ever tried to approach these questions. All of us tend to get angry at parents who mistreat their children. Our own morality is deeply offended when we learn about intentional cruelty or living conditions that terrify us. Disgust, dissmell, and fear coalesce to produce a sense of revulsion and horror as we approach this subject. The distancing emotions interfere with science, too.
And there are other, frankly personal reasons for our discomfort. Notwithstanding how sincerely we loved our parents and felt loved by them, nor how much happiness we assign our memories of childhood, not one of us grew up free of discomfort. Though the reader be of cheery disposition and wondrous calm, perhaps the beneficiary of optimal psychotherapy by a true master, yet there remain feelings and memories with which any of us may be loath to deal. Whatever disavowal of memory has been used to protect us from affective response to our own history will be undone by this material.
Empathy and identification are not always pleasant. The normal, healthy adult feels the pain and suffering of any child who is being beaten and humiliated. Often we lose our neutrality and think only of punishing the perpetrator of a crime. Here, however, we must suspend these judgments in order to study the actual flow of events involved.
You have to start somewhere. From the outset, I have focused on innate mechanisms and the effect on development of their modulation by external forces. I take for granted the realities of actual existence and the natural imperfection of parents. The entire psychotherapy movement can be viewed as a loving attempt to undo the effects of such imperfection and to offer individuals the chance to become someone from a more optimal history. Although everything presented in this book can be used to form a more effective system of therapy, my purpose here is the elucidation of the processes that make it necessary.
TEMPERAMENT
A good place to begin is with the concept of baseline. Think of it as a matter of architecture: Visualize a huge group of tall buildings interconnected at many levels. If you have enough space on each “floor” so that one could run from building to building without ever going up or down, the concept of “ground floor” changes dramatically. Many people might live, work, and play only on the twelfth floor, taking it as their shared world—the locus of their existence. Another population lives, works, and plays on the second, yet another on the fourth below ground. (If the cluster of buildings gets so large as to become the crust of the earth, then the concept of true ground level is lost forever.) In the course of normal life, all denizens get to travel one or two planes above and below their normal locus of activity. This latter vertical motion represents their normal range of affective experience. Each group tends to accept its horizontal reality as the baseline, the norm, the zero point from which all reckoning is made.
People seem to cluster on the basis of their inherent, or constitutional, activity level, which is sometimes described as temperament. There is a wide range of “normal” temperament. Some of us quite naturally work 18 hours a day, enjoying the free and unhampered use of our talents and abilities. Others feel it an imposition to engage in effortful activity for more than a couple of hours at a time, after which they tune in to some form of passive entertainment. Most presidential candidates and chief executive officers of huge corporations, for another example, seem to need and prefer five or less hours of sleep each day. Certain jobs seem to attract specific types of temperament.
We humans are born with a wide range of possible levels of inner nature or temper. Often I have heard the mother of an extraordinarily intense and successful adult describe this offspring as having been more active than her other children even when in the womb!
Yet such an activity level is neither necessary nor sufficient for the achievement of success in life. Temperament is only one of the innate characteristics that goes into the mix—just like size, intelligence, physical strength, degree of beauty, and talent. An interesting aspect of my work as a clinician has been the observation that those who benefit most from successful therapy seem to find their own level. An enlightened adult lives and works in terms of his or her true complement of attributes. Most people have grown up living on the wrong floor of my metaphorical building.
Temperament seems to be an innate set point, the net result or gestalt of perhaps dozens of biological factors. No matter what level of activity is normal for any of us, it provides the zero point from which we then experience positive and negative affect. The woman who enjoys practicing law 14 hours a day, playing squash or swimming daily, and writing for a couple of hours in the evening is brought by enjoyment–joy to a different null point than one who feels it unnatural and an imposition to work more than a couple of hours at a time. To each, the affect itself will be experienced as contentment and solace; what each does or thinks as the result of that moment of peace will be dramatically different. Both constitutions, of course, are normal and healthy.
If you have ever played in a band or orchestra, you know the difference between the way music is written for the various instruments. For the piano, the five lines that make up the G and D clefs form an invariable semantic structure; notes are always where you expect them to be, and the key is indicated by the presence of sharp and flat signs at the beginning of the line. But clarinet music is different. The same five lines represent entirely different parts of the scale depending on the key chosen. So it is for temperament. We are born at some place on a scale decided outside of our understanding and control, designed to live within a structure not of our devising. And it is from the null point of our own particular scale that each of us is moved by affect.
