Re: feelings X emotion and the issue of inseparability

From: Ricardo Ottoni Vaz Japiassu (rjapias@uol.com.br)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 10:27:46 PDT


I think that it might be an unproblematic issue to socioculturalism the separation between INDIVIDUAL/ORGANISM and context (physical enviroment/sociocultural milieu). Although a separation between SUBJECT/PERSON and the context is, in fact, a very complex question.

Trying to make me better understandable I transcribe below, some Wallon's words found in his THE ORIGINS OF THE CHARACTER IN CHILD: THE PRELUDES OF THE FEELING OF SELF, published in Portuguese language (Editora Pensamento, 1971)

" Function essencially plastic and of expression, the emotions are a kind of formation of postural origin and have, as fundamental substance, the muscular tono [contract]. Its diversity is related to high or low tono, to its free flux into gestures and actions or to its accumulation with no output and its effective use, there, by espasms. (...) the emotions availabilities are, at every moment, by tono, related to different sensibilities, mesuring and regulating, in different domains of its activity, the organism reactions. (...) the signification of emotion is essencially psychical; it cannot be explained in other way other than as a road to action and a process of behaviour. It is wrong to try to distinguish, between its organic reactions, any sensibility and the motives that are embedded in it, specially to make use of this as a central phenomenum or its secondary reverberation. In the other hand, the [typically human] emotions touch representations that can serve to define its motives or its object. But when the representations go ahead along its own course and become a kind of regulator or stimulus of psychical activity, and are not produced by movements or as something biologically asked by emotions, the organical reactions usually cease - and without them, one cannot speak of emotions. It can occur a meeting between spasm and image [representation] but, in this case, will always happen a reduction of one by the other. So, there are two possibilities: (1) the ideaction [representations] will prevail on emotionallity, and always will wake up affective reverberactions: In this case, we can only speak of feelings (...) [and] (2) The representations also can have a target or an objective imposed to affectivity. Here, the emotion is processed into passion. A person moved by passion usually controls her/his affective reactions. Face to face to her/his emotional impulses, she/he walks to thinking, to reasoning." (WALLON, 1971, p.150-152) (Underlines mine)

So, at times, I have the impression that people in XMCA are talking of different things as they was the same. One thing is very clear to me: the separation between organism/individual and the context. The biological dimension of a living being can be unproblematically analysed or studied, segregatitng it from the context in which it is found. But, another thing, completelly distinct, is to study the subject or person raised - or co-constructed - under a human organism (individual) in a very specifical sociocultural environment. In this case, the "separation" does becomes a chalenger.

Some studies have shown that personality is something fluid and changeable according to context features and condictions (sociocultural, affective, cognitive, power relations etc ) offered to a one. The participation of subjects in commonalities of practices had been accompained along time by many researchers, revealing the emergence of identificatory conflicts and movements of inclusion, from pheriferiallity to central ("active") of a one or, on contrary, her/his exclusion or "spontaneous" personal running away from those normative practices.

As we might have in mind, according to Wallon, the difference between emotion and feeling, it is necessary, I think, "to give to Ceasar [biological dimensions of beeing] what is to be given to him and give God [historical and sociocultural dimension of psychsism] what is his".



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