The Psychology of the EmotionsRibot, Th. (Théodule)
Science
The Psychology of the Emotions
Ribot, Th. (Théodule)
Emotions
2. If we admit the old maxim: “Naturam morborum medicationes
ostendunt,” as we see every day the same general therapeutics
applied to both forms of pain, we have here evidence in favour of
their identity: no doubt there are curative methods proper to each;
for moral pain, consolations, distractions, travel; but are not
opium, sedatives, and tonics employed to relieve both?
3. I brought together at the beginning of this chapter the grossest
forms of physical pain and the most refined forms of moral pain; but
there are composite forms in which sensations and representations
seem to form an equilibrium, so that such painful states might be
entered under either head. This is the case with certain
melancholics of whom I shall have to speak later, but we may take as
a type the hypochondriacal person in whom we find the point of
junction of the two pains. The physical troubles of hypochondriasis
have often been described. There are localised pains, but in
addition a large number of simply represented pains, enlarged as by
a lens, and referred to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen,
the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines. The joints are cracking;
there are conjectures concerning the appearance of the face, the
tongue, the urine, and above all what perpetual anxiety! One of them
said: “I feel better to-day, and that makes me anxious; it is not
natural.” Is this physical pain or moral pain? Sometimes one,
sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual and
the moment. Clouston has observed that in melancholics sadness often
diminishes when physical pain increases. They are so intimately
intertwined that no point of departure can be established between
them. This morbid state is worthy of mention because it also is a
transitional form. We need have no hesitation in generalising, and
saying that there is no physical (that is to say, localised) pain,
however slight, unaccompanied by some fugitive mental irritation,
and no mental irritation unaccompanied by some slight physical
troubles.
The foregoing does not imply that grief is a very refined physical
pain, or that it arises therefrom, as—according to the well-known
formula: _Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_—it
is supposed that the superior forms of knowledge arise from
sensation alone. That would be a misconstruction. Physical pain is
not a genus of which moral pain is a species. The thesis which I
maintain is that pain is always identical with itself, that it has
its own conditions of existence, that the innumerable modes which it
presents to us in the physical order and in the moral order are
related to the sensorial or intellectual elements which excite and
envelop it.[30]
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Footnote 30:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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