Emotions of Menace and Enchantment

Disgust, Horror, Awe, and Fascination

Susan Beth Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138578807
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351263740
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Emotions of Menace and Enchantment examines four pivotal human emotions. It explores what defines these emotions, how they interact, and how they impact the experience of self-boundary. All four feelings speak to the boundary around the self, to whether we stiffen that boundary, relax it or worry about its fraying.

Psychoanalysis has looked closely at conflicts that human beings experience, but has paid relatively less attention to the specific emotions through which conflict is known and managed. The disgust emotion is unique in operating like a gatekeeper that manages what approaches us closely. Disgust appears prominently in our relationship with the physical world, but surprisingly, is just as common in the world of politics. It moves people to action, including deeds of great violence. Horror occurs when we feel invaded and altered by something that leads to profound insecurity. Human beings behaving inhumanly is one common source of horror. While disgust is a moral emotion, horror makes no judgments but speaks to the misery of being unsafe. Awe opens the self to the outside world, and creates moments that sustain us through times of stress. Fascination also involves openness but its characteristic attitude and attention shows its differences from awe. It forms the foundation for deep learning. All four emotions find their way into psychopathology; for example, fascination plays a role in addiction and awe in masochism and cult formation.

Emotions of Menace and Enchantment

will help mental health professionals in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychiatry and social work to better parse clinical encounters with the four emotions and to think as well about defensive patterns aimed at blunting contact with them. It will engage anyone interested in examining the roles these emotions play in politics, societal violence, addictions, and everyday joys and suffering.

1

ENTERING THE WORLD OF EMOTION

Disgust, horror, awe, and fascination stir us boldly when a subject seizes our interest. They move us bodily, as when disgust motivates us to step back and fascination to lean in. They rouse us socially, as they stimulate or stem our engagement with others. The four emotions at the center of this study assign potent characteristics to what is in the world; they ascribe value or worthlessness, security or menace. In contrast with an emotion such as shame that attends primarily to my self, or a feeling such as embarrassment that splits its attention between self and other, the four considered here most often focus on something outside that is engaging, affecting, or altering me. The stimulating subject may be a part of me but, if so, it is split off from the observing self and perceived as something at which I can look: I am fascinated by my own dreams or disgusted by a suppurating wound on my foot.

Emotions speak of how the world outside appears to us. They also reconfigure the experiencing self. Under the influence of a feeling, I may become a door that is opening or a wall of muscle. I am a flowing stream, an ice cube, a tattered dress, or a sky filled with sparkles. The self is a highly flexible state of body awareness, images, implicit metaphor, and idea. The four emotions at issue affect particularly the boundary component of self, which imagines us to be open or closed, expanding or narrowing, invaded or launching weapons from a defined base.

Disgust, horror, awe, and fascination often join forces. The negatively-toned emotions – disgust and horror – speak to our attention to a threat and our felt urgency in protecting ourselves from it, so they may work in concert. The “positive” emotions – fascination and awe – both intensify contact, attention, and eager absorption of what I have encountered, so they, too, co-mingle. States that seem to be in opposition team up as well. Confrontation with power evokes mixed emotions. What has the intensity to disgust us will fascinate as well. What horrifies with its destructiveness often awes by dint of that same force. The man horrified by a movie has chosen to stay up late to witness what disturbs him, so we can infer some fascination keeping company with his horror. All four feelings concentrate on what we regard as powerful and thus commanding of interest and, not infrequently, that shared focus brings all four emotions into play.

Extreme fascination and awe commonly draw into play opposing and limiting forces. When interest is fanatical and self-indulgent, it courts dangers that drop us onto the terrain of horror or disgust. Cautionary tales in horror stories speak to such overreach (Day, 1985) and show us how fascination and awe cooperate with disgust and horror.

An emotion’s momentary, highly idiosyncratic alterations in the sense of self may tell us a great deal about who a person is, has been, and aims to be. We can look at a 27-year-old Detroit man’s particular way of experiencing horror. The narrative is a sample of the data on which this study depends. In this and all other uses of research data, I use the participant’s narrative with no correction of spelling, typing, or sentence structure:

If there is something that am always afraid of is a nightmare. This is the reason why I have not had a nightmare for a really long time but the joy was short lived. A few days ago, I slept late watching “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Now this is the first time I was watching the movie and worse still, very late into the night. Once I went to bed, I took some time before I could actually get some sleep but when I did, I was living my own nightmare on Elm Street.

The movie resonates with my situation because the plot is about people sleeping and dying in their sleep. Before I even entered my room, there was an eerie feeling and I was very terrified. There was this chilling feeling of horror as if someone was watching me. I cannot even tell how I fell asleep but I wish I didn’t. When I woke up the next day, I could not believe that I was still alive and for some reason vowed to stick to the kind of movies am used to.