It was Tomkins who established the concept of an affective baseline around which is sketched our experience of good and bad feelings. Our task here is to build a logic for those situations when affect is pushed, or magnified, to levels of density beyond anything for which we possess skills or even equipment for modulation. How many floors can the human be made to travel before reaching some critical end-point? When do we get nosebleeds from the height and earaches from the depths of affective excursion?
The problem falls naturally into distinct categories: What biological and psychological mechanisms increase the density of affect? How do we experience affect of high density and high intensity? By what systems do we attempt to handle such assemblages of affect? How is personality influenced by such emotion and our characteristic ways of handling it? We need a special kind of map for our housing project—one that shows not only who lives where, but how people differ on the basis of their internal and external affective environment.
THE MECHANISMS OF INCREASE
Biochemical
In this current sociocultural environment it is fashionable to suggest that any violent action was triggered by, or made possible only by, drugs. “Everybody” knows that excesses of emotion can be “caused” by drugs. Naturally, since normal affect is dependent on neurotransmitters and the family of substances I have called mediators of innate affect, all emotion is in some way chemical. Here we are talking about affect that is initiated solely by one of these chemicals, not the situation when the chemical has been released at its normal point in the chain of reactions.
Although it has been fashionable to say that drugs act as a “releasing agent,” in Chapter 1 I explained that exogenous chemicals can produce somatic effects that feel nearly identical to those produced by ordinary innate affect because they mimic the effect of the normal chemical mediators. A single cup of coffee or glass of wine can cause a surge of excitement or contentment; these affective excursions, or movements from the baseline, are of brief duration and limited extent.
Our reaction to brief bouts of chemically induced affect is dictated by our way of handling affects that have been triggered by their normal programs—as if the induced mood had come from an affect script. Imagine what would happen were we to arrange for a steady infusion of some mediator substance. Since chemically induced affect tends to last as long as the substance in question is active, this would produce a prolonged and intense emotional state. Any affect that is supported by such a constant chemical presence becomes the baseline, the temperament of an individual. Rather than being experienced as an innate affect with a known and predictable temporal contour, it becomes something more like a mood. When such a mood is the more-or-less-permanent atmosphere of one’s inner life, it becomes part of the self, a piece of an identity. In the language of script theory, any time our biochemical environment allows an affect to become a constant presence, that affect comes to magnify all other psychological functions. All of our scripts are formed with this strange affective experience as a constant magnifying force!
To me, the best model for this sort of chemically induced mood state is the regular and patterned shift between mania and depression seen in bipolar, or manic-depressive, illness. During a manic episode, for instance, the chemicals that cause the astonishing increase in interest–excitement are responsible for the magnification of every psychological function. Mania can push any affect, any drive, any form of thinking, to such a degree that it can become toxic for the organism.
Similarly, depressed people have been known to remain frozen in inaction, unable even to think effectively for long periods of time because of the profound interference produced by that phase of the illness. (“I didn’t leave my house for four years,” said one patient.) Anybody who is afflicted by a chemical lassitude or by a chemically produced and maintained state of increased excitement, must somehow come to terms with this emotional environment. The prolonged and relatively constant chemical aberration controls the floor on which one lives. The person not afflicted by this illness might consider it merely an alteration of normal biology, an oddity of nature; for the bipolar patient it produces “reality.”
This effect on overall mood and general functioning, which we might think of as a biochemical alteration of the affective set point, can be either endogenous or exogenous, depending on the source of the chemical. Among the endogenous factors would be the level of thyroid, adrenal, pituitary, and sexual hormones, as well as the neurotransmitters involved in bipolar illness; among the exogenous would be a host of substances taken into the body for the explicit purpose of altering mood. For instance, the culture of medical machismo normative in my youth required house officers to work like machines with 36 hours of activity and 12 hours of rest. In such an environment one drinks strong coffee all day and all night; temperament was maintained by caffeine.
The weariness and torpor produced by failure of the thyroid gland come from two realms of causation: Not only does the general reduction in biological functioning seen in hypothyroidism drop one to a lower floor of our building, but the hormone itself seems to be a factor in the biochemical circuitry for interest–excitement and anger–rage. All of the life-management scripts devised by a hypothyroid patient are colored by this biological reduction in set-point.
