Archive for category: #Sensuousness #Feeling #Suffering #Emotion

Insider Brief: Scientists from Trinity College Dublin claim our brains could use quantum computation. The discovery —published in the Journal of Physics Communications —  comes after they adapted an idea developed to prove the existence of quantum gravity to explore the human brain and its workings. If the team’s results can be confirmed, they would enhance […]

If you’re feeling anxious about climate change, the common wisdom goes, there’s an antidote: Take action. Maybe you can alleviate your worries by doing something positive, like going to a protest, becoming an advocate for mass transit, or trying to get an environmental champion elected.

New research reveals that these anxieties are not just Western concerns — they’re common among young people on nearly every continent — but that the ability to do something about them depends on where you live. “The question is whether you have the opportunity or not to engage in those behaviors,” said Charles Ogunbode, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, takes the broadest look yet at climate anxiety around the globe. Ogunbode and researchers all over the world surveyed more than 10,000 university students in 32 countries, asking how climate change made them feel. They found that it was hurting people’s mental health virtually everywhere, from Brazil to Uganda, Portugal to the Philippines. 

Almost half of the young people surveyed said they were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. Nearly a quarter felt “terrified,” and even more felt either “very” or “extremely” anxious. Previous research has suggested that climate anxiety is widespread: Last year, a survey in 11 countries around the world found that 45 percent of teens and young adults said that climate anxiety was affecting their daily lives and ability to function.

“Climate anxiety” has become a catch-all for how worries about our overheating planet affect people’s mental health. Experts say that feeling grief, fear, and anxiety is a logical response to the catastrophic situation. But some researchers have argued that the phrase “climate anxiety” is ambiguous — a buzzword, not a clinical diagnosis — and that it tends to resonate more with white and wealthy people than those experiencing the most severe effects of climate disasters. 

While the study didn’t look at how people respond to the phrase itself, the results show that it’s not just those in wealthier countries like the United States who are wrestling with tough emotions as a result of climate change. Ogunbode thinks developing countries should play a bigger part in the conversation, since the link between emotions and mental health is “just as strong” as it is in rich countries.

“We very rarely find anyone talking about how people in Ghana or the Philippines feel about climate change,” he said. “It’s almost like, ‘Look, as long as we can provide the basic stuff — people can eat, they have a place to sleep, they have water — that’s it. That’s fine.’”

The new study found that across the board, people’s concerns about climate change motivated them to want to take action. But anxiety played a role in motivating people to adopt environmentally-friendly behaviors, especially in richer, more individualistic countries — places where people are more likely to fly carbon-guzzling planes or drive large cars for small trips.

The most apparent barriers to direct action were political. It’s not as easy to protest climate change in a country that doesn’t protect the right to free speech or demonstrations. People worrying about the climate were more likely to engage in demonstrations in just under half of the countries studied, most of them in Europe. The connection was the strongest in Finland, one of the world’s most democratic countries, and the weakest in China, among the world’s least.

In three-quarters of the countries studied, climate anxiety appears to lead to eco-friendly behaviors — avoiding food waste, for instance, or walking and biking instead of driving. The exceptions were Egypt, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, and Tanzania.

In some places, people don’t have access to much information about what kind of actions are effective, Ogunbode said. Looking at open-ended responses to the survey, people in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia indicated that the survey questions themselves — about saving energy and reducing waste — had provided them with new information, Ogunbode said. “I got the sense that a lot of people only realized when they were reading through the questions, ‘Oh, maybe there’s something I can be doing.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: Climate anxiety is spreading all over the planet on Oct 17, 2022.

World-renowned physician Gabor Maté’s new book examines the profound physical and psychological harms of “normal” capitalist society, which makes a small minority very well-off while sowing illness and despair on a vast scale.

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Gabor Mate, the renowned Vancouver doctor in Toronto, 2009. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Dr Gabor Maté is a world-renowned author and physician, best known for his work on trauma, addiction, and childhood development. His books bring together science, myth, case studies, and his own personal history — from his beginnings in Nazi-occupied Budapest to his participation in the radical student movements of the 1960s to his experience working with drug addiction and mental illness in Vancouver’s most distressed communities. Gabor’s perspective on medicine is dialectical and holistic, emphasizing the social as much as the individual when considering disease and dysfunction.

His latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, is cowritten with his son Daniel Maté, a musical theater playwright based in New York City. In it the Matés examine the profound physical and psychological harms of “normal” capitalist society, shattering the myths of a system that makes a small minority very well-off while sowing illness and despair on a vast scale.

In this interview, Gabor and Daniel speak with American psychotherapist Chandler Dandridge about their new book, capitalism’s ability to absorb challenges and resist change, the trauma of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 defeat, the genius of Michael Brooks, and finding ways to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the political.

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Chandler Dandridge

Your book explicitly identifies capitalism as the source of the “toxic culture” referenced in the book’s subtitle. What myths of capitalism contribute to this toxic culture?

Gabor Maté

Well, first of all the myth of freedom. People believe they’re living in a free society but in fact they have very little actual authority over their lives. Authority is exercised in significant areas by a small elite, which Marx would have called the ruling class. That’s true when it comes to the control of information, and obviously to the economy. The decisions that affect people’s lives are all made not for their own benefit but for the purpose of profit. And they are made by very few people under the guise of what’s called a free society.

The decisions that affect people’s lives are all made not for their own benefit but for the purpose of profit.

The second myth is capitalism’s essential assumption about human nature — that we are fundamentally selfish, individualistic, aggressive, and competitive. It’s false. It goes quite contrary to what we know about human evolution and genuine human needs.

Then there’s the impact of racism, which capitalism has done so much to invent. And I don’t mean a conspiracy here — it happened largely organically. The more you can divide people, the more people see other people as their enemies, the less they can see who’s actually pulling the strings. So that for the white American working class to believe about immigrants and blacks, “If only they weren’t so uppity, if they only weren’t so demanding, we wouldn’t be threatened.” It’s a myth. But it’s a very helpful myth from the perspective of diverting people’s attention from the real source of the problems.

Daniel Maté

The birth of race theory coincides with colonialism and plunder of foreign lands. If you’re the British Empire — or the Dutch or the Spanish or the French — and you want to rationalize and justify a system whose entire mode of operation is to travel the seven seas and pillage, kill, rape, plunder and extract, it’s helpful to have a view of other people as subordinate to you genetically, spiritually, and morally. So the system invents ideology to underwrite its own chosen commitments and activities, and then normalizes that ideology.

Consuming is not the same as nourishing or feeding. And ballooning outward growth is not the same thing as developing in a healthy way.

In addition to what my dad said, I think there are attendant sub-myths of capitalism, including some of the core concepts that are just taken as given in any economics course or New York Times op-ed. Growth, consumption — think about these words. Growth is the aim. And what does growth mean? Growth means a mushrooming proliferation of a certain economic metric called the GDP. And what’s that connected to? Consumption, which is just people buying stuff and then consuming stuff. But consuming is not the same as nourishing or feeding. And ballooning outward growth is not the same thing as developing in a healthy way. These sort of distortions of possibly healthy ideas become the ideological tenets of a system that’s bent on its own perpetuation.

Chandler Dandridge

You all mention a couple of times in the book that myths can serve a healthy purpose. What might that look like?

Daniel Maté

I think we have to understand myth in the old sense of the word. The way we use myth in the title is the way most people in this society use the word myth: to mean fabrication, falsehood, old wives’ tale, or urban legend. But legends and myths have been a bedrock of the human experience and part of the way we’ve made meaning out of a very complicated, chaotic world ever since we arrived on the scene. We’re mythmaking machines, and it has had a very positive effect on many cultures.

If you look at the way this book is trying to encourage people to think about things like health and illness, it is presenting it in a more mythic framework, in that everything has meaning. There’s metaphor in everything. Everything is connected. Everything is for some kind of purpose. Everything is tied to some kind of journey that the soul is on — trying to reunite itself with itself, to come out of illusion into clarity. All of these things are mythic archetypes.

And if you look at any of the people in the book whose healing stories are told, they found some mythic connection between them and the natural world, between their earliest wounds and their deepest gifts. You could put any of these in a well-written Hollywood movie or a great novel, and they’d be very compelling. So I think it’s not a coincidence that toward the end of the book we remind people that myth has its place.

