Emotion Management

It is striking how much of human life is devoted to emotion management. Among the more obvious manifestations of this are psychiatry, psychotherapy, drug taking, shopping, hot baths, and taking a brisk walk. We are forever trying to calm ourselves down, recover from an emotion-laden incident, cope with a crisis, contain our anger, improve our mood, and steady our nerves. We are a highly emotional species, well aware of the negative effects of affect. We are prone to depression, emotional breakdowns, and PTSD. This is quite strange: why would we be built this way—why would the genes engineer us to feel too much? The answer, presumably, is that emotions are fast-reaction unreflective propensities that exist to enable organisms to survive in a threatening world—or at least a demanding world. As I have argued, predator avoidance looms large in this brutal economy: we need to feel fear and feel it quick if we are to escape the clutches of homicidal predators lurking around every corner.[1] If this means that we are prone to pathologies of fear, then so be it—it’s a small price to pay for not ending up in the stomach of a ravenous tiger. Emotions are not fine-tuned and they are anarchic forces, but they get the job done. In any case, emotions clearly need to be managed, soothed, civilized, and kept under control; they can’t just be left to their own devices. Maybe there was a time when humans had not evolved any strategies of emotional regulation and life was miserable, chaotic, and short-tempered; then emotion management succeeded in calming the storm to some degree (civilized society was coeval with the pacification of unruly affect).

            It is a question how much of human life is related to this goal of mitigating the ill effects of primordial emotion. We are familiar with philosophies that address themselves to the management of emotion: Stoicism, Buddhism, Hedonism, etc. Philosophers have long been aware that there is a problem here, and they have made recommendations about living with the emotions that nature has bequeathed to us. But it is surely clear that other human institutions are also in the emotion management business, with greater or lesser success: music, art, literature, sport, motorcycling, dancing, singing, playing cards, swimming, going for a run, taking a nap, and boozing. All these help with the serious task of managing our emotions: they enable us to take the sting out of our emotions, or at least supplant them momentarily with something else. They don’t solve the problem of emotion, but they make it a bit less onerous, a bit less impossible. Even positive emotions like love have their disturbing underbelly (well explored by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream and elsewhere). We have yet to develop a drug that can quell the undesirable aspects of emotions while keeping the sufferer reasonably compos mentis (no doubt the pharmaceutical companies are working on what they laughingly call “the Spock drug”). The genes have devised a rough and ready way to get themselves into the next generation, but they have given us precious little with which to combat the fallout (a comparison with the atomic bomb is not inapt).[2]

            Except dreaming–that is, according to one theory (mine). Dreams are not a chosen method of emotion management, something we have invented in our quest to govern our emotional lives; they are products of nature—of the very genes that gave us the problem to start with. Dreaming is an adaptation for mitigating the ill effects of emotional inflation (hegemony, possession): it evolved in order to provide a way of regulating our emotional lives.[3] Presumably it pre-dates the other methods I listed and is shared by our fellow-sufferers the animals. In particular, dreams are devices for coping with fear, probably the most loathed of all emotions. We and other animals live with fear all the time: fear is remarkably protean and remarkably gripping. Maybe it performs a useful biological function, but it is extremely hard to handle. Anything that can soothe its psychic impact is welcome, and dreams (according to the theory) can do that to some degree. We can appreciate that fear management is a pressing need of the human species, finding many expressions in human life; well, dreams were the first (and probably the best) method of regulating fear.[4] It is rather mysterious how they do this, but we have good evidence that they do: interrupting a person’s dream life has a deleterious effect on his or her emotional wellbeing. Similarly, depriving someone of psychotherapy or art or a motorcycle could have a bad effect on his or her emotional state. Imagine what would happen if all these methods of emotion management were suddenly removed: we would all become shrieking maniacs or sniveling shut-ins. Oh, we would not be happy! The point I am making is that the emotion management theory of dreams should be seen in the context of a more general range of human characteristics dedicated to dealing with our emotional overload. Maybe some even derive from the dreaming method, notably narrative forms. Telling stories around the campfire recapitulates the stories our mind tells us while we are asleep—stories invariably revolving around emotions (particularly fear). People started to report their dreams and before long some genius is making up similar stories without having already dreamt them: emotions can then be processed in a way similar to dream processing but while the subject is wide awake. Mysteriously, the level of hysteria goes down a notch, as the narrative form works on people’s seething emotions. Eventually these spoken stories turn into books and people are reading novels in order to have their emotions regulated (and no doubt for other reasons too). If there were no dreams, humans might never have hit upon the idea of fiction; dreams provide the cognitive-affective foundation of the art of narrative form. It might be so.

