According to the literature, no one really felt emotions before about 1830. Instead, they felt other things - ‘passions’, ‘accidents of the soul’, ‘moral sentiments’ – and explained them very differently from how we understand emotions today. Let's get up to date with emotions...
The history of emotions
For my full article on emotions click here:
Some ancient Greeks believed a defiant rage was carried on an ill wind. Desert-dwelling early Christians thought boredom could be implanted in the soul by malignant demons. This may resonate with those who have moody teenagers.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, passions were not exclusive to humans, but could work their strange effects on other bodies too, so that palm trees could fall in love and yearn for one another, and cats become melancholic.
But alongside this intangible realm of souls and supernatural forces, doctors also developed a complex approach to understanding the body’s influence on the passions. Their insights were based on a theory of humoral medicine from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, which spread via the physicians of the medieval Islamic world and flourished ultimately in the writings of the court doctors of the European Renaissance. The theory held that each person had a balance of four elemental substances in their bodies – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. These humours were thought to shape personality and mood: Those with more blood in their veins were quick tempered, but also brave, while a dominance of phlegm made one peaceful but lugubrious. Physicians believed strong passions disrupted this delicate ecosystem by moving heat around the body and rousing the humours in turn. Rage sent blood rushing from the heart to the limbs, readying a person to launch an attack. Once black bile was heated, by contrast, it sent poisonous vapours curling up to the brain and crowded it with terrifying visions. Traces of these ideas still linger: it’s why we speak of people being phlegmatic or in an ill-humour, or say their blood is boiling.
The origin of our modern concept of emotion can be traced to the birth of empirical science in the mid-seventeenth century. Thomas Willis, a London anatomist who dissected hanged criminals, proposed that a surge of joy or a nervous tremble was not the work of strange liquids and fumes, but of the delicate lattice of the nervous system at the centre of which was a single organ: The brain. A hundred or so years later, physiologists studying reflex responses in animals went further and claimed that bodies recoiled in fright or twitched in delight because of purely mechanical processes – no immaterial soul substance was necessary at all. Scientists did away with the soul. They forgot that we are beings with awareness, and it is more that consciousness cannot be explained using established science. This does not mean that the soul doesn't exist, simply that science hasn't found it yet. There is an arrogance to science and I can say this as an academic scientist!
In a draughty Edinburgh lecture hall in the early nineteenth century, the philosopher Thomas Brown suggested this new way of understanding the body required a new vocabulary, and proposed using the word ‘emotion’. Though already in use in English (from the French émotion), the term was imprecise, describing any movements of bodies and objects, from the swaying of a tree to a hot blush spreading across the cheeks. The coinage indicated a novel approach to the life of feelings, one which used experiments and anatomical investigations to focus on observable phenomena: Clenched teeth; rolling tears; shudders; wide eyes. It does capture the nature of emotions as being ‘energy in motion’, often quoted in recovery circles.
This provoked a flurry of interest among Victorian scientists in understanding how the body’s smiles and frowns expressed – and even stimulated – internal emotions. One person in particular stands out: Charles Darwin. As early as the 1830s, Darwin was treating emotions as a topic worthy of serious scientific attention. He sent out questionnaires to missionaries and explorers across the globe asking how grief or excitement was expressed by the indigenous people they encountered. He experimented on himself, trying to isolate the muscles used when he shuddered or smiled. He even studied his infant son, William, meticulously charting his responses: “At his 8th day he frowned much... When little under five weeks old, smiled”. In 1872 Darwin published his findings in ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’, and made the audacious claim that our emotions were not fixed responses, but the result of millions of years of evolutionary processes which were still ongoing. As basic and important as breathing or digestion, as much animal as human, our emotions were there because they had helped us survive – preventing us from ingesting poisons, as in disgust, or helping us form bonds and cooperate, like love or compassion. By the 1880s, the view that emotions were inherited reflexes was so established among scientists that the philosopher William James could argue that the bodily responses were the emotion, and the subjective feeling just followed. While “Common sense says... We meet a bear, are frightened, and run,” he wrote. It was more rational to say that we feel ‘afraid because we tremble’. He thought the physical response came first, the subjective quality, a byproduct – he called it an ‘epiphenomenon’ – a split second later. We now know that it’s the other way round – our thoughts create our emotions. Emotions are indicators of the quality and nature of our thinking. This is why we can unhook from negative thinking, and the resulting emotion is not manifested.
The year after Darwin published his theories on the evolution of emotional expressions, Sigmund Freud began his medical training in Vienna. By the early 1890s, however, Freud had abandoned his career as a neurologist, believing that it wasn’t enough to talk about prolonged sorrow or excessive suspicion in terms only of the brain and body: “It is not easy to treat feelings scientifically,” he wrote. One had also to consider the far more elusive and complex influence of the mind, or psyche. You can read my article on this called 'Let Your Self Off The Hook'. Although he never set out a comprehensive theory of what he considered emotions to be – he spoke of them, poetically, as “Feeling-tones” – Freud’s work added depth and complexity to the vision of emotions as biological twitches and jerks. It’s through his work that many of us have come to think of emotions as things which either can be repressed, or else they build up and require venting. And that some – particularly those urgent terrors and furious desires of childhood – can sink down and hide in the deepest recesses of our minds only to emerge years later in dreams, as addictions, or compulsions, or even physical symptoms like an aching head or cramping stomach. It’s also from Freud that we have inherited the idea that we might not even recognise some of our emotions, but that our anger or despair might be ‘subconscious’, springing up like a jack-in-the-box accidentally (‘Freudian slips’), or in the jokes we tell, or in habits such as persistent anxiety. Although many of the technical details of Freud’s theories have long since been discredited, the idea that our emotions take circuitous routes through our minds as well as our bodies has been of profound therapeutic importance and left traces on today’s emotional language. In this way, the Victorians are responsible for two of the most influential ideas about our feelings today: That our emotions are evolved physical responses, and that they are affected, and originate in, the play of our unconscious minds.
These are the emotions that I have covered for you in my series on emotions (click on the link to be taken to them):
· Anger
· Anxiety
· Courage
· Despair
· Fear
· Grief
· Joy
· Love
· Shame
Namaste.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.