Chandler Dandridge

In the book, you write about Gabor’s medical training, which insisted on viewing illness as a strictly individual phenomenon. What would medical training look like under a new, more collective social system?

Gabor Maté

First of all it would teach the science, which is not even vaguely controversial, in regards to mind-body unity. It would stop separating people’s emotional lives from their physiology. And teach that emotional life and physiology are affected by external circumstances, such that it’s futile and foolish to speak of the individual organism as an isolated entity. In other words, imagine if we actually followed the science for a change rather than just following prejudice or entrenched habit or—

Daniel Maté

Ideology.

Gabor Maté

Or ideology. The second thing it would do is actually train doctors to take care of their own traumas and stresses rather than to ignore them, rather than to suck it up and to keep going in order to get ahead in the system. And then, of course, there’d be trauma education to the extent that the science demands it, which is a high degree of necessity. We would teach doctors about trauma. Not that they all need to be trauma specialists, but they should all be aware of it.

And then, of course, the question becomes: How do we organize health care? Do we organize it on a piecework basis so that every patient is like a widget that you turn out in as short a time as possible? Is that the kind of medical system we want? Any medical system predicated on profit is going to demand a certain kind of practice from its participants, from the people that serve it. Any research system that is largely fueled by the profits of the pharmaceutical companies will churn out certain kinds of information and ignore other subjects. A new system would require a vast change in approach. Not to mention there’d be far more attention paid to the sense of agency and participation of the patient themselves, and far more listening to their experience.

Daniel Maté

All kinds of luminaries throughout the years have made observations, whether intuitively or based on evidence and observation and some hard research, that point to the mind-body unity, the link between emotions and health, the link between biography and biology. These figures include William Osler in Canada in the nineteenth century, Soma Weiss who was a Harvard researcher in the early twentieth century. But it all just went down the medical memory hole.

There are certain human needs that are not negotiable. We can’t negotiate them away. We can give up on them, but then we suffer when we do.

How would [Noam] Chomsky explain that? Well, there’s an ideological apparatus that filters out certain kinds of evidence that don’t fit the system. And so the antidote, as Chomsky recommended — you can tell I’m excited to be speaking to Jacobin — is a course of intellectual self-defense.

I think what this book in some ways is advocating is for patients to marshal their own resources and go into the system knowing what the system’s good for and what the system’s not so good for. Insist as much as you can on having that agency. Be aware that your doctor may not know to ask certain questions. Be hip to the tricks of a system that actually has been concertedly, assiduously, and at this point almost deliberately ignoring very solid evidence that points in a more mind-body, holistic direction for a long time.

Chandler Dandridge

That makes me think of the bit in the book where you talk about healing as a return to wholeness — a kind of self-retrieval, not self-improvement. I’m wondering what that looks like in a personal context, but also a political one.

Gabor Maté

You know, a lot of Aboriginal peoples talk about soul retrieval. It’s like we lose our souls at some point and we have to try to get them back. Well, that’s what I see as the journey toward wholeness. In a personal sense it means being in touch with one’s body and one’s feelings, and not ignoring them for the sake of being accepted or approved of by others.

In a social sense we have really lost the way. There are certain human needs that are not negotiable. We can’t negotiate them away. We can give up on them, but then we suffer when we do. When they’re not met, there’s going to be suffering and ill health in every sense of the word. They include having a purpose in life, having agency and authority in one’s own life, and being connected to other people. Meeting all of these needs is required for full health, full wholeness. On a social level, that means that all the institutions and political structures and ideologies that undermine those qualities need to be either jettisoned or transformed.

Daniel Maté

Alongside that, there’s the need to be woke in the original and I think more useful sense of the word, as in aware of the ways that those systems will present simulacra of those needs in place of the real ones and sell them to us. Name any human need that’s genuine and nourishing — agency, connection, contact, fulfillment, happiness, aliveness — and the system we’re living under has a Soylent Green version of it.

If you actually look around the culture at people acting out in various ways, everyone’s just coping. Everyone’s just trying to find some sense of agency, pride, belonging, tribe — these things that in a sane society, in a healthy world, we would actually all have access to in a sustainable way that doesn’t pit us against each other.

Soul retrieval is a collective process. One aspect would be to look around and see how hungry everyone is for it and to get with the program. As we say in the book, healing naturally wants to happen. Human beings are naturally trying to get back to some kind of spiritual homeostasis, and a physical one too. We just have to recognize the signs and recognize the opportunities when they come.

Everyone’s just trying to find some sense of agency, pride, belonging, tribe — these things that in a sane society, in a healthy world, we would actually all have access to in a sustainable way that doesn’t pit us against each other.

For a lot of us, the Bernie campaign, especially the last one, held out a vision of a future where these needs are actually provided for — or at least not actively frustrated by the system. What happened happened, and there are plenty of ways to analyze that. But it was amazing to just look around and see how hungry everybody is for it, and see what it would be like to not contribute to the further division and polarization which just pits us against each other to the system’s profit.

Chandler Dandridge

I want to stay with the Bernie campaign for a minute. Was Bernie’s 2020 campaign defeat traumatic? And how should the Left internalize that trauma to heal from it?

Gabor Maté

Nothing in itself is traumatic. It depends on who it happens to and how they process it. So for some people the demise of the Bernie effort in 2020 could have left them more despairing and constricted, with less sense of agency and possibility — in which case you might say that’s a sort of political trauma. For others, it could have just been instructive about what works and what doesn’t work, and how to move forward by absorbing some of the lessons of that particular setback. Whether it was traumatic or not depends on who’s experiencing it and how they process it.

Daniel Maté

As someone who is much more plugged in to the terminally online left than my dad is, what I have observed is that functionally, collectively, it has been extremely traumatic — and I’m not just talking about individuals, but to the sense of a cohesive, emergent, democratic socialist left with a positive vision. And it almost happened immediately. When it all collapsed, there was a moment of grief and then everyone scrambled for their corners. And you see it in the fracturing of alliances between various media figures, podcasters, YouTube hosts. I mean, in a sense it’s so silly and superficial, but it’s become very rancorous.

People don’t speak to each other anymore. Everyone has now re-siloed themselves in various corners and everyone has their own brand. That sense of a unifying, organizing thread and a vision that everyone could coalesce around has receded. Which doesn’t mean it can never come back, but I do think it’s fractured. The defeat exposed the existing fault lines and exacerbated them. So what’s going to be needed is for some kind of healing to happen, and people to get off it and get back to something positive, because it’s just sad to see how much energy goes into smearing, slandering, and smashing like buttons.

Gabor Maté

As for me personally, it wasn’t traumatic because it was only what I expected. I don’t expect capitalism to allow anybody to vote it out of existence. Nor did Bernie Sanders even come close to threatening to do so. But he was enough of a threat that it was inevitable that within the structures of what are called democratic politics — not just Democratic in a big D sense, but in a broader sense — he was going to be marginalized. He was not going to win. I mean, that’s just obvious. And anybody who was disappointed simply was living in a dream world as far as I’m concerned.

Chandler Dandridge

The folly of youth?

Daniel Maté

He did tell me so. He did tell me so.

Chandler Dandridge

You cite Greta Thunberg as a source of inspiration in the book. Do you think the politics of the younger generation, growing up in the chaotic first two decades of this century, offer some hope for the future?

Gabor Maté

Look, when I was a student radical in the ’60s, the older progressives were saying that we were the hope for the future. There’s always a tendency to look at the younger generation as somehow they’re the ones who are going to do it. It’s not that simple. You don’t hear much about Greta Thunberg anymore, you know?

Chandler Dandridge

No, you don’t.

Gabor Maté

You don’t. And Greta Thunberg was not the first. I quote in the book Severn Cullis-Suzuki whose name you probably don’t even know. But she made a speech in the 1992 UN climate conference in South America. She was twelve years old, bright, articulate, hyperarticulate, very emotionally present, but also very passionate. And she spoke almost exactly in the same words that Greta speaks in now about climate change. And she made a big international sensation as young, attractive, and articulate women will always do. Where’s that today? Nowhere.

