OVERLOAD: AFFECT BEYOND THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE
Need we be surprised at the idea that a certain density of affect can be “too much” for the system? All bodily systems have limits. Take, for instance, the outer reaches of athletic ability.
We devote a great deal of attention to the exploits of our finest athletes, who spend their lives attempting to perform certain tasks at peak levels of effectiveness. There was a time when everybody wondered whether it was possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Working in the physiology laboratory and studying his own oxygen utilization, the young English physician Roger Bannister devised a strategy that allowed him to increase his already remarkable efficiency to the point where he became the first to break through that particular barrier. Every year another great champion shaves a few tenths of a second off that record; indeed, today’s best runners rarely fail to equal Bannister’s achievement.
Yet the human machine seems incapable of running this distance in significantly less time—no one talks of a “three-minute mile” or a “two-minute mile.” The concept of a four-minute mile remains an excellent approximation of optimal human performance. Even though we like to think of our species as capable of continuous and limitless improvement, we do seem to have certain boundaries.
Our culture calls the upper range of affective experience by the simple name “stress,” thus ignoring the whole problem of identifying its components. Sometimes we are taken over by affect of tornadic intensity, when the “mood of the moment” creates a din so loud that we cannot hear anything else. Affect at this level is so intense (many together, one amplifying the other, producing sequences of terrible vehemence) that we lose much of our ability to give it a specific name.
In this chapter I will discuss what happens when normal distractions cannot work simply because they are incapable of garnering enough attention to take over a central assembly locked to a more powerful stimulus. (I am unlikely to be distracted from a hurricane by the tinkling of a harpsichord.) Just as it takes dynamite to loosen a log jam, the mechanisms capable of giving us freedom from dense affect have evolved to handle other stimuli of great intensity.
THE PARADIGM OF PAIN
There are well-defined limits to the conditions under which we can appreciate certain stimuli and to the intensity of stimulation that the body can handle. Our experience of pain provides an excellent illustration. As we discussed earlier, pain itself may be described as an analogue of injury in that the sensation itself bears some felt resemblance to what caused it. Pain enters consciousness—calls attention to injury—by providing information that is at once localizing and motivating. When something hurts we know not only where the damage has occurred but that urgent attention must be paid to the source of this discomfort. It is for this reason that Tomkins considers pain as a system to lie somewhere between drive (an information source) and affect (an amplifier). It has features of both. Pure somatic pain achieves meaning and significance based on these properties.
Although pain and affect are neuropsychological events produced by quite different mechanisms, there is a significant relation between them. All of the negative affects are experienced as intrinsically painful, even though the discomforts of fear, dissmell, disgust, anger, distress, and shame are qualitatively different both from each other and from the type of sensation experienced when one of the pain receptors is stimulated. And, on the other hand, the duration, intensity, and stimulus contour of pain can trigger any of the negative affects as an accompaniment.
Pain, then, has evolved as a signal that tends to enter consciousness and motivate us to remove its cause so that the message can be turned off. The two parts of the pain message—localization in space and motivation—can be separated. This is why the tooth hurts until you call the dentist—once the message has been heard, it no longer need be urgent.
The ability of pain to distract us is limited by many factors. In the heat of battle soldiers often are aware of but not hurt by wounds that might at other times produce agony. One’s ability to survive on the battlefield requires attention to a wide variety of percepts unrelated to the self. It is these other sources which therefore gain urgency through affective amplification, emphasis far in excess of that produced by pain, thus guaranteeing them preferential entry into the central assembly.
Simply stated, sometimes an otherwise competent signal is lost in the noise of other, “louder” information. Affect is one of the bulletins that can over-whelm and replace pain. Something like this is going on when hypnosis is used to control pain. Hypnosis involves a contract between operator and subject in which some sort of affect mutualization is achieved by the techniques of hypnotic induction, after which attention is shifted to another focus.*
Notice that pain is unlike affect in that it is neither a contagious nor a recursive stimulus. Because it is initiated by highly specific receptors, pain does not maintain itself or trigger more pain; nor is my pain likely to cause pain in an empathic other. Each affect, however, is triggered by some stimulus that forms a profile, and it is this contour that is duplicated as the innate affect. We should not be surprised that affect itself triggers more affect, because the system has no way of detecting differences in sources. Pain, on the other hand, is so specific to the site that has been irritated that its message is intrinsically specific.
