[xmca] Emotions and culture

[Larry Purss <lpurss@shaw.ca>]

Hi everyone
I wanted to look at another level of the discourse on emotions.  This is to add to the recognition of the other levels such as institutionally and historically contexts of emotion. This in no way minimizes the critical importance of these levels of process for understanding emotion.
But, in the same spirit of discourse analysis which loos at the micro level of conversation I believe we expand our horizon of understanding by exploring the microgenesis of emotions as the interface between biology and culture. I have posted before on the position of Daniel Stern and the moment by moment generation of emotion.  Today I want to summarize the thoughts of a DONNEL B. Stern to this discussion in his book "Unformulated Experience" 
 
(p.43)When we talk about content or structure or experience it is not a THING at all, but a PROCESS, one that has CONTINUITY OVER TIME.  Some processes have more continuity (organization) some less. We act AS IF these discrete abstractions which our folk psychologhy labels thoughts, memories, feelings, are REAL but they are socially mediated constructions that locates experience in PARTICULAR stable ways.  Psychoanalysis is interested in how these processes keep reproducing experience in similar shapes or patterns through interpretive organizing ACTIVITY.
Stern discusses a psychoanalyst "ROY SCHAFER" who attempts to translate all psychological events and language games into ACTION LANGUAGE to recognize these psychological events as ACTIVITY. Schafer chooses not to take this approach because communication becomes awkward.
 
However he does elaborate the processes of REFLECTIVE EXPERIENCE (where we stand back from and observe our phenomicological processes.  Folk psychology (common sense) leaves the impression that thoughts and emotions just arrive or leap into existence without the DEVELOPMENT of the thought or emotion.  In reality each moment of experience is a process of emergence (MICROGENESIS) a sequence of necessary steps that must occur as experience UNFOLDS.  Microgenesis, applied  to thought and emotion develops from moment to moment in a process Donnel Stern calls FORMULATIND THE UNFORMULATED.  The microgenetic lens emphasizes the developmental life (Dewey's "arc") of each present moment OUT OF the experience of the recently formulated experience.  Conscious, explicit, liquistically articulated experience (formulated)emerges from activity (verbal and nonverbal) that took place in the preceding (sociocultural) moments.  This emergence of experience INCLUDING THAT PART THAT ARRIVES IN AWARENESS is ORGANIC and CULTURAL and is a continuous dynamic process.  Sometimes AFTER THE FACT the way one moment developed from the PREVIOUS one COMES TO OUR ATTENTION but more often it does not.
Donnel Stern uses the terms thought and emotion as heuristic devices and stress that he sees these processes as a single process of COGNITION (which for him is emotional-thought or thoughtful-emotion)  Cognition is formulated as a process of emergence within sociocultural activity.
William Blake's metaphor "seeing the world in a grain of sand" captures the spirit of this inquiry at the microgenetic level.  If this is seen as the unit of analysis it posits identity, subjectivity, and self-ing as emergent in moment to moment enactments which become organized into cultural patterns.

I hope this captures the spirit of the relational frame emerging in psychoanalytic discourse. They also are elaborating how the micro, meso, and macro levels of process develop in particulat historical contexts.
 
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