We cannot by ourselves turn the wheel of history. We can contribute. And what I’m hoping people will get from the book is the awareness that it’s not only possible to contribute, but it’s also the best thing anybody can do.

This system has the capacity to absorb and to withstand these challenges. So, no, I don’t think it’s a matter of generations. I think it’s a matter of social transformation on a broad scale, a process in which the younger generation will play a role. But I don’t think we can do this willfully. You don’t transform the system just because you decide to. Systemic transformations happen. They’re a historical movement of their own. The challenge is: at whatever stage we are at, what are we going to do? Are we going to act, and are we going to persist? We cannot by ourselves turn the wheel of history. That’s beyond the will of any particular generation or any particular group. We can contribute. And what I’m hoping people will get from the book is the awareness that it’s not only possible to contribute, but it’s also the best thing anybody can do. The rest of it is not necessarily in our hands.

Daniel Maté

I might add two things. Number one, one of the facets of the toxicity of our culture is the way generations are split and alienated from each other. No healthy culture would have such generation gaps where one generation can’t speak the language of the next one, and where we’re presumed to have nothing to learn from each other in either direction. Elders used to be the key wisdom transmission and cultural transmission device. Now we don’t have elders, we have the elderly. Pushing against intergenerational alienation is a key part of bringing the world back together. You see it in healthy political movements. The old guard and the new guard have something to say to each other.

The other thing I’d add is that even though I agree with my dad that some romantic notion that the young will save us is misguided, I do think that each generation born in a particular time has certain gifts they can bring. They have certain unique challenges, too. But this generation? I mean, I’m Gen X, I thought we were jaded. This generation coming of age now is under no illusions that somehow they’re going to inherit a world that’s more prosperous than that of their parents. And that disillusionment as a default posture could also be a superpower. They could use their lived experience to hone a kind of jaundiced view of propaganda and supposed normalcy, which could help them build. However, there’s also the risk of paralysis, nihilism, despair, resignation, and hedonism, and all of the escapes from the pain of that. There are gifts and opportunities in every moment, and also real dangers. I don’t think the dangers have ever been higher.

Chandler Dandridge

I was thrilled to see you quote the late, great left-wing commentator and regular Jacobin contributor Michael Brooks in the book while writing about bridging the spiritual with the political. Could you talk about what Michael meant to you?

Daniel Maté

I met Michael Brooks at a Harvard event and he was so warm and friendly. Watching his show, you really got a sense of heart purpose. There’s a lot of YouTube shows of people being smart or being funny or being right about stuff. But with Michael there was a kind of heart emanation in terms of why he was doing what he was doing.

He was not a pie-in-the-sky guy. He could break down the toxicities in the system like no one else. He had a great analytical mind. But there was a positive energy to him that I think exemplified what in the Jewish tradition is called tikkun olam, to repair the world, as a kind of calling, a reason to do politics or political media.

When he died, I really felt it. So many of us really felt it. Like a real bright light had gone out, because the default is to be jaded and to not be openhearted like that. And so when I heard Lisha, his sister, quote him I just was like, well, that’s what it’s all about. The fact that it came from a political media guy — I mean it could have come from Thich Nhat Hanh. Michael Brooks was someone who I think showed us that those two spheres are best intimately overlapped, not kept separate. The inner and the outer.

Chandler Dandridge

As a psychotherapist I am deeply interested in reconciling the self with the social. Gabor, you write very personally about your own healing in this book. How has your own healing enhanced your political life? Is this dialectic important?

Gabor Maté

On the Left it’s very important. My political views really haven’t changed much since I was a student radical in the ’60s. I’ve become more sophisticated and nuanced, perhaps, but the old broad outlines of how I see the system haven’t changed. What I didn’t like then, I don’t like now, the Vietnam War being the previous iteration of Afghanistan or Iraq or Gaza or any number of atrocities. But the emotional fervor I put into it, which I always thought was justified by the cause, in fact came from unresolved rage in myself that had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with unresolved trauma. And to the extent that this rage and hostility infused my speaking, it made my speaking all the less effective when it came to trying to convince anybody who didn’t already see my way.

Both the Left and the Right have got these traumatic imprints that they enact. The Right very often consists of abused people who identify with power so they’ll never be hurt again. That’s basically it. You know, like a [Donald] Trump. Big Daddy will protect me so that I’ll never be hurt again, like I was hurt by my real daddy. And they hate vulnerability. They attack vulnerable people because they hate their own vulnerability. So that’s the thumbnail traumatic imprint of people on the Right very often.

People on the Left, on the other hand, also suffered in their childhoods, and they take that anger that’s not resolved in them and they project it into the politics, which makes them not very tolerant and much less effective. When they talk to people who just don’t see it their way, who are not aware or maybe more ignorant, or not in touch with the real issues, there’s a tendency to speak in a very hostile and very demeaning way. That’s unresolved trauma on the part of the people coming from the Left, as it was in my case. Self work, particularly for people who want to make a difference, is really important. To the degree that people don’t do it, they might attract some followers with a certain degree of charisma, but they will not convince anybody that doesn’t already see it their way.

Daniel Maté

And let’s not let the center off the hook, because they’re damaged as hell, too. They’re the kids who just want mommy and daddy to get along. Don’t rock the boat. There’s a whole layer of trauma that you can see in so-called centrism these days that can be very blind to the genuine complaints and grievances of either side.

Gabor Maté

I don’t know what the hell center means anymore, but the fact is, a lot of people are in denial of reality. And the propensity to deny reality comes from painful experience.

Chandler Dandridge

Well, I want to thank you all and wish you the best. And Gabor, I can tell you, as a psychotherapist, that your book on addiction completely changed the clinical game for addiction treatment. I hope that this book does the same on a wider cultural scale.

Gabor Maté

Thank you. Listen, can I ask you a question?

Chandler Dandridge

Yeah, what’s up?

Gabor Maté

And I’ve always asked this. Did you like this book as a read?

Chandler Dandridge

Of course, Gabor. It’s a great read.

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Alfred Adler was ahead of his time in centering what he called “social interest” in his psychological theories. His approach sought to combat shame and alienation and encourage concern for the common good — a psychological application of his socialist values.

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Austrian physician and psychotherapist Alfred Adler (1870–1937) emphasized the importance of social interest for the healthy individual. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

It’s a sunny spring day in 1909 at the Stadtpark in Vienna. Leon Trotsky, fresh off another jailbreak, kicks a soccer ball toward his kids and waves back at his wife, who’s sprawled beneath a maple tree on a picnic blanket with another couple. Trotsky waltzes over and chats with his friend, one of the most renowned psychoanalysts in all of Vienna. No, not Sigmund Freud — the man with Trotsky would actually be expelled from Freud’s inner circle two years later. But while he’s less remembered today, he remained highly influential on an international scale for decades, his ideas taking center stage during the city’s interwar socialist period known as Red Vienna. This man was Alfred Adler.

Adler’s break with Freud in 1911 was a long time coming. He had joined Freud’s famous Wednesday Psychological Society at its inception in 1902, but over the course of the next decade, the two men’s thought diverged. Adler had entered the group already a socialist, and his political views shaped his psychological thought. Freud, meanwhile, preferred to keep politics out of the clinic. Because of Adler’s early involvement in the group and his widely recognized clinical skill, he felt empowered to challenge Freud. But Freud found the challenge increasingly frustrating, and eventually the group dynamic became untenable.

Adler entered the Viennese stage in 1898, with his first professional publication at the age of twenty-eight. His Health Book for the Tailor Trade aimed “to describe the connection between the economic condition of a trade and its disease, and the dangers for public health of a lowered standard of living.” Adler outlined the diseases common to Viennese tailors, their etiologies, their psychological impacts, and the potential of various reforms to improve workers’ lives. He examined how industrialization had changed the tailor trade and argued in favor of robust government regulation to improve conditions and rights for workers. At the start of his career, Adler was already emphasizing the social aspect of disease and advocating for a more preventative type of medicine, both biologically and socially.

This would become the basis of Freud and Adler’s conflict. Freud found Adler’s emphasis on the way social forces shape the psyche unconvincing and regressive. Adler first articulated his idea somewhat crudely by way of what he initially called the “aggression drive,” a socially situated drive that, in his view, was totally separate from Freud’s famous “sexual drive,” or libido. Freud initially tolerated this variant view, but within a few years began to openly reject Adler’s thinking in the group and insist upon the primacy of the sexual drive. Later, after living through the horrors of World War I, Freud would develop his concept of the “death drive,” a drive altogether separate from libido and strikingly similar to Alfred Adler’s initial conception of the aggression drive.