Like the drives, then, pain provides information about a highly specific source; affect amplifies any information and is intrinsically general. The hypnotic device of shifting attention from pain to affect, and then to some other focus, allows one to pretend that the source of discomfort is far afield from the actual tissue that has been injured. It can do this simply because heed has been shifted from a system with only one possible source to another system capable of being triggered by a nearly infinite number of sources.
It is interesting to consider our response to torture, which may be defined as the perverse use of pain to motivate rather than inform. When the operator produces pain of an order and intensity beyond what can be tolerated by the subject, the central assembly switches into the circuit we call unconsciousness. As well as providing a remarkable degree of anesthesia, this mechanism turns off all contact with the tormenting outside world. So, at least in the case of pain, the body is wired to release us from stimuli outside the range it can utilize.
I live by a stream that meanders through a suburban neighborhood crossed by roads. In their infinite wisdom, the civic officials of an earlier era elected not to build bridges, but to save money by channeling the stream into large pipes over which they laid roadways. This system works well until we have a major downpour, when the sheer volume of water far exceeds what can possibly flow through conduits of that size. Rainwater, unable to go in its usual direction, backs up in the form of a flood.
In physics, this is referred to as a “bandwidth” phenomenon, involving the relation between anything that must be transported and the means available for its movement. A traffic jam, with motorists searching for all possible alternative routes, is an automotive flood; gridlock and logjams are bandwidth problems. So may we use the language of physics to describe the loss of consciousness in response to overwhelming pain. Stimulus overload triggers a shunt to another system.
The affect system has some similar limiting features. The nine genetically determined, prewired mechanisms described by Tomkins govern our range of normal emotional responses. The enormous range of possible emotions is a function of the permutations and combinations of these nine programs assembled with the immense variety of actual human experiences to form higher-order scripts. It is for this reason that moods tend to cluster into certain predictable groups. Emotional expression, for all its complexity, is limited to what can be done with the tools at hand. The variety is great, but not infinite.
Then what about our ability to handle densely packed affect? What does it mean to be flooded or overwhelmed with emotion? The process of magnification can produce an emotional state so extraordinary, so strained, stinging, extreme, or radical, that it must be managed by techniques that have little or nothing to do with affect. The extremes of emotional excess and explosion that we call psychopathology are based on normal and otherwise healthy psychological mechanisms that have been called into play to handle situations for which they did not evolve.
One model involves the history of the mechanism called “fainting.” Historically, we know that it was once fashionable for women to faint when confronted by certain situations, especially those involving shame. Indeed, like so many poorly examined phenomena, this used to be considered a normal ingredient of feminine physiology. Nevertheless, men and women are equally likely to faint in anticipation of severe pain, when given an injection, or when blood is drawn. Such a response may be considered analogous to the loss of consciousness seen in torture.
Sometimes the operative affect is fear–terror, sometimes shame–humiliation; with a bit of investigation one can usually figure out just which is involved. But central to the symptom is the avoidance of affect, a technique of sidestepping—moving away from it into something else. The general name for all mechanisms of this sort is dissociation, in which the central assembly causes a shift from one form of consciousness to another. Most likely we should drop this term, which comes from an era when it was thought that the symptoms observed resulted from an interruption in the flow of information from one neural center to another. The actual mechanism for the sort of shutdown seen in dissociation is more likely to involve turning down the nonspecific amplification of the reticular activation system. We know now that nothing really becomes dissociated—only a finely tuned, correctly operating neurological system can produce such an effect.
Today, someone who faints in public is more likely to be teased than comforted—shame has come to prevent, rather than cause, fainting. But the very fact that women rarely swoon in public these days suggests both that there is a volitional component involved—a choice of response patterns—and that (as a biological mechanism) it remains available. These clinical anecdotes hint that we humans can switch to our huge repertoire of devices for the management of pain when intense and densely packed affect cannot be reduced by techniques drawn from our repertoire for affect modulation. It is only when an intense affect has gone on for a long period of time that it becomes what we think of as too dense.
