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Re: [xmca] about emotions

I don't feel a strong resistance to Freud, though maybe to some uses of his work. I think the Interpretation of Dreams is one of the best works of semiotics to be found, and very interesting to put beside Levi-Strauss work on myth, for example.
Freud and Jung were, at different times in their careers, both as obsessed with the issue of individual vs. culture/society as we are. Jung seems to have put culture first, a sort of top-down view. Freud in his mid-career seems more bottom-up, going from emotionally intense childhood experiences to later structures of ego and feeling. Late in his life, he turned to more of a Big Picture, and that's where I sort of lost him.
I think there is a lot of resistance to Freud (I don't know about how it stands here on xmca or in the CHAT community), but I suspect it comes more from the ideological antipathy to anything that counts emotion as more fundamental to human behavior than reason. For all the reasons I cited before about why the study of affect has been disparaged until recently, while cognition is a perfectly respectable topic to focus on.
In fact, outside the Anglo-Saxon world, Freud stands in much higher respect, especially in those Latin/Romance cultures where emotionality is itself more accepted (even for males!), Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc. I don't know how things stand in the Slavic world now. Of course Freud was disparaged by orthodox Marxism, and I would expect a counter-reaction in the post-Soviet era, and then some sort of balance being reached, perhaps consistent with the longterm slavic cultural attitude toward the respectability of emotion(s). Does someone know?
I bring all this up in response to Larry's point, only because it may provide a sort of index or window on cultural attitudes toward taking affect seriously in academic and intellectual terms. 

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Nov 30, 2009, at 9:10 PM, Larry Purss wrote:


Jay
I am not a Freudian scholar and have as much resistance to Freudian and neo-Freudian constructions as everybody on CHAT. It is the newer relational and intersubjective psychoanalytic theories that focus on interpretive meaning that I find interesting. They are looking at Peirce and the other Pragmatists, Gadamer, and are embracing the discursive and interpretive turn in the human studies. The point you have just conceded has implications which they are deeply invoved in exploring. Infant studies is one of the central focuses for their understanding. At the cultural-historical level they are engaging with the same themes as CHAT and I see many parallels. They are passionately trying to move beyond a Cartesian subject/object split and are looking at the linquistic turn, and also at the dramaturgical framework of enactments and scenarios. I personally find it generative of new and novel perspectives to engage with discourses which on the surface seem so oppossed. 
Jay,
I don't have an academic background and except for CHAT most of my thoughts are personal reveries on the development of "the self" 

Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
Date: Monday, November 30, 2009 8:49 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] about emotions
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>



Yes, Larry, I can agree that the originary moments of connection
for
an individual persist in some form as core constituents even of
the
later, more elaborated or "higher" cultural formations of
feeling. So,
were they to be undermined in an individual's psyche, by
some
conflicts of denials that blocked their participation in the
higher
forms, then those forms would lose their meaning and/or
their
emotional support. I find this an interesting way to look
at
psychoanalytic views of the emotion-culture relationship, at
least for
individuals. Would we get something similar also at the societal-

historical level of analysis? (I confess I never really
understood
Eros and Thanatos.)

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Nov 29, 2009, at 11:17 AM, Larry Purss wrote:


Jay
I agree that acts become symbolic because of there

ASSOCIATIONS and

patterns with other acts which are experienced as meaningful.
The question I struggle with is the focus on "higher" symbolic

and

"higher" cognitive relational patterns superceding and

transforming

these initial "moments of connection"  I agree that

complexity is

emergent and is formative of cultural historical patterns

of

activity and all the theories that try to understand this

matrix is

foundational to understanding human science.
However, this is where the "relational psychoanalytic"

discourse

points to a recognition that these "moments of connection"

continue

to be central (at the level of affect attunement) to all the

further

elaboration of culture.
If these "moments of connection" become disconnected (as a

regular

pattern) the whole cultural ediface collapses for that person

who is

disconnected.
Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
Date: Sunday, November 29, 2009 10:53 am
Subject: Re: [xmca] about emotions
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>


Larry,

I certainly agree about the importance of understanding how
"moments
of connection" occur, even across species, and to do so as
a
meaningful-and-feelingful process.

In Goodall's case, I wonder how long a prior period of
interaction
there may have been with this particular chimp? and whether some
sort
of bond was building up, with this special moment as an
emergent
threshhold for a qualitatively new relationship.