After his exile from Freud’s group, Adler found intellectual freedom. Though the two regarded each other bitterly, talking a bit of smack at every opportunity, they mostly stayed out of each other’s way. During the First World War, Adler was drafted as an army physician and worked psychiatrically in Austrian military hospitals, an experience that left its mark on the man. He would later talk about the guilt he felt in treating his patients with such care, only for them to be sent back out for slaughter.

The Adlerian clinician seeks to help patients move toward more adaptive social interest in order to alleviate their symptoms and improve their conditions.

The experience of World War I inspired Adler’s most enduring concept: Gemeinschaftsgefühl. An inelegant though good-enough English translation might be “a community of equals creating and maintaining feelings of social interest,” often shortened to just “social interest” in Adlerian circles. Adler started to view social interest as an inherent psychological trait and one that could be measured in the individual. In fact, Adler believed that most psychopathology was rooted in a maladaptive sense of social interest. To what degree do we care about our fellows? About the common good? Indeed, the Adlerian clinician seeks to help patients move toward more adaptive social interest in order to alleviate their symptoms and improve their conditions.

This idea has persisted, though not necessarily in Adler’s precise terms. From Adler’s student Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” to work on the psychological benefits of altruistic action, to research showing how reward chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin are released during socialization, Adler was ahead of his time in promoting social interest. His focus on collective well-being was deeply informed by his socialist politics. In one of his more poetic moments, he claimed, “Socialism is deeply rooted in community feeling. It is the original sound of humanity.”

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The Gospel of Gemeinschaftsgefühl

After the war, Adler’s influence spread across Vienna. He had a thriving practice where he saw patients and taught courses at institutes, lecturing to both professionals and the general public. He worked toward educational reform while serving as the vice chairperson of the Workers’ Committee of Vienna’s First District. He also started his own psychological society that met on Mondays. Where Freud’s Wednesday group was becoming increasingly exclusive, Adler’s maintained the egalitarian spirit that drove his work: all were welcome to attend. “The door was left wide open,” as one student put it.

Between the world wars, Vienna came under the leadership of socialists, a period known as Red Vienna. During this time, Adler’s attention turned toward the youth. He observed their demoralization after the war, and embarked on a venture to connect psychological clinicians to Viennese schools and set up “child guidance clinics” around the city. Adler trained students, teachers, and parents in his developing psychology, proselytizing his ideas about social interest. The effort was monumental: Adler’s contribution can accurately be said to have created a new educational milieu and shared emotional understanding among Viennese youth, educators, and parents. One of the many tragedies of the Third Reich would be the annihilation of this effort.

Adler started to gain international recognition for his progressive work, especially around child development, marriage, gender equality, and a host of other issues all infused with Gemeinschaftsgefühl. In the late ’20s, he began traveling to the United States to spread the message, and picked up a teaching post at the New School. His American sojourns produced a popular book called Understanding Human Nature, which catapulted Adler to prominence in both the American public and academic circles. While in America, Adler became less overtly political, but his psychological perspective maintained its characteristic egalitarianism and consideration for economic and social conditions.

The less socially conservative American audience greeted his contributions with enthusiasm, especially his lectures on the gendered power dynamics in marriages. Adler toured across the country and would go on to influence Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, Harry Stack Sullivan, and most other major mid-century American psychologists. Adler’s influence on American popular psychology was profound: one need look no further than the contemporaneous emergence of Alcoholics Anonymous and its primary philosophical principle — that by helping another alcoholic, you are actually helping yourself — to see Gemeinschaftsgefühl weaving itself into the fabric of American culture. While the United States in the interwar period was no Red Vienna, Adler’s ideas matched the political mood here as well, particularly as the New Deal fostered a more inspired imagination of the prospects for social interest among the American public.

In 1929, Adler decided to move to New York City to begin teaching at Columbia University’s medical school and to run a child guidance clinic at the university six days a week. His wife, Raissa, intended to come later, preferring to stay in Europe to continue her revolutionary work, which at that point primarily consisted of assisting their dear friend Trotsky in trying to topple Joseph Stalin. (Raissa was a committed Trotskyist, and her politics no doubt served as the foundation for much of Adler’s political thought.) Adler’s association with Columbia was short-lived, and his 1930 exit is shrouded in mystery. What is known is that when Adler’s name was put up for a permanent position, it was quickly denied by the loyal Freudian psychoanalysts populating the Columbia University medical faculty.

Many psychological studies have since found that shame increases disconnection, alienation, and isolation.

Nevertheless, Adler continued to popularize his ideas, mostly by touring and lecturing. He kept himself busy promoting his theories on the ground, his published works consisting of little more than patched-together lecture notes. In fact, one reason Adler’s afterlife has suffered is because his writings are not very good. His early German work has not been properly translated into English, and his English work is second-rate. Where Freud wrote with great care and skill, Adler phoned it in, at times just passing his notes to students to compile into something digestible. In a great irony, his active promotion of his ideas from the lectern and in the clinic made him wildly influential during his lifetime, while his neglect of published works has caused that influence to go unrecognized.

Adler died suddenly in Scotland in 1937. He had just completed a lecture and written a letter to Raissa, now living in New York, announcing his intention to travel on to Russia in an effort to locate their missing daughter, the sole Adler still in Europe. Their daughter’s disappearance was weighing heavily on the sixty-seven-year-old Alfred, and he suspected the worst, considering the family ties to Trotsky. In 1942, a friend of the family and great admirer of Adler, one Albert Einstein, would deliver the news to Raissa that their daughter had died in a Siberian prison camp.

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Solidarity Versus Shame

Even beyond his concept of social interest, Adler’s thought offers us useful concepts today as we continue to move toward a more emancipatory future.

Perhaps his most famous contribution to the field of psychology is the idea of “compensation.” Adler posited that when a person experiences some deficit in their being, whether natural or imagined, they will then compensate in other ways for that perceived inferiority. Compensation is often healthy: Adler was quick to cite a study done in a German art school showing that a majority of the art students claimed a congenital optical abnormality. When our experience of coping with this inferiority becomes maladaptive, we develop a neurotic complex — hence the now popular concept of overcompensation.

Adler believed that most neuroses stemmed from leftover feelings of inferiority from childhood. As children develop, they begin to recognize their natural inferiority to their caretakers — physically, socially, and emotionally. When not properly cared for, encouraged, or empowered toward healthy compensation, these feelings of inferiority can begin to take a different shape and send them into maladaptive behaviors and away from social interest. Adler believed that the effects of this process carried into adulthood. In today’s terms, we would call this feeling of characterological inferiority “shame.” Many psychological studies have since borne out Adler’s theory, finding that shame increases disconnection, alienation, and isolation.

These ideas can help us understand the psychological factors at play in the current political climate, where overcompensatory personalities dominate and social interest is in short supply. They are also instructive for the Left as we conceptualize how to pursue our project of repairing that sense of investment in the well-being of society. Moments of perceived inferiority will inevitably arise in both the individual and collective experience; comparison is part and parcel of human existence. But it is how we compensate for those perceived inferiorities, how we find nuance and maintain mutuality in dealing with these dynamics, that makes all the difference. We can choose overcompensatory status jockeying and corrosive individualism, or we can choose solidarity.

Adler came to his emphasis on the social while working psychotherapeutically within the working class, championing gender equality, and surrounding himself with people devoted to social transformation through political action. When Vienna turned red, Adler was in the trenches. He walked the dialectical line between emphasizing the individual and society, seeking to empower individual people in order to encourage collective feeling. Adler knew that Freud’s initial neglect of the social was not going to suffice to get to the root of the tailor worker’s issue or the oppressed wife’s woes. He started from a belief in equality among people, and trusted that the answer to our problems lay in each other.

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Kayla Ruano-Lumpris

The post Black Trauma Is Not a Lesson appeared first on The Nation.

Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using entangled photons to test the quantum foundations of reality

A study unpacks the origins of adult mental illness — and finds a correlation with unpredictable childhoods

It used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods.

