EMOTIONS
§ 33
Emotions, including moods and many nameless feelings, are some of the
innate organic sensations evoked in our bodies by sensations that are not
organic. In other words, they form a part of the internal sensations,
which so far as generally named are originally associated with external
sensations.
Frink remarks that “the emotion, from the point of view of physiology,
_is_ these various preparatory changes in the content of the blood,
in the innervation of the various muscles, endocrine glands and other
viscera. The emotion, from the point of view of psychology, is the
afferent, sensory report of these changes.” And William James’ classical
statement is as follows: “Bodily changes follow directly the perception
of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur
_is_ the emotion.... The more rational statement is that we feel sorry
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,
and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or
fearful, as the case may be.”
While most emotions of the simple type, like surprise, admiration, joy
and others are in infancy and childhood originally, though not innately
associated with certain definite sensations from the outer world, they
are frequently reassociated by experience through the influence of the
environment, so that, in later life, one enjoys or detests quite the
opposite of what caused instinctive attraction or repulsion in early life.
The complex emotions of love, jealousy and hate are not, in their
greatest complexity, existent in humans before puberty, although the
unsynthetized elements out of which they are finally composed are present
in childhood, particularly hate. This, according to psychoanalysis, is
a more archaic emotion than love and is not its direct opposite. It is
likely that human emotions are progressing from a dominant hatred toward
a reigning love.
Love in its fully synthetic and complicated form is not only impossible
in children, but its higher types, spoken of in this book as _erotic_,
occur at their best in those more intricately complicated personalities
that are the peculiar product of modern civilization.
The expression of erotic emotion does not involve activity on the man’s
part solely, and absolute passivity on the woman’s. Passion and passive
are etymologically the same word, but the natural inferences from this
are erroneous. It happened that emotions were called passions by some old
Roman pseudo-philosopher who was translating Stoic doctrines and used
“passions” to translate _patheia_, which, in Greek, means “sufferings.”
The Stoics believed that emotions were sufferings inflicted on men by
Fate. Their great discovery was that men could conquer them by training
(_askesis_). Hence comes “asceticism”: the training by which a man might
free himself from the suffering which was caused by feeling anything.
Now we are beginning to realize that there are emotions that _ought_ to
be felt, and repeatedly—emotions that are as necessary to the growth of
the soul as food is to the growth of the body. Asceticism (training),
therefore, of the future will be a training in the emotions of love.
§ 34
Women are said to be more emotional than men. In the sense that their
actions are guided by their emotions more than by the verbal processes
of logical reasoning this may be true. For there is a type of mental
process that may be called logical in which verbal consistency is sought
and with little difficulty maintained. But as words are only counters,
symbols or representatives of things and are used in only a part of
all the thinking, conscious and unconscious, that goes on in the mind
continuously day and night, a term is needed with which to describe
the wordless thought-processes that are quite as important causes of
action as are the verbal processes; and to these has been given the term
psychological.
Emotions are for the most part indescribable, not to be adequately
represented by words, and are therefore to be regarded as psychological
processes tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal thought or
reasoning.
Men are characterized more than women by a tendency to subject their
mental processes to verbal control, while women utter many words in the
vain attempt to give verbal expression to their feelings. In men on the
average words have more weight in the determination of action; in women
feelings or emotions.
§ 35
In the sense, however, that women perceive with greater clearness and
intensity the internal organic sensations (or emotions) it is not true
that women are more emotional than men. Unconsciously, “down deep in
their hearts” the members of one sex are as emotional as those of the
other. Men have as many and as powerful emotions as women, but have
controlled some emotions more than women have, by annihilating or
attempting to annihilate, them by means of repression. But women too have
been forced to repress certain other emotions, notably the erotic.
§ 36
The most vital emotion is the erotic. I hope I shall not be misunderstood
in my use of the term “erotic.” I place it above all the other emotions
in dignity and complexity. It is sex plus love and more than that. “All
the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem.” All the
dynamics of the ages in the force of one feeling. It is the physical plus
the spiritual, the combination of bodily and psychical, the paradox that
makes the individual’s greatest personal happiness consist in his feeling
the happiness of another person of the opposite sex, the spiritual
force that vitalizes and sublimates every physical thing it touches,
the psychical that completely evaporates, if not supported by the most
physical, an emotion that, unlike any other emotion, comes from the
experience not of other _things_ but of another’s _emotions_, the only
emotion that responds pleasurably to _every_ manifestation of bodily and
spiritual activity of the member of the other sex. Erotism is the most
nearly perfect type of conjugal love.
§ 37
“After she has had sexual experiences,” Kisch maintains, “a woman’s
sexual emotions are just as powerful as man’s, though she has more
motives than a man for controlling them.” (Ellis, _Psychology of Sex_,
Vol. III, p. 202.)
Her motives for controlling them, which here means annihilating them or
repressing them, are egoistic-social ones (see § 43) just as man’s; but
in man-made society these motives are stronger in the woman than in the
man, because man has placed more repression on her sex impulses than on
his own.
In placing more repression on hers than on his, he has not, however,
given anywhere near a full expression to his own erotic instincts.