In the case of chimps, however, I don't think we can exclude
that the
processes involved may have been "symbolic" in some sense,
as
something like a symbolic capacity is well developed in their
species.
The gesture of touching hands, it seems to me, has a lot of
symbolic
potential in it: trust (cf. the human handshake or open-hand,
no
weapon gesture), and intimacy, and whatever relationships
between
chimps may involve light peripheral body contact, etc. How does
an act
become symbolic? at least in part because of its
associations,
sometimes even accidental ones, with other actions or
activities. For
instance, would we say that grooming behavior between chimps is
not
simply functional (to eliminate parasites), but also symbolic
of
nurturance relationships? or at least proto-symbolic?

Here is a hypothesis: no meaning without feeling, and no
feeling
without meaning.

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Nov 28, 2009, at 11:15 PM, Larry Purss wrote:


Emotions is a central topic to reflect on in our ways of being

human.> I was watching Moyers on PBS yesterday and he was
interviewing Jane

Goodal.  She described an incident when a chimp reached

out and took

her hand and their eyes met. She described this as a profound

moment

of recognition for both of them and changed their way of being

with

each other. In our theories of emotions we must include

an

explanation of what changed in their relationship because of

that

moment of connection that was not symbolic and was pre-

linguistic,

but was communication.
Larry

----- Original Message -----
From: Beth Ferholt <bferholt@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, November 28, 2009 9:33 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] about emotions
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>


Jay,
I am thinking about a three year old I knew very well explaining
that the
girl next door was his best friend because she made him cry

--

apparently a
good thing, at least until he learned otherwise from the older
people in his
life!
But we adults relearn all the time from the children around us
that sadness
(maybe not fear and its opposite, but certainly sadness), is

not as

different from happiness as we tend to assume.
Beth

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:59 PM, Jay Lemke
<jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:


I have had Scheff on my reading list for a while, but was away

from the

right kinds of libraries most of last year.

I'm afraid I just don't see why it's important to list

something as a

"basic" emotion? That usually just means that someone

wants it

to count as

having academic or intellectual importance, or that they want

to link it to

our baser animal nature, or that it's a candidate for some

sort of

biological universal, pre-determined by evolution. All of

which agendas give

me the creeps!

But I've heard good things about Scheff, so I will get round

to him soon.


How about this: there are several hundred "basic" emotions?

In any case, I was thinking of anthropological arguments about

"guilt> cultures" vs. "shame cultures" and the kind of analysis
Achilles was citing

from LSV about how feelings, whatever their biological

functions or

antecdents, get infused and transformed by culture into

something a great

deal more.

Thanks for the reminder about Scheff!


JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Nov 28, 2009, at 8:47 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:

Thomas Scheff

http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/
makes a good case that guilt is among the basic emotions, Jay.

Andy

Jay Lemke wrote:


Achilles, and friends --
I am not sure of the best interpretation of LSV's position

on these

matters, but it seems to me to be in the spirit of his work

and the later

CHAT tradition that we imagine a culturally informed

"development" (probably

with phylogenetic antecedents) in which the "higher"

functions develop out

of the earlier ones by a progessive layering or refinement,

specialization,>>> and differentiation -- both for higher
feelings as well as higher

cognitions.
Indeed I don't think we want to separate affect and

cognition, or feeling

and meaning, emotion and reason, too much. A little

distinction is useful to

give us purchase on understanding their integration. I would

assume that in

the developmental and evolutionary sequence, these two

aspects of our

adaptive operating-with-the-world, are initially less

separable and less

distinguishable, aspects of a single functional process. And

that later in

the sequence we LEARN to MAKE a distinction, and perhaps

even to FEEL a

difference between them.
But it is their functional integration which is of the

greatest>>>>>>> importance, not their difference (in my
opinion). So to the

higher mental

functions viewed cognitively (and it is not at all clear

that LSV did view

them ONLY cognitively in our modern sense) there must

correspond also

"higher feelings", what we might call culturally refined or

culturally>>> differentiated and functionally specialized
feelings, which function as part

of the whole engagement in activity that enables us to

sometimes get a bit

ahead of our semi-predictable environments. Insight.

Intuition. A feeling

for the organism. Good hunches. Good judgment. A nose for

useful lines of

research. And so on.
Of course once we are immersed in a complex world of highly

culturally>>> differentiated feelings, we realize that their
functions are not simply

practical, not simply dictated by evolutionary fitness. Or

at least not in

very obvious ways. And so I have taken to making a heuristic

distinction of

my own in terminology among emotions (the more classical

ones, triggered by

environmental events, with obvious adaptive significance,

like those listed

by Darwin and borrowed by James, such as fear, anger,

disgust, desire,

etc.), affects (which I use to mean the "higher" feelings,

the more

culturally specific and "refined" ones, like feeling noble

or feeling

guilty), and feelings as such (the general category, of

which emotions and

affects are subclasses, and which also includes the more

auto-perceptual

feelings like feeling tired or feeling dizzy).
Again it is not so much the distinctions here that I value

theoretically,>>> but getting a sense of the scope of the whole
domain of feelings, and how to

make sense of any particular feeling-type within it.