Emotions is one of those words that everyone thinks understand until you press them with questions. Broadly speaking, Western philosophers have not thought well of emotions. It was not until the time of the Romantics at the end of the 18^th century that the tide turned in favor of the emotions. Here is a history of how the leading lights of the West thought of emotions. For most of Western history:

• Emotions were thought of as coming from supernatural forces outside the psyche. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that emotions were thought about as physiological
• Emotions had no separate categorization of its own. It was rolled up into temperament and passions.

Plato was as distrustful of emotions as he was of pleasure. Emotions were part of appetite and a lower form of humanity. Rationality and mathematics were believed to be true. Aristotle, as he often did, struck a balance and said that reason and emotion went together. The Stoics, including Seneca, understood the passions to be dangerous and the cause of imbalances. Reason should put passions in their place. St. Augustine distinguished emotions of human frailty from emotions of God. Reason was separated from emotions since emotions could not be trusted. For Hobbes, the passions are bodily sensations and are the primary sources of action, which prompt both war and peace. Passions could go in two directions. One way was towards an object which was appetite and the other was away from object, which was aversion. Respite from passions make rational decisions possible and the basis for a social contract. Descartes, as most of us know, separated the mind from the body and believed emotion had no place in the mind, which was rational and mathematical.

The status of the emotions began to improve with Spinoza who wrote that both the mind and the emotions were part of nature. Locke added that emotions could be positive as well as negative and added the empathy people have with each other. Hume warned against the rising tide of passion, saying that passions controlled reason. Hume did not think that reason drove emotions. Rather, reason was just a calculator for a way out of predicaments that the passions had created. Rousseau championed natural feelings as more reliable than reason and despised “factious or sham feelings produced by civilization”.

How well do you know what emotions are?

To demonstrate how people’s understanding of emotions can be more confusing than you might suspect, try responding to the following statements below. Except for the eighth bullet, try to decide if each statement is mostly true, conflicted or mostly false. Don’t take more than a minute to answer each one, as my point for this article is to examine your spontaneous answers to these statements. After you’ve marked the bullets true or false, give a reason or two which justify each answer. Then answer bullet eight with a paragraph. The first part of this article is designed to address your answers before discussing other topics. Here are the statements:

1. Feelings and emotions are the same thing.
2. Emotions are irrational and are the opposite of thoughts.
3. Emotions are biological and out of our conscious control.
4. Emotions happen first and thoughts follow in order to explain them.
5. Negative emotions such as hostility and venting (screaming and throwing things) get those emotions out of your system so they don’t build up.
6. Changing your interpretations of thoughts about events that happen to you can change your emotions.
7. A two-year old cannot feel angry.
8. What kind of conditions might exist in which you wouldn’t know how you feel?
9. In general, women are more emotional than men.
10. Emotional ranges are universal regardless of one’s social class.
11. Non-verbal body language, like gestures and postures, are truer expressions of emotions than what people tell you about their emotions.
12. Regardless of the type of society, if a heterosexual woman finds her husband in bed with another women it is natural to feel jealous.

A Cognitive Theory of the Emotions

Are feelings and emotions the same thing?

Usually people use the terms “feelings” and “emotions” interchangeably. I think this is a loss of a great opportunity to differentiate physiological states of arousal (feelings) from cognitive interpretation of events (emotions). While most feelings are biological and out of our control, (fight-flight, pleasure-pain; frustration-contentment), our emotions are under our control. But what do I say, as a counselor, when a member of my Men Overcoming Violence support group says to me “but my anger is out of my control. What do you mean I have control of them?”. Feelings like dry mouth, sweaty palms, headache simply start the process. Which emotion results from these bodily conditions depends on how the physiological state is interpreted. One interpretation is a panic attack. Another is anxiety while still another is anticipating the happy unknown of a wedding ceremony.

Emotional reactions from thick to thin

In order to have interpretations, the person has to give meaning, and in order to do that the person has to think. “Wait a minute” the participant in Men Overcoming Violence, says “when I get angry it happens very fast, I don’t think about which emotion to have, I just have them. How do you explain that?”. The problem is many of us think of thinking as thick – weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of pants or trying to understand what is causing a leak in the pipe. We have less practice imagining thinking that is thin and happening quickly. How do we account for differences in the speed in which we think?

A child is not given a universal set of emotions which, like buttons, the child pushes on and off. She has physiological states of arousal and the child is slowly taught how to translate that state of arousal into emotions like hurt, confusion, or sadness. The time it takes to have an emotion is mediated by the set of interpretations the parent socializes in the child. As the child reacts to situations, the situations become more familiar, so both the thinking process and the emotional go faster. Soon the emotion is unconscious and automatic. It becomes so habitual that it seems “natural, that is, biological. No emotion is biological. Feelings are biological, emotions are ontogenetic (part of individual development), social, cultural and historical, as we shall see.

Emotional reactions from thin to thick

In the last section I said there that as people are presented with situations that are familiar and predictable their emotional reaction speeds up and eventually becomes unconscious. But what are the conditions under which your emotional reactions will slow down? This can happen when a person is put in an increasingly unusual situation. For example, suppose I broke up with someone I loved after five years. We had differences over wanting children, where we wanted to live and how much money we expected each other to make. So we break up. It is a relatively small town and we are at the point that the last thing either of us wants to do is run into each other. But errands are errands, so I head for downtown. In the distance about three blocks away I think I see her. I duck inside a storefront and watch as the figure moves towards me. How do I feel? Sad, disappointed, angry but relieved. I am frozen in place. Then I see another figure is joining her and they hold hands. Now I am filled with new emotions. Outrage, as I decide not enough time has passed by to justify this. Was she seeing this guy while we were still together? What the fuck?? It gets worse. About a block away I see her partner is a woman. Now all the gaskets are blown. Fortunately, the store front was a clothing store that I can enter to possibly avoid running into them. Fortunately for me she and her girlfriend don’t come in. I flee the scene for home. Do I know how I feel? There is only so much complexity that can be integrated. I friend calls later in the afternoon to see how I am doing. He asks, “how are you feeling?”. My true answer is that I don’t know how I feel. It will probably take me a few days to answer a question like this coherently.

Are emotions irrational and the opposite of thoughts?

Emotions are not irrational and the opposites of thoughts. There are rational and irrational thoughts, not rational or irrational emotions. Irrational thoughts are things like, “my boyfriend is cheating on me because he is talking to a female neighbor for 30 minutes. I am jealous”. The thought is irrational because the woman is jumping to specific conclusions without much evidence. Being jealous is only irrational because the thought is irrational. If the same woman claims that her husband is flirting with the neighbor and might be sleeping with her because she has many experiences of her husband having had casual sex is rational. Here, in this situation, the emotion of jealousy is rational. All emotions follow thought. Emotions are rational or irrational just as thoughts are. Feelings are biological and prerational but only emotions can be irrational or rational

Are emotions biological and out of our control?

Emotions are neither biological nor out of our control. Emotions are ontogenetic, social cultural and historical. Having a particular emotional reaction may be hard to change but that does not mean they are out of our control. As an Italian American man, I am socialized to express anger rather than hurt, sadness or confusion first. Can that be changed? Yes, but it requires a great deal of psychological work. Many men in the Men Overcoming Violence program learned how to do that, but it took them 40 weeks of meeting once a week for two hours. On the wall we had a large list of emotions on a 5×10 foot piece of butcher paper. At the top were seven kinds of emotion. But underneath each emotion there were seven other emotions going from strongest to weakest intensity. Every time a man in the program said he was angry, we would insist that he include at least 2-3 other emotions so he could become aware of the emotional variety of his emotional states that he was unaware of up to that point.

Thoughts precede and create emotions

As is probably obvious by now emotions don’t come first and thoughts follow. First comes interpretation of what events mean and then the emotion follows. The order is:

• Interpretation of what the situation means – dangerous/safe; structured/loose;
• Feelings sweaty palms, dry-mouth, heart racing;
• Emotion – fear, anger, disappointment.

Does the hydraulic theory of emotions work?

