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| Thursday, August 28, 2008 |
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“Despite our view of ourselves as thinking beings, cognition is but a frail craft floating on a sea of emotion. ”
-Donald L. Nathanson, M.D.
What is your reaction to these words? It’s hard for most of us to believe that we spend much of our lives under the sway of our mercurial emotions.
Nathanson, a Philadelphia psychiatrist, wrote the words above in his book ''Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and The Birth of the Self.'' He went on to say:
''Many of us treat emotion as merely something that interferes with thinking. We demean arguments by calling them emotional, discredit people who seem emotionally involved in whatever bothers them, trust feelings less than cognition...[We even have] code words that allow us to pretend we are talking about thinking rather than feeling. Rather than admit that our concern is emotional, we will say, ''I have a problem with that,'' or ''Don’t bother me with such ideas,'' or ''That upsets me.''
We want fervently to believe that our reasoned thinking prevails. Yet the evidence is to the contrary.
As we learn more and more through neuroscience and brain research, we are coming to understand that our biology has us hardwired with a set of emotions that irrefutably require our attention. Just as pain, hunger, fatigue, and thirst give us information that mobilizes us to some action on our own behalf, so do our emotions give us important information about our world – internally and externally.
Visitors to this site come from all over the world -- Norway, Taiwan, Mexico, Iran, Poland, the U.S., Venezuela, South Africa, China and others. In spite of our varied cultural influences we share the same physiology, biology and humanity. We also share the same innate set of emotions, present from our infancy. We are endowed with the emotions of interest, enjoyment, surprise, anger, fear, distress, disgust, dissmell and shame.
Our emotions, anywhere along the continuum from mild to extreme, can seize our attention and freeze our thinking. These emotions can be complex, terrible, punishing, rewarding or inspiring. They can bring us to our knees, push us to acts of aggression, or inspire us to kindly acts of the sainted. But, most importantly, our emotions make us care about something – our emotions get our attention and give us information – if we can allow them to do so.
Across cultures we also face the intense complexity of living in this world. War, terror, technology, too much media stimulation give us an overload of sights, sounds and information. We have limited human capacity to process everything that comes at us. Swamped with the intense complexity of this life, we’re not sure where to find a blueprint for living with any simplicity in this era. Yet, the blueprint resides in our powerful system of emotions.
With the emergence of an emotion exists the potential for clarity of a personal truth. If we can tolerate the emerging emotion, without avoiding, impeding or numbing it, that emotion has the ability to illuminate the intense simplicity of a new awareness. Acting on that awareness we have new information to create, problem-solve, and connect.
For example, when the neural program for the emotion of surprise – the ''reset'' button of our emotions - is activated in your brain you immediately shift your attention to the source of that surprise. It may be pleasant – a call from a distant friend. It may be negative – your tire just blew out while driving on the freeway. In each case there is a call to shift your resources, time and attention to a new situation. You turn off the TV to focus on your phone call and enhance your enjoyment in the conversation. You pull to the side of the road and call for assistance and safety.
Silvan S. Tomkins, an original thinker and theorist identified and elaborated the nine basic emotions in four pioneering volumes of writing titled ''Affect Imagery and Consciousness.'' His comprehensive Affect and Script Theory is a guide for beginning to understand how our brains are wired from birth to respond with the appropriate emotion.
Though by no means exhaustive, the writing in the columns archived here reflect some of Tomkins’s thinking about emotion. If you take one thing away from this site, may it be a new interest in the emotions that inform human creativity, pain, conflict and connection.
All the best, Jennifer
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