There is a wondrous logic to such a shift. Whereas affect can be triggered by a myriad of sources, pain normally is focal. When someone is overwhelmed by negative affect due to any of the causes described in the previous chapter, the act of pretending that the discomfort is due to somatic pain allows one to mitigate the noxious affective experience by techniques that work for pain. Anything that has ever worked to reduce pain has been used to detoxify devastating degrees of affect.
The transformation from affect to pain is something like hypnotic pain control in reverse. I had a personal experience of this conversion of symptoms early in my medical career, one that may serve as an example of the process. It was during my residency in internal medicine that I entered a formal psychoanalysis, hoping to find the sources of my personal discomfort. A month or so into the process I developed a three-millimeter red lump on the tip of my tongue; initially merely uncomfortable, it soon became intensely painful. Careful inspection of the swelling revealed nothing alarming, and the steady, boring pain went away when I put ice chips on it. I learned to walk around the hospital carrying a little paper cup full of ice chips. Despite this inventive solution, the pain only intensified; now I began to use a topical anesthetic. Only because this local anesthetic tasted horrible did I mention the situation in an analytic session.
To my surprise, this localized steady pain was of great interest to my analyst, and we spent a number of sessions trying to link it to some part of my emotional life. In desperation, for there was no way I was going to get the picture unaided, eventually he asked, “Something raw and painful on the tip of your tongue? Don’t people often comment that they have something right on the tip of their tongue but can’t say it?” Literally within minutes of my realization that I was angry, very angry at someone, both the steady pain and the red lump vanished.
Psychotherapy works. Only one other time in my life was I forced to endure that steadily painful lesion on my tongue, which reappeared in the context of a romantic involvement. Forced by neurosis to disavow any anger at my then beloved, instead I suffered the distressing or angry pain of psychosomatic illness. Nowadays this sore appears only when I disavow my need for sleep and work past any rational level of tolerance. Fatigue, too, is a constant-density stimulus quite analogous to the steady, boring pain of my private and idiosyncratic internal signal.
The scripts that had blocked both the expression and the awareness of my anger are too complex and personal to warrant mention here; my purpose is only to suggest that the monotonously painful lesion functioned as an analogue of the affect anger–rage. I do not know how such things come to happen, even though as a psychotherapist I have seen dozens of similar cases. (Surely we can admire what we do not completely understand.) What I have come to accept is that a steady, intensely noxious emotional stimulus, ignored and disavowed in its more usual form of distress and anger, was converted into something that I would not ignore. That it could be partially blocked by the use of “painkillers” is evidence for the efficacy of the shunting mechanism.
Most, if not all, nonmedical narcotic use works in this manner. These drugs seem to diminish the experience of pain by altering consciousness at many levels of brain function, although more gradually than the on/off switch of fainting. Taken in excess, they certainly will knock one out; used when nothing hurts and one is in a state of pleasant calm, they produce an uncomfortable loss of critical awareness. The majority of our population makes occasional use of alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, marijuana, and a host of other substances in order to ameliorate intense noxious affect.
Once, in 1970, I discussed with philosopher Alan Watts our societal use of drugs. He commented that “chemicals certainly can be a doorway into another realm of consciousness. Unfortunately, for some people the drugs become a revolving door in which they get stuck.” Since street drugs offer only a transient and (at best) a partial solution for the problems caused by otherwise intolerable levels of affect, many people attempt to surmount this obstacle by increasing both the dose of their chosen substance and the frequency at which they use it. The scripts and predicaments of addiction are quite another matter, well beyond the scope of this current book.
There are many other systems of affect avoidance based on the model of dissociation and pain. One, just now receiving the degree of scrutiny it deserves, is the problem of those who have been exposed to so much terror, humiliation, and sexual arousal that they are forced to call upon even more psychological systems. The large group of dissociative disorders, including the florid syndrome called multiple personality disorder, is characterized by alteration in the sense of self as a device for the amelioration of unbearable affect. Essentially, the central assembly decides that, although it can do nothing about the immediate overwhelming situation, it can trick us into believing that it is happening to someone else. Only those who disavow the whole idea of affective overload deny the ubiquity and importance of these terrifying illnesses. Excellent work in this area may be found in the writings of Richard P. Kluft and Frank Putnam.