Similarly, consider the patient whose chronic asthma is being treated by the more-or-less constant use of medication that mimics the effects of adrenalin. This person, too, must devise life-management scripts that take into account whatever limitations are presented by the basic respiratory illness, as well as the constant sense of rush or hurry brought by medicine. Most of us have on one occasion or another ingested some substance like this; most over-the-counter drugs for nasal stuffiness include such compounds. In addition to their expected effect on respiration, they produce a rush of excitement quite welcome when our activity level has been reduced by a minor virus. But can you imagine living day by day with the degree of affective magnification produced by this kind of adrenergic drug? Inescapable and immutable, this sense of hurry must be incorporated into the patient’s self system as the new baseline.
Obviously, when our general level of functioning is held down by some biological interference with the normal range of affective expression, as in certain forms of depression, optimal treatment requires ingestion of a chemical that neutralizes the abnormal biology. But what about people who end up using caffeinated beverages all day long in order to fight off normal weariness, or cocaine to increase the general level of excitement and arousal, or tranquilizers to reduce constant fear? All of these substances might be considered acceptable under certain circumstances; when they become constant companions, regular or stable components of one’s life, they come to govern the floor on which we live. This association between the (natural or artificial) chemical environment and baseline temperament is a reality of existence—neither good nor bad.
It is difficult not to be deeply moved when watching the emotional growth of an adult whose affective set point has been stabilized by the use of lithium salts or an antidepressant. Patients whose chronically low self-esteem, fear of rejection, and nearness to shame are due to some malfunction in neurotransmitter mechanisms become different people when given the opportunity to take proper medication. Chemically induced shame can become such a dominant part of one’s life that all action is impeded by shame magnification.
It would take a shelf of books to describe in detail all the possible interactions involving chemical substances, the affect system, and temperament. Important here is only the idea that the chronic experience of an aberrant biochemical mediator, or of a normal mediator pushed to an abnormal level, can alter the affective set point. The emotional development of a child who has grown up with a chemical aberration, or in the care of a parent with some sort of biological alteration of temperament, will be influenced powerfully by these factors.
Neocortical
It was Basch who suggested to me that the much-vaunted neocortex, that part of the brain which is responsible for most of what people call “thinking” or “cognition,” had evolved to enable the modulation of innate affect. “Look at it,” he said. “It wraps around the rest of the brain like a cap.” One at a time, little structures must have developed, each allowing a bit more opportunity to evaluate, understand, manage, control, and respond to innate affect, as well as the situations in which it had been triggered. Any increase in the potential for affective modulation might have conferred on the organism an increase in the potential for survival. True enough, the network formed by the interconnections between these new brain systems has turned out to confer other benefits. But Basch may be right to suggest this concept for its origin. The thinking of the new brain may have evolved to alter the thinking of the old.
If you watch any experienced mother deal with any ordinary crying baby, you can get a pretty good idea of the ways affect is attenuated. There is no better example of the interconnection between subcortical and neocortical activity. First, she seems to tune in on the display of affect itself, perhaps mimicking it briefly. This momentary joining, or linking, is what we call affective resonance; it is the beginning of empathy. Next, this caregiver attempts to find out which of the most common stimuli to affect has acted as trigger. If the child is hungry, food will be indicated; if in pain, then attention to its source is warranted. Concomitant with her efforts to answer the affect-triggering message will be a decrease in the amount of affect generated.
But if none of these simple remedies seems applicable or available, something must be done about the affect being expressed—affect must be modulated for its own sake. Now she calls on her own repertoire of calming techniques. First, as caregiver she must check her own control of the affect she has begun to experience through resonance; next will she demonstrate for her child how this control is accomplished. In order to reduce crying, she may hold the baby to her chest and rock side-to-side. Also might she make rhythmic noises at a volume precisely attuned to that of the baby—louder when the baby’s cries are more strident, softer and cooing to merge with its quiet sobs. At other times she will simply take over the infant’s affect by merging with it for a moment and then switching to another of her own choosing. Done well, this can be a fine way to distract a child; done without regard for the moment-to-moment response produced, it can have the opposite effect and push the child into a far greater degree of negative affect. Successful techniques include nuzzling and stroking.
Sometimes all we need is a brief period of freedom from an affect that is not being maintained by its original triggering stimulus but has begun to recycle itself through the recursive process of internal contagion. Bright lights and jangling bells can distract attention for a moment, just as a pistol shot or handclap can cause a momentary break in the flow of affective expression by triggering surprise–startle. “BOO!” is such a resetting stimulus.