Allowing yourself to vent—yell, scream and throw things does not make you have less emotion. What it does is help you form a habit of escalating to the point where it gets easier and easier. “Getting it of your system” is part of an old way of looking at emotions called the “cathartic theory of the emotions” that goes all the way back to Aristotle. It has been called the “hydraulic” theory because it pictures emotions as rising up like water in a bathtub which will overflow if it is not drained. Freud had this theory and so did humanistic psychologists like Fritz Perls during the early 1970s. Reichian therapists would give people tennis rackets and have them flail the couch of the therapist, hoping to get their anger out of their system. It was not until the 1980s when cognitive psychologists argued that emotions don’t work that way (see Carole Tavris, Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion).

Emotions emerge over the course of ontogenesis moving from simple to complex

Is anger present from birth or is it the product of a developmental process that only arises at a certain age level? Some theorists of emotion claim that there are universal emotions such has surprise, disgust, love, hurt, sadness. My point here isn’t to claim what the right batch is. Rather it is to say whatever the right batch is, it takes time for them to emerge. So to the question can a two-year old express anger, my answer is no. Let me give an example. If you are watching a two year old child play with a toy and you get up and put a barrier in front of the toy and you watch the child try to figure out how to get around the barrier to the toy the child may be frustrated, but they are not angry at you. In order to be angry the child has to perceive that there are a certain social roles and rules that are normal. Anger comes over the violation of these rules. If the child was six years old and you again placed a barrier between them and their toy, chances are good they would be spending more time challenging why you put the barrier up than they would trying to overcome the barrier. Why? Because as the child’s parent, it is highly unusual for you to behave in such a sadistic way. There are complex emotions like jealousy, envy and revenge which require the mastery of rules and roles before they make sense.

How Emotions are Socialized

Are women more emotional than men?

At least in Yankeedom, it is common to say that women are more emotional than men. This is really not the case at all. Socially, women and men are given a range of emotions that it are safe to express and another set that is more or less forbidden.

If we start out with straight women and straight men we can say, women are taught to express a wider set of emotions such as sadness, hurt, fear, confusion, humiliation and love. Men are socialized to be angry, brave and courageous. What is interesting is that if a woman crosses the line and expresses forbidden emotions, she is threatened by being called gay or a lesbian. We all know that when a woman is assertive at work she is called a bitch. On the other hand, can you imagine how a male attendant at a gas station would feel if after finally agreeing with his wife that they were lost came into the store and said:” I feel embarrassed, humiliated and confused because I can’t figure out how to get to such-and-such a place”? The guy might not give him the correct directions right away. He may first say “Get hold of yourself, man”.

There are at least two ways to think about having an emotion. The first is emotional impression and the second is emotional expression. An emotional impression is when an emotion is registered internally. An emotional expression is whether you decide to express the emotion to someone else. Often, women may express emotions more. But that does not mean women are more emotional than men.

Expression of emotions and social class

It is not true that all classes in capitalist societies have the same range of expression of emotions. In the first place, it matters what kind of religion the social class is committed to. If we consider the differences between men and women and we examine Catholic working-class women and men we will find they will express a greater range of emotions than the Protestants will. The protestant working class (at least the white working class) tend to be shut down emotionally. Working-class men and women generally have a hard life and it makes sense they will have thicker skins.

Middle class men and women have better jobs which requires less armoring. They will be more open emotionally than the working class. This is amplified by how committed middle class people are to therapy. Out-to-lunch, class-oblivious, humanistic psychology proclaims that the more open the person, the healthier they are. They fail to understand that if you live in rough neighborhoods, attend rough schools and take orders from a boss all day long, it pays to have a thick skin.

Upper-middle class men generally are the happiest in their work. Woman in upper middle-class positions at work have to be more careful, since they are in danger of being called a bitch for asserting their authority. They also have to be careful about being labelled as too emotional at the slightest turn.

The upper classes are generally old money conservatives. Both men and women tend to repress emotions and they generally feel that the very expression of emotion is bad taste. They carry on an aristocratic tradition which prides itself in never breaking down, whether in love or war.

Happiness and social class

Socialists would be very happy with the results of research about which social classes are happy and which aren’t and why. It seems intuitive to say that the upper classes are happier than the working class because they have an easier life. But research shows that this isn’t quite the case. What we know for sure is that money does bring happiness when money delivers the working class into a middle-class position. However, there is no necessary correlation that money buys happiness as one moves from middle class to upper class. It is not predictable that upper class people will claim to be happier than those who are middle class. All this means is that when money provides the foundation for a good life, people respond well. But beyond middle class there is no correlation between money and happiness. To say money can’t buy happiness is not true. Happiness can increase as we ascend from poor to middle class. A formula for a good economic social policy is that if you want happier people, try to make all workers middle class.

Differences between classes in becoming civilized and becoming disciplinedAs we will see shortly when we discuss the history of emotions, the process of becoming civilized brought with it a whole different range of social and psychological emotions. But for now we want to ask, does the process of becoming civilized apply to all social classes from the 17th through the 19th centuries? In my book Forging Promethean Psychology I argue that the working class and the poor in absolutist states or nation-states never became civilized, but they did become disciplined.

How was becoming disciplined different from becoming civilized? The first difference had to do with the population in question. Becoming civilized was the psychogenetic socialization process of the middle and upper classes. Being disciplined mostly applied to the working class and the poor. The second difference was in the types of influences used. The process of becoming civilized involved softer influences such as rhetoric, charisma, symbolic power, and legitimacy. Discipline, at least initially, involved hard influences such as physical force, the threat of force (coercion), economic deprivation, politics, and later, legitimation.

The third difference was the direction of the class forces operating. Becoming civilized, as Norbert Elias writes was a competitive process for status among classes who were roughly equal – aristocrats, merchants, and intellectuals. Becoming disciplined initially involved top-down orders. Poor or working class people had to obey the authorities or face consequences. Discipline came from the top: Calvinist and Lutheran theologians to their parishioners; from military authorities to their soldiers; and from the state to its subjects.

Following Elias, becoming civilized in the courts of Europe involved a new set of emotions for aristocrats such as shame, embarrassment, superiority and envy. For the working class under disciple, they had another set of emotions; fear, suspicion, paranoia and guilt. It is easy to think classes in other societies had the same set of emotions, but this is not true. Elias says that the situation in 16^th and 17^th century Europe was unique.

Cross-Cultural Emotions: How They vary from society to society

Collectivism vs Individualism

In his book Cultural Psychology, Steven J. Heine reports that broadly speaking individualists of industrial capitalist societies are more likely to express emotions than collectivists and they are certainly more likely to express negative emotions. This is not hard to understand. People in collectivist societies are interdependent upon each other and consider most as extended kin at work and in their villages. They cannot afford blow-ups. On the other hand, because the relationships between individuals in industrial capitalist societies are short-term and appear voluntary (following social-contract theory), they are more likely to tolerate a falling out.

Another common distinction is between cultures of honor (herding societies) and cultures that are not (farming societies). As has been pointed out in the book Cultures of Honor herders are far more suspectable to insult because: a) their wealth is mobile rather than stable; b) their population is sparse; and c) they have no protection from the state in terms of land disputes. Farmers are more likely to tolerate insult because their wealth in land is stable, they can count on the state for intervention and the land is densely populated. They are less likely to settle disputes with duels or shoot-outs. The differences between southerners and northerners in the United States follows.

Finally, Ruth Benedict characterized the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. Shame is embarrassment at letting the group down. Guilt has little to do with groups. Guilt is remorse over a volition of a law, or a holy book. Puritans show a great deal of guilt. She also made a distinction between Dionysian cultures which are expressive and Apollonian cultures which were more reserved.

Analogical messages: gestures, postures

Most people well understand that it is necessary to do emotional work on the job and at home. Emotional work means a) showing emotions you do not have and; b) hiding the emotion you do have. This is especially true in customer-service work. However, people also imagine that their analogical communication (gestures, postures) is somehow less deceptive and imagine they are a more reliable gage than verbal expression of emotions. But cross-cultural research shows this is not the case. For example, Yankees may think that the A-Okay sign is universally recognized when among Southern Europeans, it is a crude gesture. In our Men Overcoming Violence group, a Yankee man innocently propped up his feet on a stool in front of an Iraqi man sitting across the way. He soon found out the showing the sole of one’s foot to someone from Iraq is the greatest insult. If there are gestures and postures that are universal, they are few and far between. They may be harder to hide than the verbal expressions but their origins lie deep in the local context of the culture which vary from region to region.