Other dissociative defenses against intense and enduring affect include immersion in physical activity. Most of us know at least one adult who seems addicted to jogging or some other solitary form of exercise. The simple regularity of the discipline itself acts to induce trance, while the exertion itself is usually maintained at the border of pain. (“No pain, no gain.”) Certainly there are many whose interest in physical fitness is reasonable and healthy. Yet in this current era I suspect that the triad of “sporting goods” stores, exercise facilities, and “sports medicine” clinics offers mute testimony to the lure of physical exercise as an affect-modulation script. When used to reduce intense and abiding shame, these scripts for dissociation form a significant part of the avoidance pole of the compass of shame.
Often we see a macabre reversal of this process, when successful dissociation produces a kind of anesthesia called depersonalization, itself lasting so long that it acts as a trigger for distress and then fear. So painful is the resulting magnification product that people will do literally anything to escape. It has been my experience that patients who injure themselves with repetitive gestures (like cutting their skin with knives or broken glass or burning themselves with cigarettes) do so in an attempt to undo the dissociative state. They cut or burn or pick at themselves until they can feel again, after which they rest or begin to react to the overwhelming affective complex which they had so recently handled by depersonalization. In general, most people seem to prefer physical pain to affect at the level of density we are discussing here.
Let me summarize this section: There are a number of life situations in which affects are piled one on the other, magnifying and intensifying each other, forcing the hapless human to experience emotion at a density, an intensity, and over a duration for which we were not designed. Shame, distress, dissmell, disgust, fear, or anger, magnified to this extent, can be handled like somatic pain. Extrinsic agents and a wide range of psychological systems that alter consciousness are prime among the ways we control affect in the name of pain.
THE PARADIGM OF HUNGER
Whereas the affects are a group of nonspecific amplifiers, capable of adding urgency to anything with which they have been coassembled, the drives are a group of highly specific information sources, each involved with a different bodily need but providing no motivation for its satisfaction. The true function of a drive is to inform the central assembly that some substance is needed or must be transported. Only when the drive garners affective amplification will it become urgent enough that we are motivated to do something about it.
The fact that certain drives most often become associated with one or another affect led previous investigators to assume that the affect “belonged” to or was a derivative of the drive. Hungry babies cry, sexually aroused adults seem excited, wounded animals roar angrily. Yet we can cry for reasons quite unrelated to hunger, just as we become excited for reasons other than sexual arousal and angry when we are not in pain. It is the steadiness of hunger pangs that makes that drive most likely to trigger distress. Likewise, the optimally rising stimulus profile of sexual arousal quite naturally triggers interest–excitement. Chronic pain, because it is often both a steady and an intense noxious stimulus, can trigger affective responses ranging between distress and anger. These three linkages occur with regularity simply because of the mechanisms involved.
Until this moment we have focused entirely on the separateness of drives and affects, ignoring exactly the sort of combinations with which we are most familiar. Until one understands the plasticity of the affect system, and its utter lack of obligatory association with any other bodily function, the old way of seeing emotion tends to pull us away from the more biological view presented here. Nevertheless, there is much to be gained from the study of what happens most often, now that it can be surveyed from this new vantage point.
Take, for instance, the situation that obtains when hunger is quelled by food. Mild degrees of hunger require only small amounts of food, while intense hunger usually reflects a more serious nutritional deficit. Drives are activated by need; yet, despite the mass of food actually needed, the flow of information we call hunger is turned off when the process of satisfying that need has begun. Both the drive and the affect it had triggered are turned off long before the actual deficit has been remedied. Just as the hunger of a small child is turned off by the initiation of consummatory activity, so is the accompanying (amplifying) affect of excitement, distress, or rage. With experience comes knowledge: Food is both relief from hunger and a modulator of distress. We learn from earliest childhood that food is a calming substance, a sedative.
Naturally, the caregiver cannot always guess the cause of the infant’s negative affect; on occasion the child will be offered food when tears have been provoked by stimuli other than hunger. And, on occasion, this proffered food will serve not as satisfaction of a drive-based need, but as an adequate distraction from the actual trigger for distress. Thus it is that we learn to eat when we are not hungry. Whenever consummatory behavior is used in an attempt to wipe away intense and dense affect, it has been engaged to handle affect as if it were drive.