In an older child we can suggest a strategy more dependent on higher cortical function, like counting to ten, reciting the letters of the alphabet, or naming the 50 states and their capital cities. As adults we can disperse the mood of our everyday lives by attending any public entertainment, taking a vacation, or going for a drive in the countryside. Usually we return refreshed, or at least in a somewhat different “frame of mind” from when we left. Each of these methods works by providing a new source for affect, which then takes over the central assembly and keeps us focused on this new source long enough for the original (noxious) mood to wane.
So there is a wide range of actions capable of reducing or “down-regulating” affect. Of perhaps equal importance is the rarely discussed fact that there is a wide range of actions capable of increasing or “up-regulating” innate affect. So important to the very concept of innate affect is this idea that affect is experienced in degrees of intensity that Tomkins gave all of them paired names indicating the range over which each might be expressed. (It would have been easy enough to call one “dissmell–shunning” and the other “disgust—revulsion.” “By giving dissmell and disgust single-word names,” Tomkins told me, “I meant to drive home the point that they were highly complex auxiliaries to a drive, rather than true affects.”) Anything capable of triggering anger can be pushed further, leading to rage; similar observations can be made for all affects.
Extending Basch’s above-mentioned idea and extrapolating it in a direction he never intended, I suspect we can approach this aspect of the realm of very dense affect by calling attention to the same neocortical mechanisms that may have evolved to modulate affect. It is my opinion that any faculty capable of down-regulating affect can be used in a perverse fashion to increase it to levels that may be toxic for the organism. One of the penalties exacted by the inexorable process of evolution has been the emergence of affective magnification far in excess of anything that is good or useful for the species.
Whatever emotional waters can be calmed by music can be roiled by music; involved is one’s reaction to music. Sudden bursts of sound can startle; soft music can soothe; loud music can irritate. A slow rhythm can provide a stimulus profile analogous to enjoyment–joy, while an intense, fast beat can mimic and therefore trigger excitement, fear, distress, or anger. The child who can be calmed by counting privately to ten can be made more agitated by a parent who fires questions at a rate sufficient to increase agitation; the same neocortical mechanism is responsible in each case.
Note, too, that there are ways of preconditioning the organism so that an affect is likely to be expressed at the higher, rather than the lower, end of its spectrum. One does not have to be at the baseline, at the null state of no affect, when a new stimulus for affect begins. The alterations in gradient or density responsible for affect can be initiated from any level of preexisting stimulation. Certain stimuli can accumulate—when I am hungry or exhausted any increase in my load is likely to make me shift from distress to anger. Even birds, who have no affect system, show an exaggerated startle reaction when “potentiated” to do so by chronic fear. (It is unfortunate that few, if any, of those psychologists and neurophysiologists who have studied such additive effects have also taken into account the nature of the human affect system.)
We like to think of the caregiver as one who calms the fears of the young—explaining away the confusions of childhood, removing or deciphering whatever mystery might frighten. But imagine, for a moment, a child being reared in an atmosphere of parent-inspired terror—danger everywhere, solace nowhere to be found, love unimaginable. There really are parents who do more than warn their children about the bogey man or Sweeney Todd; they seek out and call attention to anything that might produce fear. I mean to suggest that some mothers and fathers have less interest in solace than control. (The power to create dependency through fear is seductive. It binds the frightened to the giver of fear and provides a system of behavioral control.) In such an environment one lives on guard rather than at rest.
Then, too, there are kinder parents who have no choice of climate and must raise their offspring to handle a terrifying, uncompromising reality. Such children grow to maturity within a mood state of chronic fear. The hovering, omnipresent affect fear-terror will magnify every scene so that even the most banal and simple stimulus is likely to be viewed as frightening simply because it has been encountered in the context of fear.
Were we born without a neocortex, without the ability to store, link, group, assemble, retrieve, or associate memory, such a degree of magnification would not occur. The seeds of this process may be seen in the work on fear-potentiated startle in pigeons. But this is minor compared to the intensity of magnification made possible by the new brain. However, affective magnification is not dependent only on neocortical thinking. Magnification is assisted by data coming from the feedback provided by affect receptors located all over the body, from the contour of events made to occur at far-flung sites of action. Yet it is our very ability to learn that makes magnified affect both bearable and unbearable.
