Complex Emotions: Relations, Feelings and Images in Emotional Experience

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that emotions are experienced primarily as structures of feeling which give meaning to relational experience. These feelings can be articulated through speech genres or discourses which give them form as specific emotions that have a place in the emotional vocabulary of a culture. Thus, I seek to distinguish between feeling and thought and attempt to trace the complex process through which feelings become emotions. This involves a reconsideration of the relation between body and thought, and the material and the ideal, as it appears in the work of various thinkers. Central to this is the role of image-schemata (Johnson, 1987) that mediate between the recurring relational patterns of bodily activity in the world, which makes experience meaningful, and the symbolic structures of the social group that can be used to articulate bodily feelings metaphorically. Feelings and emotions, then, while in a complex relationship to one another, are not always identical: they can in fact diverge, giving rise to the ambiguous nature of much emotional experience. Finally, all of this is considered in the light of power relations and the way that emotional dynamics play a central role in power.Anglo-Saxons who are uncomfortable with the idea that feelings and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms usually have to be told that these matters, the relationship between the self and others, and the relationship between self and environment, are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called ‘feelings’— love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the ‘feelings’ are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted epistemology (Bateson, 1973: 113).