Even though we can be mollified by candy, ice cream, pizza, or junk food of any sort, this approach to the modulation of negative affect contains some inherent defects. Normal hunger, simply because it is triggered by a drive-based program, turns off when consummatory behavior has begun—that is the nature of a drive. But the eating we do when we are not hungry does not have such a protective mechanism. It wasn’t real hunger anyway, and it isn’t turned off until some other switch is activated. For most of us, that button is the feeling of fullness.
Eating behavior is influenced dramatically by its accompanying affects. Newborn babies demonstrate pure drive response. Usually they make known their hunger, suck for a moment or two, then either drop off to sleep or become interested in something else. Not so the adult whose discomfort stems from other causes, and who continues with great intensity to eat until sated. This, of course, is the reason most “reducing diets” fail to make us more than temporarily slim. Intense, distressed people eat intensely, diet intensely, and then return to their normal level of intake without ever learning anything about the affect modulation scripts responsible for their inappropriate hunger.
Enduring distress is not the only affect likely to be handled in this manner. We can overeat, or snack, or gorge for the sake of any negative affect. When frightened at the movies we may reach for the solace of popcorn or candy; consequently, theater owners often rate films in terms of their likelihood to provoke sales of food. It is easy to tell when people are eating out of anger, for the correlative property of innate affect makes them ask for and take food angrily, chew angrily, and end their meals angrily; they are more likely than most to “chew out” a hapless underling.
The trick of eating to diminish intense affect is usually taught as part of a family system of affect modulation scripts; this is another reason it is so difficult to help adults alter their pattern of daily food intake. Often you will see families use shame as a tool for the accomplishment of this goal. It is easy enough to embarrass someone into eating by threatening ostracism, which produces conformity in the attack self mode. One patient, whose bouts of “compulsive eating” proved untreatable until a similar link to shame was uncovered, described the nightly ritual of family dinner: “If you looked up and met anybody’s eyes there was so much shame in the other guy that you would be the immediate target of abuse. So you learned to keep your head down as much as possible and finish your plate. The two of my brothers who are overweight, like me, are the two who are the least likely ever to say anything bad about anybody. And the two of them who are thin are scornful toward everybody; they look around for people to make fun of.”
Shame of great intensity and prolonged duration can trigger distress, just as chronic distress can produce a feeling of helplessness and chronic shame. These two affects commonly form a reciprocating pair, one magnifying the other. If the conditions are right for the addition of fear, which makes us experience shame in the form known as guilt, most of us will define this assemblage as “depression.” This particular combination of affects is seen in the type of depressed patient who seems compelled to eat into oblivion. These people do not eat “because” they are in the throes of shame, guilt, fear, or depression, but because they know no other way of handling affect of such density.
Using the language of his script theory, Tomkins has introduced a new way of explaining such behavior. Simply stated, Tomkins sees some people as developing what he calls deprivation affect, a complex and highly magnified affective state which the individual attributes to the absence of whatever substance or activity has come to bring solace. He gives the name sedative scripts to the actions through which one attempts to reduce the deprivation affect by which the absence of this substance or activity has been made to appear dangerous.
Not infrequently, people become quite upset at the idea that something might interfere with a sedative script. These are times when we worry that we might run out of cigarettes, alcohol, or anything chosen to relieve or reduce deprivation affect. Tomkins calls the affect that accompanies such ideas addictive affect. An addictive act is one taken to prevent or limit addictive affect; this is when we light more than one cigarette at a time so there is no possibility of being without one, drink in order to avoid the way we might feel if we needed a drink and couldn’t find one, horde or earn money to ward off the danger of poverty we will therefore never feel, engineer sexual release so we will not get the kind of nervousness calmed by an orgasm. In the true sedative act, once is enough because the psychological device really works to make us feel better. In addiction, however, one never really achieves sedation because what is being ameliorated is only the dense and terrible affect associated with the idea that we might not have access to our sedative script when we really need it!
When circumstance demands chronic and enduring shame, steady and stable humiliation that must for the sake of some relationship be maintained in the attack self mode, a certain constancy of internal mortification may be produced by self-dissmell and self-disgust. Although you might think that dissmell and disgust would prevent hunger, for this certainly is their physiological function, I have worked with a number of patients who force themselves to eat in order to overcome the noxious experience of these affects. The difference, of course, is that these latter individuals are experiencing something other than innate affect as such. Rather, they are forced into torrential levels of emotion by conditions well beyond their control, by scripts written when they did not have the power of choice and by distortions of neurobiology of which they have no concept.