            But there is another narrative form that cries out for inclusion in this picture: film. Watching films is clearly a method of emotion management for many people—an escape, as they say. Arguably, movies have had a larger impact on the psyche of ordinary people (and extraordinary people) than any other cultural form, including popular music and pornography. People live their emotional lives (partly) via the Big Screen: fear, love, grief, exhilaration, compassion, etc. They don’t sit there in the dark in an affect-free zone; they emote to their heart’s content. Look at the face of average moviegoer! Horror films have been remarkably durable and popular, as well as other fear-based genres. The ancient dread of predators is being processed via the moving image (there is a movie called “Predator”). But now we can make a theoretical link: for movies are a dreamlike medium.[5] So the palliative effect of movies mirrors that of dreams, and maybe even improves on them: the psychological mechanisms that govern dreaming are recruited while watching movies. Movies tap into the same set of psychological capacities: imagination, narrative understanding, visualized affect, and emotional re-enactment. So we can predict that movies will bring the same sort of relief that dreams bring (whatever exactly that is): they will render our emotions easier to live with. They won’t solve the problem of emotion, but they may ease it; they afford some sort of amelioration (as psychotherapy does, also somewhat mysteriously). And they are closer to nature’s own psychotherapist—the dream creator—than other means of emotion regulation. I venture to suggest that movies have done more to modify human emotion than any other art form, at least in societies that have them, precisely because they recapitulate dreams. Practitioners have long realized that dreams are central to psychotherapy; film experience could be likewise revealing (better than Rorschach tests). Both are sites of affective enactment—that mysterious process in which emotions assume a different character by linking up with imagination. Dreams, films, songs, games, physical activities, philosophies, books, etc.—all these work to regulate emotions. The emotions originally arose as devices for coping with a demanding and dangerous world, without much regard for their disruptive and unpleasant side effects, many millions of years ago (what must the emotional life of dinosaurs have been like?); these modern developments are aids that enable us to deal with the fallout. Dreams are the most ancient and primitive, but they seep into other forms too, particularly film. We accordingly live at the intersection of wild emotion and relatively feeble attempts at containing it. Other animals have fewer ameliorative resources, but then again their emotions don’t seem quite as unmanageable as ours (though the life of an elephant, say, may be much more emotionally fraught than we imagine). At any rate, we have a lot to thank dreams for. Things could have been worse.

[1] See my “Dreams and Emotion”.

[2] It’s not as if emotions have a switch-off threshold: they don’t simply turn themselves off when they get too intense. We might venture the Law of Emotional Amplification, which asserts that emotions will keep amplifying indefinitely. You thought you were pretty angry about X and then you encounter Y, which produces an even stronger anger reaction—and then you are presented with Z, which exceeds anything you might have imagined. There seems to be no upper limit to the intensity of an emotion.  

[3] We don’t feel the need to regulate our perceptual and cognitive lives: it’s not as if our perceptions and thoughts have a tendency to get out of control to our detriment (unless driven by emotion). We don’t live our lives trying to mitigate their ill effects (though they can of course malfunction). But our emotions have an inbuilt tendency to go rogue, to run amok, to trample the chickens—so we need to find a way to corral them, tame them, keep them away from the chickens. Our thoughts and perceptions are not our enemies, but our emotions are always one step away from that status. That’s why Aristotle counseled moderation and the Buddha inner calm (meditation being a tool of emotion management).

[4] Theorists have used words like “repress” and “release” to characterize the way emotion can be regulated. These are dubiously hydraulic terms and should not be taken to define the range of operations the mind might employ. I use the word “regulate” to be as neutral as possible as to how the mind might act on emotions in the overall economy of the psyche. I don’t think we have any clear ideas about how such regulation works, though that does not imply that there is no such phenomenon. One part of the mind can modify another part to produce such and such an effect—that’s about all we know.

[5] See my The Power of Movies (2005).