Cross-cultural nature of jealousy

The following is paraphrased from the textbook Invitation to Psychology by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris. A young wife leaves her house one morning to draw water from the local well, as her husband watches from the porch. On her way back from the well, a male stranger stops her and asks for some water. She gives him a cupful and then invites him home for dinner. He accepts. The husband, wife and guest have a pleasant meal together. In a gesture of hospitality, the husband invites the guest to spend the night with his wife. The guest accepts. In the morning the husband leaves early to bring home breakfast. When he returns, be finds his wife again in bed with the visitor. At what point in this story will the husband feel angry? The answer depends on the culture.

• A North American husband would feel very angry at a wife who had an extramarital affair.
• A North American wife would feel very angry at being offered to a guest as if she were a lamb chop.
• But a Pawnee husband of the 19th century would be enraged by any man who dared to ask his wife for water.
• An Ammassalik Inuit husband finds it perfectly honorable to offer his wife to a stranger, but only once. He would be angry to find his wife and guest having a second encounter.
• A century ago, a Toda husband in India would not feel angry at all because Todas allow both husband and wife to take lovers. However, both spouses would feel angry if one of them had a sneaky affair, without announcing it publicly.

In most cultures people feel angry in response to insult and the violation of social rules. But they often disagree about what an insult is or what the correct rule should be. Here we have four different cultures lined up on the political spectrum in their attitudes towards hospitality and sexuality.

The most extreme right wing is the Pawnee Indian who draws the line at talk at the well. In the center right is a Yankee husband who is outraged at his wife having a martial affair. But on the liberal side of the spectrum we have the Inuit who draws the line not at having an affair, but at having sex twice. The Toda, the most radical has no problem extramarital sex. The problem is if it is done in an underhanded manner.

History of the Emotions

Broadly speaking, it used to be that emotions were experienced as being invasion from the sacred world given to us by the goddesses and gods. It was only at the beginning of the 18^th century that emotions were thought of as originating from some part of the mind or the body. After 1860 emotions were seen as cultural, universal, inclusive of all species, biological, physiological and hard-wired.

What does it mean that emotions have a history? Does it mean that new emotions emerge in different historical periods? To say this is to challenge universalis ideas of emotions being static or possibly circulating in different historical periods. In my book Lucifer’s Labyrinth I follow Elias’ description of how differences from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe produced new sets of emotional reactions.

Emotions in the Middle Ages

As Elias says, people in the Middle Ages lived a life that was intense, brutal and short. They lived life to the fullest with the time they had. Their psychological life alternated between sensory saturation and religious mortification about what they had done. Middle Age people were more violent and could tolerate more pain. As Elias said, they live their life between the super-ego and the id. The ego was less developed.

The warrior class in the Middle Ages could be characterized as courageous, impetuous, wild, cruel and living in the present. But when these warriors were forced into the courts by the king and the merchants, they had to adapt themselves to court life. Above all, they needed to control themselves. Now their characteristics included being prudent, restrained, self-contained, timely, refined, more humane and more gossipy. Their every mood required foresight for the future, hindsight into the past (people they may have offended) and insight and self-reflection to make sure their behavior was not offensive. So within a century, the emotional life of one class significantly changed.

Emotional life in the Baroque and the 18th century

There are also major differences in the emotions between the Baroque 17^th century aristocrats and the 18thcentury merchants during the Enlightenment. The aristocrats of the 17th century had superiority complexes, were preoccupied with “keeping up with the Jones” and cultivated a cool nonchalant attitude. On the other hand, some 18^th century merchants strove openly to be happy, and were motivated by their quest for serenity. Their emotions were controlled by reason, not so much by what was expected of them. The emotional life between the aristocrats and merchants differed in many other areas such as attitude toward the senses; attitude towards pain; attitude towards animals; bodily conduct; sleeping patterns and attitude towards dying.

From honor and glory to avarice and ambition: warriors vs merchants

As we’ve said, the values of aristocrats in Europe were honor and glory. But for the merchants in the 18^thcentury these values would not do. As Albert Hirschman traces a movement from glory and honor to “interests” in his book Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray tells the story of how these values were undermined by two new values: avarice and ambition. Both these motivations were despised by all classes in the Middle Ages. But with the rise of merchants there was a slow process by which avarice and ambition were changed from vices to virtues, which supported merchant capitalism

Emotional life of Romantics: late 18th to mid 19th century

Lastly, in the 18^th century with the rise of romanticism, early romantics had a new attitude toward the emotions which differed drastically from the Enlighteners. Lionel Trigger in his book Sincerity, points out that with romanticism came new emotions: the importance of being sincere and the importance of being authentic. Being sincere was the exact opposite to the aristocratic of haughtiness and masquerading. It meant saying what you meant and meaning what you said. Being authentic came out of the romantic notion that everyone had a true self as opposed to the roles both aristocrats and merchants had to play. Being authentic meant showing people your true self. Sincerity and authenticity were hugely important to humanistic psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Summing Up: Evolution to an Emotion

We are now finally in a position to describe the evolution to an emotion. The first step, or point zero, is an external event that triggers the emotion. Let’s say you work as a cook in a restaurant and your ex shows up for dinner with her new boyfriend.

• Physiological state of arousal:
  • Physiological – sweaty palms, racing heart, dry mouth
  • Feelings – confusion, frustration, pain, discomfort
• Internalized socio-cultural, class and historical forces
  • Type of society – industrial capitalist
  • Social class – all working class
  • Cross-cultural – Mexican American; Italian
  • Gender – heterosexual – man – woman
  • Point in history – 21st century crumbling Yankee empire
• Cognitive appraisal
  • Automatic thoughts; cognitive interpretations; explanatory styles
  • Assumptions – all this from the cognitive psychology of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck
• Analogical messages
  • Gestures, posture, clothing
• Situational constraints
  • You are working and you can’t leave
• Display rules and emotional work
  • What feelings do you have to show that you don’t have?
  • What feelings do you have that you can’t show?
• Emotional impression
  • Hurt, anger, fear, jealousy, disappointment, relief
• Emotional expression
  • Optional
  • Act like you don’t care

Under normal circumstances which are routine, all eight of these steps could be processed in less than ten seconds because of years of practice. But because of the unusualness of this particular circumstance, our poor cook may take days to process what the situation means and what array of emotions he has.

As we have seen, the cognitive theory of the emotions has revolutionized the theory of emotions by arguing that emotions come from thoughts. But cognitive psychology implies that the individual makes up their own mind about which emotions they have. In the evolution to an emotion steps, the second step is entirely missing. A communist theory of the emotions would have social, cultural, class and historical mediators in place.

The hardest step for people in capitalist society to understand about this evolution is the second step. How could internalized socio-cultural, historical and class forces be inside of people rather than outside? Wouldn’t these forces come later, at the end?

The inclusion of step two attacks the idea that emotions are private, inside people and under their control. A communist theory of the emotions says that emotions are not private. They are products of a particular type of society, a particular social class, a particular kind of culture existing in a certain point in history. All these forces exist prior to the time you were born and they are socialized into you by your caretakers mostly unconsciously, especially in the first five years. The initial internalized socio-cultural, class and historical conditions are inside you whether you like it or not. That is our fate.

Later, as we mature, we become more active in dialectically reciprocating with these forces so that our class status might change. We might go to live in a different country (culture) or go to live in a socialist society. We might work as economic advisors to contribute to the world historical economy shifting Eastward in the 21^st century. Whereas fate are the conditions that we are given when we are born, destiny is what we make of those conditions. However, even if you are active on all these fronts, step two is the infrastructural plumbing of all emotions and its creates and sustains all the steps that follow. The content of the infrastructural plumbing may change, but the presence of a plumbing infrastructure will not.

What Capitalism Can Do to Our Emotions

Capitalist psychology splits the individual from his social, cultural, historical and class identity. Then it takes the stripped-down, isolated, alienated individual as human nature as its point of departure. Most every psychological problem is rooted in the chaotic and contradictory interactions of the four systems as they interact.