Again and again in my study of affect I am drawn to the conclusion that all sciences follow some common rules. Affect at its highest realms of magnification is nothing like innate affect. The heat of a nuclear fusion engine, the core of the sun, plasma energy—such forces bear only slight resemblance to the flames with which we heat the kettle for our morning coffee. In like manner, when affect is piled on affect, one magnifying the other continuously, all in the context of a social or interpersonal situation forbidding surcease or solace relevant to the affects really involved, the resulting affect density can be unbearable. Small wonder that the search for relief in the context of such torture leads to consummatory behavior.
More is involved here than the use of foodstuffs. Just as we learn from infancy that food relieves distress as well as hunger, we come to know the pleasure of rewards. It feels good to be given a present, to win a prize, or to feel the power and freedom conferred by earned income. Reward itself can be a shorthand term for healthy pride or for anything that alters the negative affect in a scene by bringing contentment. Any sequence capable of producing a shift from one affect to another can be incorporated into a script. The library of scripts I have characterized as the avoidance pole of the compass of shame contains many systems for the reduction of shame through the induction of pride.
Evidence for the ubiquity of the link between avoidance and consummation may be accumulated from many fields of enquiry. For many years, the American economy has been held at an artificially robust level by consumer debt. The average person purchases goods and services in amounts disproportionate to earned income, enabled by a banking system geared to finance this hunger on the basis of future earnings. Encouraged to disavow the danger of steadily mounting debt, the consumer piles one responsibility on another. An astonishing number of adults work at two jobs in order to maintain a relatively exorbitant style of living made necessary by the decision to purchase what they cannot really afford.
Think, for a moment, about what happens when one or both parents work at this pace. Family, rather than being the locus of our solace—the place where we commune one with the other and allow each other the right to decompress, to reduce affect—becomes merely a pit stop on an endless loop of striving. The economy may be buoyed up by the concept of “fly now, pay later,” but the human lives better in a system of “work now, fly later.” Ignorant of the realities involved in the constant magnification of innate affect, encouraged by market forces to disavow the spiraling cost of debt against which we must mortgage our future, all of us tend to seek out and find devices that provide only brief respite from our understandable discomfort and bind us to an ever-worsening load of affect. Small wonder that ours is a world of tranquilizing substances, objects, and entertainments for which we hunger without understanding.
THE PARADIGM OF SEXUAL AROUSAL
One of the most interesting aspects of the sexual drive program of the generative system is that it provides a script that works unlike anything else in our lives. Most of our innate mechanisms are designed for brief temporal contours—they call us to action, after which their signal is diminished. But sexual action is an analogue of arousal—it is meant to be increased.
In practical terms, once aroused we are unlikely to become comfortable until arousal has been increased to its built-in breaking point. From kindling to explosion to contentment, the events involved in sexuality offer a form of tranquilization equaled by few other human experiences. Sexual activity, whether solitary in the form of masturbation or in some pattern of interpersonal behavior, can provide a wonderfully effective way of distracting us from negative affect. Although for moral reasons we prefer to discuss sexuality in its idealized context of love, marriage, and procreation, in the normatively socialized human the overwhelming majority of individual sexual encounters has more to do with affect modulation.
Initially, of course, the drive itself provokes us to touch what has become inflamed. A glowing ember that we learn to fan into a roaring fire, increasing sexual arousal provides sensory data of steadily rising gradient—capable therefore of triggering either excitement or fear. In this current era of graphic sexual imagery and universal discussion, few children grow into adolescence ignorant of the connection between stimulation and orgasm. Yet I suspect that in an earlier, more private and reserved epoch, boys were frightened of their first ejaculations, and girls often apprehensive about the rising tide of arousal as well as the overwhelming experience of orgasm. Most of us, however, do learn about our sexual system and take control of it for our own pleasure.
Shame affect, the painful analogic amplifier of any impediment to ongoing pleasure, is more likely to humble sexual arousal than is any other psychological function. Embedded in moral philosophy, shame has for centuries been used to reduce our proclivity toward free access to sexuality. One might think, therefore, that shame is only associated with reductions in sexuality. Actually, sexual ardor is cut down by shame affect only when bundled into the withdrawal scripts of the compass of shame. Shame as deference, submission, or masochism characterizes the attack self pole of the compass; as rape and the sexual exploitation of children it powers a significant part of the attack other pole; also does it power a significant fraction of scripts in the avoidance library. In each circumstance, orgiastic behavior is used in sedative or addictive scripts to blow away whatever noxious affect had previously held sway.
