For, in the last analysis, all hysterics are deceivers both of
themselves and of others. Their symptoms, real enough at bottom, are
theatrical and designed for effect. As I shall later show, they are
weapons, used to gain an end, which is the whim or will of the patient.
In order to clinch our understanding of the above conditions we must now
consider in more detail certain phases of emotion.
Fear curdles the blood, anger floods the body with passion, sorrow
flexes the proud head to earth and stifles the heartbeat; joy opens the
floodgates of strength, and hope lifts up the head and braces man's
soul.
Man is said to be a rational being, but his thought is directed mainly
against the problems of nature, much more rarely against _his own_
problems. It is for emotion that we live, for emotion in the wide sense
of pleasure and pride. What guides us in our conduct is desire, and
desire in the last analysis is based on the instincts and the allied
emotions,--hunger, sex, property, competition, coöperation. The
intelligence guides the instincts and governs the emotions, but in the
case of the vast majority of mankind is swept out of the field when any
great decision is to be made.
We are accustomed to thinking of emotion as a thing purely
psychical,--purely of the mind, despite the fact that all the great
descriptions and all the homely sayings portray it as bodily. "My heart
thumped like a steam engine," or "I could not catch my breath"; "a cold
chill played up and down my back"; "I swallowed hard, because my mouth
was so dry I could not speak." And the Bible repeatedly says of the man
stricken by fear, "His bowels turned to water," with a graphic force
only equaled by its truth.
William James, nearly simultaneously with Lange, pointed out that
emotion cannot be separated from its physical concomitants and maintain
its identity. That is, if we separate in our minds the weak, chilly
feeling, the dry mouth, the racing heart, the sharp, harsh breathing,
and the tension of the muscles getting ready for flight from the feeling
of fear, nothing tangible is left. Similarly with sorrow or joy or
anger. Take the latter emotion; imagine yourself angry,--immediately the
jaw becomes set and the lips draw back in a semi-snarl, the fists clench
and the muscles tighten, while the head and body are thrust forward in
what is, as Darwin pointed out, the preparation for pouncing on the foe.
Even if you mimic anger without any especial reason, there steals over
you a feeling not unlike anger.
In a famous paragraph James essentially states that instead of crying
because we are sorry, it is fully as likely that we are sorry because we
cry. So with every emotion; we are afraid because we run away, and happy
because we dance and shout. In other words he reversed the order of
things as the everyday person would see it; makes primary and of
fundamental importance the physical response rather than the feeling
itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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