(Distinguishing again

between the uniqueness of a particular feeling on a

particular occasion and

the more generic feeling-types recognized or recognizable

culturally across

instances.)
Whew!  A lot to chew on ...
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Nov 27, 2009, at 10:45 PM, Achilles Delari Junior wrote:



Jay,

Thank you very much.

Something near to this distinction between feelings and

emotions>>>>>> was posed by William James too, according
Vygotsky, but James

saw this distinction in terms that these social dimension

of affective

world, the higher feelings, have almost nothing related to

biological,>>>> physiological, material, body, conditions. And
Vygotsky criticizes

this like a way of dualistic thinking - this dualism

can be

understood>>>> as based in ideological motivations too: "the
human is not an animal,

nor a material been, but a divine been, in his higher,

superior>>>>>>>> feelings..."


A distinction between feelings and emotions is present in

Damasio too

in neurofunctional terms... But Vygotsky proposed the

question of

a systemic inter-relationship in that the lower can turns

higher, and

vice versa... I don't know what we can thing about this...

In this

case, distinction between feelings and emotions are useful,

but if

we want to understand the entire human been, his/her whole

personality,>>>> the integration and inter-functional relations
between feelings and

emotions turns relevant too, In my point of view.

Best wishes.
Achilles.


From: jaylemke@umich.edu

To: lchcmike@gmail.com; xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: [xmca] about emotions
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:28:26 -0800
CC:

I am certainly one of those people interested in emotion,

or feeling,

or affect, or whatever we choose to make of the phenomenon.

The topic seems to have historically accumulated a lot of

ideological>>>>> baggage. And while its expression may be more
sophisticated today than

in times past, there doesn't seem to be that much less of

it (as for

example in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy review

noted by

someone earlier).

Emotion tends to be seen as bad in our philosophical

tradition. As the

enemy of reason, the motor of self-deception, etc. It

links us to the

animals, to our "baser" nature, etc. A bit of this in

the pagan

tradition, a lot of it in christian asceticism, and tons

of it in

Enlightenment rationalism and its successors.

Emotions are also associated with the unreliable feminine

vs. the cool

and collected masculine, with the passions of the mob

vs. the

thoughtful elite, with peasants, workers, and children,

and pretty

much every social category whose oppression needs some

legitimation.>>>>> Indeed one of the near universal
legitimations of elite power is "we

know what's good for you", not just because of what we

know, but

because you can't be trusted to see your own best

interests through

the haze of your emotions.

Useful as this is to elite interests, it combines further

with the

cult of individualism to make emotions a purely

individual, mental,

subjective matter. Non-material, non-social, non-

cultural, and

universal (the easier to apply the stigma of emotionality

to non-

European cultures). It is rather hard to crawl out of this

pit of mud.


As I've been trying to do for the last year or two. There

would be too

much to say for a short post on this list, but here

are a

few basic

suggestions:

Feeling is a broad enough category to get back to the

phenomenology of

affect/emotion, whereas "emotion" is too narrowly defined

within the

tradition of animal-like and universal.

There are a LOT of different feelings, and that is more

important than

efforts to identify some small number of basic emotions.

Many feelings are associated with evaluative judgments and

this may be

a key link to re-unify affective and cognitive.

Feelings do differ significantly across cultures, and are

part of a

larger system of meanings-and-feelings specific to a

community.>>>>>>>

You can't make meanings across any longer term process of

reasoning>>>>> without feelings and evaluative judgments.


It is likely that feelings have histories, both in

cultures and in

individuals.

Feelings are often reliable guides to survival, to

adaptive action,

and to finding ways to meet our needs.

Feelings are just as situated and distributed as are

cognitions. And

just as active and actively made and produced.

In short -- pretty much everything in our dominant

tradition about

emotions and feelings is exactly wrong -- and for the

worst possible

ideological-political reasons, I believe.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Nov 26, 2009, at 8:08 AM, mike cole wrote:

With so much interest in achieving an integrated

understanding of

emotion,
cognition, and development, Achilles, your focus on this

topic is a

helpful
reminder of its continued importance.

Seems like one of those many areas in psychological

research where

we cannot
keep from murdering to dissect.
mike
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