Because of the dominance of egoistic-social impulses in modern
civilization his erotism does not permit the expression of such
fundamental strata of his unconscious as are stirred in woman, whose more
flexible erotism is aroused to a pitch that he finds it difficult because
of his egoistic-social interests to ascend.
As is maintained steadfastly in this book, he has repressed his own, but
hers still more. In so doing he has lowered the moral, spiritual and
psychical status of marriage, which should, if they two are to become
one flesh, accept the entire body as well as the whole soul each of the
other. In repressing what he has deemed the physical side of love man
has put on himself a quite unnecessary burden. With the natural desire
to control, which constitutes masculinity, he has, in his thinking,
blunderingly made annihilation an equivalent of control.
This placing of more repression on her erotism than on his is due to
the fact that his own is so quickly satisfied in comparison with hers.
He acts en masse as if it would take so much of his time, now devoted
to egoistic-social ends, to equal, in erotic expression, her greater
capabilities.
§ 38
The most striking fact of most emotions, except those of love, is the
facility with which they are reassociated with ideas different from those
with which they first occurred.
The love emotions appear to be the least easily transferred, as indeed
they are the least easily stirred to their depths. This is said advisedly
on the well grounded observation that most people who say they love do
not love fully, and deeply. The more deeply they love, the more their
passion instills itself into every fibre of their being and the more
slowly they are able to change their love object.
But ordinary emotions, other than the erotic, are readily and almost
universally shifted from one object to another. Indeed, it may be
asserted that there is no innate content of any of the emotions except
love. Love innately requires an object of the opposite sex.
To illustrate the reassociability of the other emotions it is necessary
only to recall what things one has liked or feared years ago and compare
them with the present likes or fears.
And it would be enough to take fear itself as an illustration of the
variability of its content. When fear becomes fixed in a phobia, it is
extraordinary how irrational the association is, viewed from any logical
standpoint. A woman fears mice or snakes, although she has never been
injured by either, or beetles, although possibly she has never touched
one. Or she fears to cross an open square, and nearly faints if she has
to do so alone, although there is not a chance in ten thousand that any
harm would come to her. An association of an emotion so profound as fear
with some chance place or occurrence is ample proof that the emotions
themselves have no essential connection with any external object.
The absence of fear in some persons under circumstances where people
generally would be afraid also demonstrates the ready dissociation of
emotions from particular experiences. One can learn to like or to dislike
almost anything.
To a certain extent this is true of love but far less so if we restrict
the use of the term “love” to its more ideal phases. When we speak of
“Off with the old love and on with the new,” it will be conceded that we
speak not of true love but of a very shallow interest.
§ 39
A young woman, Miss F., married a man who made an ideal lover and to
whom she responded passionately; but yet she was not happy with him. She
had in reality fallen in love more or less unconsciously with a previous
suitor. She frankly told her husband she could not love him fully,
divorced him and subsequently married her first lover.
One might say that, if the reassociation of love emotions were as easy as
that of most other emotions the young woman might have learned to love
her husband. She evidently tried to do so, but she made the mistake, made
by many uninstructed young women, of going against her better judgment
in marrying the man she did. Her first lover was not in a financial
condition to marry. She wanted to marry, and took the first available
man. So, as in many cases, the fear of not getting married at all forced
her to take a man whom she did not love _enough_. She must have been more
or less conscious of this all the time. She made, however, a definite
attempt to reassociate her love emotions. She was not able to do it. Her
husband, although he is described as an ideal lover, was not able to
arouse her full passion.
§ 40
Then there is the case of Mrs. G., who married the prominent Dr. G.
practically on a wager. She did not love him, but in a spirit of bravado
declared to a girl friend that she could make him marry her. Not himself
being in absolute control of his own erotism, he succumbed to her charm.
Not knowing also the part a husband is required to play in the marital
life in order to make it a success, he did not make her love him, did
not evoke in her the responses which make a woman the object of a man’s
deepest passion. So, as in a great many marriages, he did not really love
her, and she divorced him after a few years.
Both women were unfortunate in their choice of a man. The resultant
divorces could have been obviated by the knowledge neither man had. But
this is the history of most divorces where the couples have come to grief
on obstacles considered to be erotic.
Neither of these women clearly distinguished between egoistic-social and
erotic motives because neither of them had had erotic experiences, and
in their marriages they failed also to get the highest type of erotic
experience.
§ 41
But it is impossible for any woman to know what sort of erotic life
will be hers with any man whom she consents to marry. At present every
marriage is a trial marriage for a woman, and for the uninstructed man as
well. Only the marriage composed of a woman and a fully prepared man can
be said to have any reasonable assurance of being permanent.
The other emotions than love are readily transferred from one object to
another. Love is not easily transferred as, primarily, it has only one
object, the human of the opposite sex, and where the love in question is
the elaborately developed love, that has its roots deep in the erotic
soil of the unconscious of both partners, which it invariably has, if
the husband knows how to control himself, the transfer is more like the
transplanting of a huge tree.
It all depends on the unconscious depth of the love whether it can be
transferred or not, or how long it may take. From this the corollary
is that the so-called love that is fickle is not worthy of the name.
Fickleness in a woman shows lack of skill in the man. Fickleness in the
man shows him to be not a man but an autoerotically minded boy.