EMOTION AS AN ACCESSORY VITAL SYSTEM FRANKLIN DONALDSON* What are the emotions? The problem of emotion has long been with us, but the need to attain a workable general definition is particularly pressing. This arises not only from the extraordinary volume of experimental data concerning the emotions which has accumulated in the past two decades, greater than that of all preceding centuries , but also from the increasing importance of the emotions to medicine and to psychology. Whereas in preindustrial cultures the major agencies of disease are parasitic, nutritional, and infectious [ 1 ], in advanced industrial societies emotional agencies emerge paramount . Mental illness alone comprises the greatest single category of human disease. In health and in disease the absence of a comprehensive definition of emotion leaves a void at the heart of all interpretation of human personality. It is a curious situation: man lives by his emotions, and yet he does not quite know what they are. An Approach to the Problem ofEmotion The literature on the emotions is so vast and so diverse as to defy summarization. The following considerations pursue, instead, one train of inquiry through the major theories of emotion from Darwin to the present. Darwin's treatise on emotional expression [2], presenting the unity of emotional behavior in man and higher animals as one evidence of evolution, made no claim to defining the emotions. The deeper physiological interpretation which he invited appeared first in the work of Lange [3, 4] and of James [5]. The James-Lange theory held that the feeling of the body changes directly following the perception of the exciting fact is the emotion [6, 7]. Sherrington [8], noting that emotional behavior continued to occur even after the sectioning of visceral sensory nerves, seriously * Associate physician, Health Service, Tufts University Medical and Dental Schools, Boston, Massachusetts. 46 I Franklin Donaldson · Emotion, a Vital System questioned the James-Lange theory. The first major alternative to this theory, however, appeared in the work of Cannon. Cannon's experiments on the body changes accompanying rage, pain, and fear indicated that emotions are produced by unusual and powerful influences emanating from the thalamic regions. These particularly affect cerebral cortical processes [9, 10]. As substantial as Cannon's emergency theory proved to be, it still left many questions unanswered. Are the emotions only unusual, emergency mobilizations? How can an emergency definition explain the steady, affectionate states which endure not for minutes or hours but for years? Are the emotions only gross mobilizations? What of the fine discriminatory feelings which accompany everyday thought, the subtler emotions, in the description of William James as countless as the rocks upon a New England farm? Are emotions only disturbances ? What of those purposive feelings which give life integration and direction [11, 12]? Are emotions only situational responses? What of those emotional needs which, arising from within, seek out persons or situations in order to advance inner development or to create new environments [13-16]? Perhaps the most persisting theme over the decades has been the interpretation of emotion as visceral action. Although the emotions cannot be equated simply with visceral sensation, certainly the emotions extensively engage visceral processes, and clearly the excessive involvement of the viscera in emotion produces disease [17-19]. Following Cannon, the theories of Papez [20], MacLean [21], and Wenger [22, 23] have extended emotional interpretation to a broad range of visceral action in which the narrow realm of emergency mobilization is reduced to a special category. This larger view enjoys the advantages of encompassing both positive and negative emotional states and of being able to interpret any degree of feeling. Although for the physiologist an interpretation of emotion primarily as visceral action may seem adequate, for the clinician it is not. For the personality psychologist the most important dimension of emotion is meaning. Clinical investigations of the emotional life, as Freud [24], Jung [25], Murray [26], White [27], and many others have shown, reveal a rich and varied realm of emotional themes within every personality. Fully examined, human emotional life is so extensively involved in all human activity as to be as varied as personality itself. Indeed, the most central definition yet obtainable for any given personality is that individual...
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Nov 24, 2004
Hugo D Critchley + 5