Dreams and Emotion

It is widely agreed that dreams are a mystery, or rather dreaming is. Why do we and other animals dream—what purpose does it serve? And why do we dream about some things and not others? Dreams seem pointless, even disruptive: why did nature install the ability to have them? One thing is clear: dreams are closely connected to emotions. The precise nature of the connection is not well understood, but that there is such a connection would not be disputed. So maybe we should begin by asking what the purpose of emotion is: why do we have emotions, and why some emotions and not others? It is tempting to reply that emotions are easy to understand: natural selection installed them to serve specific biological ends such as the avoidance of danger or mate acquisition. But this answer is superficial; emotions are mysterious too. Why did emotions evolve to fulfill these functions and not some non-affective trait or mechanism in the style of Mr. Spock? Plants manage without them, as do bacteria and primitive organisms: emotions are not the sine qua non of biological survival. And why must they be so extreme? Surely we could do without all the emotional drama and proceed in a more calm and calculating manner. Emotions are unruly, chaotic, disruptive, often irrational, uncontrollable, and linked to depression, anxiety, neurosis, and insanity. We could do without them a lot of the time—they are a burden, a trial, and a cause of strife (Mr. Spock’s considered opinion). It’s also hard to know what they are exactly, which lends them further potency. Fear, in particular, is volatile, labile, and dominating, easily sliding into phobia; and we all know about the ill effects of anger, envy, and jealousy. Emotions are the bane of our existence, what with one thing and another. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Spock’s serenity? So it’s not clear why we have emotions, biologically speaking, and their activities leave a lot to be desired—rather like the dreams they are linked to. Still we do, so it would be good to have a theory of them. Perhaps if we did we would be closer to understanding dreams and dreaming.

            There seems to be a clear connection between emotion and imagination. Fear will lead to images of injury and death; sexual emotion will lead to sexual imagery; anger will produce images of revenge and downfall. We often see in our mind’s eye what the emotion concerns; the two are made for each other. Why this should be is not so clear, but it appears to be a fact. If we regard dreams as exercises of the imagination, we can see a natural affinity between emotion and dreams: dream images are the shape emotions take while we are sleeping. The emotional faculty recruits and infiltrates the imaginative faculty; the imaginative faculty is readily available to the emotional faculty. Thus the imaginary landscape of dreams is an emotional landscape. Accordingly, the excesses and pathologies of emotion will be manifest in dreams; we might even say that dreams are the imaginative identity of emotions—what they look like when they join forces with the imagination. The two things fuse in dreaming. If the imagery of dreams is primarily visual, then emotions get transformed into visual images in dreams. Thus the mystery of dreams and the mystery of emotion become entangled: why do dreaming imagination and the emotions combine in this way? Our explanandum becomes the dreaming-emotional complex—an emergent psychological unit. What theory might we give of this psychological formation? How might it have arisen and for what purpose?

            Let’s take fear as our paradigm: why does fear exist? My conjecture is that it arose in the context of predation: animals are naturally afraid of what preys on them (as well as other things no doubt). In our case we used to be deathly afraid of big cats: a gene for feeling intense fear in the presence of such predators would be favored by natural selection. This is a useful adaptation when encounters with such dangerous animals happen frequently, but it has a tendency to spill over into other areas of human life. We easily become a fearful and timid species obsessed with death from a tiger’s jaws. It’s a bit like deer evolving big antlers in order to joust with reproductive rivals: the antlers do the job nicely, but you have to carry them around all the time. We suffer from emotional overload arising from a useful but localized adaptation—a downside to the upside. The emotion needs to be extreme to do its job effectively, but then you are saddled with something intense and uncontrollable, something that can easily lead to phobia and neurosis. The prey animal is in an arms race with the predator animal, and it evolves the emotion of fear as part of its armory; but like all arms races the weapon becomes a liability—prone to malfunction, indiscriminate, and expensive to maintain. The weapon needs to be regulated, contained. This is where dreams come into the picture: they serve to process and manage emotions that exist because of specific biological imperatives. Something about the transformation into dream materials calms and controls the underlying anarchic emotions, rendering them less toxic and disruptive. Dreams are a kind of counter-adaptation regulating and mitigating the emotions that have evolved to perform a specific vital function. They are a kind of self-therapy combating the ill effects of excessive emotion. The original adaptation was crude but effective, by no means the perfect solution to a survival problem (nothing ever is); the imagination in the form of dreams stepped in to keep the emotions in some sort of order. Compare pain: it’s a good way to motivate the animal to avoid injurious stimuli, but it is prone to undesirable side effects such as chronic pointless pain. The body normally has ways of terminating pain when the job of avoidance has been done, but it is by no means perfect; then we have to resort to massage or herbs or surgery. Presumably apex predators have little to no fear of becoming prey themselves, so they possess no fear response to the presence of other animals (or not much); such animals would not need a dream life to mitigate the side effects of this kind of fear. Their dream life might be thin to non-existent, according to the theory under consideration. Let’s call this theory the “fear-of-predator management theory of dreaming”: simply put, dreams exist in order to manage our fear of predators. That’s how the psychological formation originally evolved (it can take other forms as time passes): predators—fear—fear management—dreams.