Just as the built-in systems that have evolved for pain and hunger give us imperfect but useful hedges against intense and enduring negative affect, sexual arousal, too, can make us feel good when everything else is simply awful. In this, of course, it is more like a painkiller than anything else. Remember that we are describing people (ourselves, some of the time; some people most of the time) whose affective baseline has been pushed far above the theoretical null point that we would call the neutral state of no affect.
These are adults whose inner lives are the screaming face of an Edvard Munch painting, the hell of Picasso’s Guernica, the nightmarish agitation of Leonard Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety. These are the tortured men who sought surcease in the bath houses that served as homosexual brothels but died horribly of AIDS. This is the doomed heroine of the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, whose last masochistic sexual fling brings her death at the hands of an equally overloaded marauding lover. Whoever among us who has not resorted to sexual intercourse or masturbation for the simple goal of tension reduction is more than likely afflicted with crippling shame or some biological anomaly. Not to try, not to test the system, is foolish; to live as though there were no other route to solace is deadly.
Simply because we have had until now little or no language for intense emotional experience, many otherwise sober clinicians have begun to express their desperation at the breadth and severity of the individual and societal problems created by this use of sexuality in sedative or addictive affect control scripts. Resorting to a technique based on dissmell and disgust, placing the sexual paradigm in a special category of self- and other-abuse, they have attempted to limit such behavior through attitudes redolent of 19th-century moral suasion. I have interviewed quite a number of patients treated in this manner. Each told me that he or she suffered from some form of sexual disorder caused by shame; in each all sexual behavior had been restricted intentionally by therapist-induced shame, self-disgust, self-dissmell, and guilt. At no time was attention paid to the nature of their internal emotional state; that sex was being used for a nonsexual purpose came to each as a not-unpleasant surprise. To inform someone that he or she is a “sexual addict” is merely shaming and frightening unless addiction has been defined in terms of affect modulation.
Just as the mechanism of dissociation can be used when there is no physical pain, and the system of consummation allow us to purchase inedible objects when there is no hunger, the sexual drive program can be mimicked by gestures that have nothing at all to do with the sex organs. The sexual paradigm for the modulation of intense and enduring affect is at work whenever people pick a fight in order to “clear the air” or make things worse in hope that they will get better afterwards. The sequence of events—intense negative affect, intentional magnification until the trigger for some action program is reached, an explosion of violent behavior, and quietus—is itself an analogue of sexual expression.
Such analogues of sexual release are so common in our society that this system of affect modulation deserves elaboration at book length rather than the sketchy treatment I can afford it here. Explosive relief is built into much of our system of public entertainment, which has always functioned as a modulator of civil “tension.”
It is for this reason that gangster movies, with all their conventions of cruelty, sadism, violence, and antisocial behavior, have been popular for so long. Every few years another form of filmic explosion is developed, all part of the genre known as “sex and violence.” One of the conventions of filmland requires that the underlying affective state of the protagonist be left as mysterious as possible. We, as audience, neither know nor care why the protagonist is explosive. This makes it easier for us to identify with the character’s hedonistic, violent, explosive, or destructive actions, as well as the incorporation of these acts into sedative and addictive scripts.
Whereas once the world of athletic competition favored the attributes of endurance, discipline, and skill, now attention and praise are heaped on those who are most likely to explode. Watch the television theater of professional wrestling. The announcers are truculent and explosive, the performers violent and frankly contemptuous of their opponents. Whips, chains, masks, costumes suggestive of extreme dangerousness—all this is commonplace and expected. The audience participates by screaming its pleasure and displeasure, an integral part of this choreographed explosion.
Television commercials, popular songs, and video performances also promote the system of affective magnification leading toward explosive behavior. When was the last time you saw a movie chase scene that did not cause at least one accident? The culture of machismo (characterized by the downgrading of shame, distress, and fear in favor of excitement and anger) requires ever-new and different forms of explosion in order to produce its mild and momentary decreases in an already intolerably magnified affective state.