Alienation Under Capitalism

Alienation is the inversion of subject and object, creation and creator. It is a reversal of ends and means so that the means acquire a life if their own.

Members of capitalist society are alienated in:

• the products of their labor;
• the process of producing the products;
• the other people they are producing with;
• the power settings in which the product is distributed;
• the biophysical environment; and
• their self-identity

The products of their labor: commodity fetishism: hoarding, manic consumption

Marx talked about how under capitalism commodities acquire a life of their own, and become disengaged from the situation which produced them. Commodities, rather than becoming a means to an end for living, become an end in itself. Erich Fromm defined a particular kind of pathology which he called the hoarding mentality and the marketing pathology in which people are obsessed with the accumulation of commodities. The emotional life of a consumer is anxious and destabilized because their identity is centered around the acquisition of new commodities, whether they need them or not. Most capitalist psychologists treat accumulation of commodities and capitalist mania for accumulation as not worth identifying as a pathology as it’s not even in the diagnostic manual.

The process of producing the products: insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion Under capitalism, the workday has lengthened from 40 to at least 50 hours of work in the last 50 years. There is less security about having a job and the average worker is more likely to have two jobs with no benefits. For workers a job is just something to put up with. Life begins when an individual has leisure time. Work under capitalism still possesses a religious root as a way to repent from original sin. This adds extra distress for workers during a recession or a depression when workers cannot find a job but blame themselves for not having a good “work ethic.”

Other people they are producing with: competitive anxiety anti-group mentality Almost a hundred years ago neo-Freudian Karen Horney claimed that it was competition between workers and between workers and other social classes that produced anxiety. As I mentioned in my article What is Social Psychology Part II, that groups under capitalism are treated as:

• no more than the sum of individuals;
• less than the sum of individuals;
• an entity that has a super-personally separate life from individuals.

To give you an example of the third framework, when people join a group at work, they often dissolve into it. They reify the group. They make the group a thing, above and beyond anything they can control. When an individual withdraws from the group, the group is renounced as a resource, as the individual believes their problems are so precious that no one could possibly understand them.

When the individual tolerates the members of a group, the individual renounces the capacity of the member being tolerated to change. The tolerating member does not consider that other members might be restless also, and they are not alone in putting up with members who are hard to manage. When individuals rebel against the group, they assume that other group members are conservative, never change or are stuck in their ways. If the individual tries to dominate the group, the dominating individual renounces their ability to get what they want through the collective creativity of the group. What withdrawing, toleration, rebelling or dominating have in common is that they are zero-sum game, with winners and losers. The best example of a group that is treated as less than the sum of individuals, is in the Lord of the Flies novel. A group being less than the sum of individuals exists in the hyper-conservative imagination of Gustave Le Bon in his books about crowds, or in mass media’s depiction of mass behavior during natural disasters where crowds develop a hive mentality.

The power-setting in which the product is distributed: apathy, myopia

Unions in the United States gave up a long time ago providing a vision for workers in terms of having a say in the decision making on the job. This leads to apathy. In addition, the specialization of labor discourages understanding what is going on in the entire production process. People do their job over and over and know nor care what is going on in other parts of the production process. “That’s none of my business”.

Alienation from nature: physical deterioration shortening life-span

This form of alienation under capitalism has reached a currant volatile form in the areas of pollution extreme weather. John Bellamy Foster has called this a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature. Air pollution worsened breathing for people with lung problems and added new physical problems. Extreme weather has made both winter and summer conditions hazardous almost everywhere in Yankeedom. The lack of state planning over Covid has either killed millions of people or given them Long-Covid. The United States life span has declined 2.7 years since Covid began. The US is the worst at managing Covid, having the highest number of infections and deaths. Environmental psychologists have long known that getting out into nature reduces stress and has long-term benefits. But thanks to capitalism, communing with a nature which is unpolluted is getting harder and harder to find.

Alienation from self: the illusion of free will under capitalism – depression

Capitalist psychology assumes people are fundamentally selfish, as if we individuals are like Hobbes’ atoms, greedy, insensitive, grasping and mindlessly crashing into each other. Whether it is Freud’s ego or the behavioral motivation of pain or pleasure, individuals’ primary motivation is self-interest.

Under capitalism individuals have supposed “free will”, meaning they may more or less freely choose their situations. Religious institutions, educational expectations, economic and political propaganda, legitimation techniques, mystification and collusion in the end have no bearing on what happens. In spite of everything, free will wins over the type of society we are raised in, our social class, our culture or the historical period in which we live. With these unrealistic expectations about freedom, the individual is likely to internalize the real-life constraints and blame themselves for their less than idyllic life.

For a communist psychology, all these forms of socio-political control affect free will. While none of these processes by themselves or even all together determine a person’s free will, the options people choose to exercise are significantly constrained.

Capitalists eternalize capitalist relations Capitalists eternalize alien relations under capitalism and treat them as if they were always there. They project how people learn, think, emote and remember under capitalism into other historical periods. For example, they present narcissism, attention-deficit disorders or manic-depression as present in tribal or state civilizations just as much as they are under capitalism.

Emotions under Communism Everything that follows is based on the real experience of workers in worker cooperatives, behavior in natural disasters and workers’ experiences in revolutionary situations. These emotional states represent communists at their very bestrather than all the time. Under communism people are seen as primarily collectively creative. This is demonstrated in practice when workers are given the opportunity to operate cooperatives, create workers’ councils in revolutionary situations or even how they behave during natural disasters. Selfishness is a product of capitalism and not the primary way human beings operate. Consuming commodities are a means to an end. There is no hoarding or manic consumption in communism since the primary identity of a worker is fulfilled on the job because they love their work.

Workers are not anxious or insecure about work because there is more than enough work for everyone. The number of hours of work per day will shrunk because technology, no longer controlled by capitalist, is available to do mechanized part of the work, leaving people more time for the creative parts of the job.

Social unconscious: recalling the great moments in revolutionary situations

For a communist psychology, what is unconscious, at least for the working class is a “social” unconscious. It is the repressed memory of the human past, dead labor, that causes this individual to have “social amnesia” and not care about their own history. However, when the collective-creative memory is revived, out pours the wisdom that has accumulated from revolutionary situations: the heroic stance of the Paris Commune; the heroism of Russian factory councils and the workers’ self-management experiments in Spain from 1936-1939. To make this social unconscious conscious is to make the working class shapers of history rather than just being a product of it.

Pro-group basis of communist psychology

In all these examples the group attitude under capitalism is a whole never more than the sum of its parts. The goal of communist psychology is to cultivate a “social” individual who gradually comes to see the activity of building and sustaining groups as the key to emotional health. Even though in socialist psychology, the group as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, the group is still the creation of concrete individuals. The group has no mystical identity floating above individuals. While there is no group without individuals, through the collective creativity of members, the group acquires a synergy whose products are more than what any individual can do by themselves. A communist psychology creates these win-win situations through cooperation.

A socialist psychological group challenges people who withdraw or dissolve into the group by asking what the group can do to give then what they want. The group confronts those who tolerate others by asking them why they are putting up with other members – what would need to happen for things to be different. To those who rebel the group asks “what are you rebelling against and how could we change things to make the group more attractive to you?”. To those who try to dominate the group, socialist group therapy does not moralize against dominators. We simply say that you are losing out on the collective creativity of others by trying to subjugate them.

Our job involves exposing the unconscious commonalities between people that lie beneath our individual differences. It means making a long-term commitment based on the belief that the commonalities between most working-class and middle-class people far outweigh our differences.

The idea is that if you learn to build the collective power of a one group, you can then go out into the world and change it by your newfound capacity to change groups wherever we go, now and into the future. Learning how to change groups through the collective creative capacity of the group moves us from being products of history to being co-producers of it. A rich, co-creative group life is the key to emotional well-being under communism.

Under capitalism we have an emotional life with elements that include hoarding, manic consumption, narcissism, short-attention span, insecurity, anxiety, exhaustion, apathy, myopia, unnecessary physical deterioration, a shortened lifespan and depression. Under communism people are relaxed, serene, enthusiastic, creative, and happy and that goes with the research on happiness described earlier in this article.

Beyond Capitalism

Though they lack brains, scientists are figuring out new ways to probe whether plants “think”