            An immediate objection is that it is not clear how dreams could have this therapeutic effect: in virtue of what do dreams “manage” emotions? How does imagination work to bring emotion under control? We know that it does because it is well attested that dream deprivation leads to emotional troubles, sometimes serious. When dreaming is reduced the emotions start to cause problems. We can speculate that if dreams were entirely eliminated the person would become an emotional wreck; dreaming keeps those raging emotions in check. Emotions are dangerous things when left to their own devices, and dreaming helps to keep them healthy. That’s the theory anyway. Why this is we don’t know—it’s just a psychological fact. To this extent the theory harbors a mystery: it doesn’t say how the transformation of emotions into the visual (and other) imagery of dreams serves to keep the emotions healthy; it simply asserts that this is the case. In this respect dreams are like the action of a drug that we know eases a particular pathological condition but don’t know the mechanism. Dream activity has a therapeutic effect on emotional wellbeing, but we don’t know how the causal structure operates: all we know is that fusing emotion with imagination in dreams keeps emotions in reasonable health. But if the theory is true it explains why dreams evolved and what their function is: dreams operate to reduce the ill effects of emotions that would otherwise overwhelm the organism. The dreaming imagination tames the emotions; it keeps them relatively placid and well behaved. Without dreams our emotions would consume us; we need that counter-adaptation. Imagine if emotions were the result of parasites that invade the brain, causing much psychological ill health (Spock might become the victim of such a parasite). Then a neuroscientist figures out an antidote—install a dream module in the brain to counter the emotional effects of the parasite (this would make a good Star Trek episode). It might simply suppress the disruptive emotions, making them more manageable; or perhaps it works by converting the emotion into a pale simulacrum existing in another part of the brain (the part devoted to vision, say). In any case, the emotion ceases to have its demonic power, its disruptive overreach.

            I have focused on fear but much the same treatment can be applied to other emotions. Sexual emotions can be expressed in sexual dreams, and we can suggest that such dreams work to keep the emotion within tolerable limits. We need not think of this on a hydraulic model with the dream allowing a release of energy (or some such); instead we can think of the dream actively changing the charge of the emotion in some way that we don’t understand (drugs don’t work by releasing what they are designed to modify). Jealousy is a biologically useful emotion as a way of securing a mate, but it is notorious for its poisonous effects (see Othello); and dreams might work to dampen or transform this difficult emotion. Similarly for envy: it can motivate achievement in a social species, but it can also poison a person’s life—dreams might work as an antidote to this poison. And let’s not forget the boiling cauldron of childhood emotion: it’s hard to see this as healthy and adaptive in every respect, even if it has a biological function. Childhood dreams (especially nightmares) might well serve to keep the cauldron at a tolerable temperature. Adult emotions are not discontinuous with childhood emotions, as developmental psychologists remind us, so the ability to dream does not become redundant as we grow up. Dreaming is still necessary in order to keep emotions from spilling over. This has nothing to do with repression in the manner of Freud; it is more a matter of containing a crude but urgent psychological adaptation. I see it more as reshaping than as holding down: it gives emotions a mode of existence that allows them to do their job while not causing too much psychological havoc. As I indicated, there is an element of mystery to this process, but perhaps that is just as well, since the mystery of dreams is not going to be solved by anything obvious and completely devoid of mystery. What I have done is identify the location of the mystery while sketching a plausible evolutionary story.

Mind Fuck America

Here is the first verse of Green Day’s American Idiot:

Don’t want to be an American idiot

Don’t want a nation under the new mania

Can you hear the sound of hysteria?

The subliminal mind fuck America

I wrote a monograph entitled Mindfucking over a decade ago, and it seems more prescient every day. What else is the Big Lie? But don’t think it’s confined to the political right: the left is prone to it too. The point I missed is that the mind fuck can proceed on the basis of an obvious lie, so long as the audience is primed to accept it. Indeed, the bigger the lie the better, so long as it has the right psychological shape. I notice that Green Day associates the phenomenon specifically with America–a point worth pondering.