Try another affect: Imagine someone who grows up in a city where so much is happening at the same time that the dominant affect is distress–anguish. Momentary joy, which moves the healthy infant from bad to good, can move the troubled adult only from worse to bad. Contrast the most ghastly districts of Manhattan, Los Angeles, or Chicago with rural Maine. An event that would perhaps earn only a quizzical glance in one locale, might cause tempers to flare in the other. The very density of some cities makes them tinderboxes simply because so many people are forced to live at a high level of stimulation; in this context solace provides only brief respite before one returns to the baseline distress. I have read many studies of experimental situations in which animals like laboratory rats were bred to population densities that produced horrific changes in normal behavior. Imagine reinterpreting such work in terms of the human affect system and our potential for script formation!
More? Anybody who has the ability to tune in to the affective experience of another person is said to be empathic—and that is supposed to be a worthy talent. Yet what of individuals (and they are legion) who use this empathic skill to achieve affective resonance and then proceed to make worse whatever was going on in the other? Call it cruelty, or sadism, if you will. But no matter how such behavior is viewed within the moral system important to you, the “technical aspects,” the mechanism for its effectiveness, are worthy of study.
For better or worse, the overwhelming majority of our populace really doesn’t give a hoot about the inner experience of others. Most of the time, if someone (infant or adult) is expressing affect in a manner or at an intensity we find unpleasant, we do something about it for our own sake. We dislike the contagious quality of affect unless it entertains us; in fact, the social rules require everybody to mute the display of affect. Usually we simply ask people to stop shouting, or crying, or laughing too loudly. But when these appeals fail, we resort to more restrictive techniques, which themselves produce a peculiar constellation of emotional effects. Every non-empathic interpersonal experience increases the amount of negative affect floating around. Every recurrent non-empathic interpersonal experience must be handled by some sort of affect management script, which then becomes part of the repertoire we think of as our personality.
Asked to summarize the concept of an affect-management script, most readers would describe the methods and techniques through which adults calm or diminish the noxious experience of negative affect. Yet only a tiny fraction of such scripts involves the induction of calm. Take, for instance, the entire library of scripts described as the attack other mode of reaction to shame. Shame (shifted, interpreted, and experienced as the idea of personal inferiority) becomes anger, put-down, calumny, ridicule, torture, abuse, rape. Hardly a calming experience in the lot.
Every one of us has attempted to improve the mood of the moment by substituting one affect for another. There are times when it feels just great to yell and scream at the ludicrous theater of professional wrestling, to feel terribly frightened at a horror movie, or to savor the strange combination of excitement and fear we call “being thrilled” while watching others take mortal risks. These dynamic shifts from one affect to another provide an excellent form of distraction from discomfort. Yet sometimes we get stuck in the distraction, which threatens to take us over in ways for which we are unprepared. Intending to avoid or escape shame and distress, we can get involved in behavior that itself magnifies affect and becomes life-threatening. Anything can be pushed to and beyond the limits of tolerance.
So many and varied are the strategies for increasing affect that any summary tends to trivialize the process. The subject is one that must be approached in meticulous detail elsewhere; it is far beyond the scope of this present book. Here I wish only to point out that life tends to augment rather than damp our ambient load of affect. Partly responsible is the wondrous neocortex, the giver of complexity and calculation, of modern memory and mimesis. The batch of equipment that may indeed have evolved to modulate affect can also be used to push affect to ever-higher limits.
Forgive an interpolation important to one of my generation. If there remains any psychoanalytically trained reader who has not long ago thrown down in disgust this treatise on the nature of emotion, there is yet another stake to be placed in the heart of Freud’s theory. Freud maintained that all psychic energy came from the drives, which were expressed as the id and seen most clearly in the roiling affective expression of the infant. Since, to him, all emotion was derived from drive forces, it is by definition impossible for any adult emotion to be more intense, more powerful, than that seen in the infant. Yet there is no infantile analogue, nothing in the repertoire of the infant, that resembles the prolonged and intense displays of emotion described at the beginning of this chapter. Psychoanalytic theory contains no provision for the unlimited magnification of affect by affect.
I have deliberately avoided discussing what happens when shame is magnified to toxic proportions. Shame affect involves a painful analogic amplification of any impediment to positive affect. No matter when and how triggered, shame damps and impedes and reduces and makes painful everything with which it is coassembled. Yet, before we can consider the specific problem of an atmosphere of shame, replete with reactive systems organized at the furthest extension of the scripts found in the compass of shame, we must extend our survey of madness. In the next chapter I will sketch some of the ways affect—affect in general—is handled when it goes beyond our limits of tolerance.