Much recent attention has been paid the group of affect management scripts called “eating disorders.” Those who suffer from anorexia nervosa limit their intake of food, in part to avoid the roundness they associate with somehow humiliating sexual maturity. Others will act as if ravenously hungry—forcing themselves to eat until they feel so stuffed that not another morsel could fit inside them—after which they induce vomiting; this latter pattern is known as bulimia. Anorexia may be understood as a method of affect management in which distress and shame are handled by techniques learned in the management of hunger, while the explosive quality of bulimia more resembles the calm-inducing system I characterize as sexual explosiveness. Forced vomiting produces shame, self-disgust, and self-dissmell, which may be one of the reasons that those who use bulimia as a sedative or an addictive script tend to withdraw afterwards. These concepts have proved quite useful in the treatment of those whose use of such scripts brings them to medical attention.
There are other problems associated with our chronic disavowal of dense and enduring affect. We live in a world that requires ever more intense attention to detail, vigilance while driving our automobiles lest the other guy use us as an excuse for explosion, harder and harder work over longer and longer hours in order to meet the payments for purchases meant as anodynes for our chronic mental pain. And we do come to need painkillers. Fatigued and drained, the more we live at the upper reaches of affective experience, the more we are forced to experience the physical aspects of affect. Not only does high-density affect cause “emotional” imbalance, but it causes so much activity at the sites of action from which we come to know affect that we begin to experience it as a somatic event. Worse yet, we fool ourselves into believing that the next round of affect triggered in this recursive process is a “reasonable” response to somatic illness rather than a manifestation of a much larger system.
Often it is precisely those people who suffer the most from “panic disorder,” “cardiac neurosis,” “depression,” or psychosomatic gastrointestinal disorders like “irritable bowel syndrome” and “spastic colitis” who know the least about their emotions. Shame, at this level of intensity, often is experienced as bodily weakness, fatigue, dullness of thought, depression. Experiencing only persistent and highly magnified symptoms at the varied sites of action we understand as signs of affect, such patients come to us for relief of what they fear are deadly somatic diseases. Not infrequently they use caffeine, alcohol, chocolate, nicotine, headache remedies, fad diets, and any available nostrum in order to achieve some degree of relief.
ON COMPLEXITY
Every few years some expert comes along, presenting experimental data from which is derived a new theory for all human woe. Suddenly fashionable, this idea is found appealing by an audience hungry for simplicity; the perpetrator is lionized by the broadcast and print media, while envious colleagues grab headlines by suggesting or denying that the theory merits prizes of great financial and social value. Immense numbers of people are exposed to the treatments implied by the new theory; many of them actually prosper. Yet very few of those who profit from the new approach experience anything so dramatic as the cures promised by the early enthusiasm surrounding its initial presentation.
Always in our civilization there has been a persistent split between the mind of the alchemist and the attitude of the philosopher. Popular through the Middle Ages well into the 16th century, alchemy refers to “the pursuit of the transmutation of baser metals into gold, which (with the search for the alkahest or universal solvent, and the panacea or universal remedy) constituted the chief practical object of early chemistry.”† Science (and journalism, too) is peopled by humans with their own affect modulation scripts. One of the most seductive scripts involves the wish for simplicity. Despite the evidence presented by a lifetime of immersion in an increasingly complex world, we still hunger for simple and clear-cut rules that will make everything different by removing both uncertainty and negative affect. Instinctively we shun the philosopher who shows us the truth of complexity.
Like it or not, the human condition is multideterminate. The impatient swordsman offering to cut rather than unravel the Gordian Knot threatens us with the immense power of his weapon.
In this chapter I have attempted to show that extraordinarily dense human affect is by nature immutably complex, far more complex than can be accepted by most of those who study it. Directly proportional to the density of affect seen in an individual will be the complexity of the scripts that have produced it. Social forces are important, but they are not the one true key to understanding. Neurotransmitters, drives, affects, and prewritten habit patterns are important, but we are more than the sum of our parts. Neocortical cognition is important, but, notwithstanding the yearning of 19th-century rationalism, it too is biological and cannot be separated from the biological field from which it evolved. Whoever wishes to help guide humans along their best paths toward their highest goals must learn all of these systems.
*I have discussed this mechanism at some length in Nathanson (1988).
†Oxford English Dictionary