The horror stimulus is the complex narrative and imagery of a film, one about people dying in their sleep, in an exposed, unguarded state. We might wonder about any personal history that sensitizes the young man and note the line “[t]he movie resonates with my situation.” This man lives in a city known for violence. Is his vulnerability as he lies down to sleep influenced by any broader experience of defenselessness?

The beginning of his story is confused. He says he slept late but seems to mean he stayed up late. He states that he hasn’t had a nightmare in a long time because he is afraid of them, which is another perplexing statement. Perhaps his cognition is shaken by fear. A threatening outside world has invaded inner space. What was happening out there will occur internally so that a movie seen becomes a movie directed, in a nightmare.

He fantasizes he is being watched by a malign presence, which is a common horror trope. To be surveilled by something that has not openly declared its presence, its nature, or its intentions is a theme found in a number of narratives. Great power inheres in the gaze, which is the expression of your deep interest in me and my activities, and perhaps your power to harm me. If you do not identify yourself and your purpose, I know you to be peculiar, not normal. I assume evil intent.

He is chilled by horror, another common avowal, one that tells us that horror is a deep disturbance of self that perturbs the experience of a normally warm, safely energized body. He experiences himself as small and feeble, depleted of strength and heat. His condition is a body and mind affair.

We can see in this story and others to follow both idiosyncratic and universal elements in the reaction to a horror stimulus, or in a person’s belief that a stimulus is horrific. A responsive consciousness shapes the world, while also self-reflecting and detailing inner changes, especially with respect to boundaries.

The concept of taboo is an integrator of the four emotions. Taboo has been the subject of intensive study by anthropologists (Douglas, 1966; Leach, 1964) and was considered as well by Freud (1913). To regard a subject as taboo means to see it as holding and emanating great and dangerous power. Taboo is a status, not an emotion, but Freud endorsed a definition of the word – “holy dred” – that points us toward emotional aspects of our engagement with what is taboo, and signals the relevance of the feelings, awe and horror. Disgust may join the mix when people approach the taboo. Fascination may as well; consider, for example, the complex feelings stirred by stories about incest.

Emotion has been defined in a variety of ways. Along with the word, feeling, people use emotion to designate the conscious component of processes that psychoanalysis, in somewhat shifting ways, calls affect, from the German, Affekt. Studying the definitional complexities of the term, affect, André Green (1999) concludes, “Affect, therefore, should be understood essentially as a metapsychological term rather than a descriptive one” (p. 8). He suggests that, when looking for descriptive language, “the term affect may be replaced by another, more adequate one, one closer to the reality that it designates” (p. 8). Despite Green’s recommendation, psychoanalysts do, at times, continue to use affect rather than (or in addition to) emotion or feeling to designate felt experience (Spezzano, 1993).

Some nonpsychoanalytic scholars avoid the word affect, and treat emotion as synonymous with feeling (LeDoux, 2015). They restrict emotion and feeling to conscious experience (a useful if redundant phrase) that characterizes how an individual is in the moment, to his or her state of mind, which has bodily aspects and attitudal elements. I join those who avoid the use of the term, affect, as historically confusing, and speak instead of emotion and feeling, which denote consciousness. Talking about nonconscious processes relevant to emotion, I will label them as such. A useful definition of emotion was put forth by Levinson (1997):

At present there appears to be some consensus that in perhaps the majority of cases an emotion is best thought of as a bodily response with a distinctive physiological, phenomenological, and expressive profile, one that serves to focus attention in a given direction, and that involves cognition to varying degrees and at various levels.

(p. 21)

The words, emotion and feeling, can be used almost synonymously although emotion can connote slightly more weighty and abiding experience than feeling does. Emotion entails a sense of reification and a tilt toward a full, multi-faceted experience that feeling, for me, often lacks. They differ in their verb forms, too, with “I feel” designating an inner state and “I emote” emphasizing expression that others can read, nevertheless, in their noun forms, their meanings are too close for me to try to differentiate them.

As I work to define emotion and feeling, and look at others’ definitions (Levinson, 1997), I recognize that the experience of feeling contains something irreducible. A feeling is what is felt. It is uniquely itself as much as vision and hearing are, as the color blue, or the taste of an olive. Experientially, these cannot be defined in other terms though we can refer to the physiological events that associate with them and undergird the experience, or to external triggers or cognitive elements. Speaking of emotion, we can address aspects of the experience such as tension in the muscles, or ideas filling the mind, but assembling those elements does not amount to a feeling: the whole is not the sum of the parts. I can say that disgust is a pushing-away and pulling-back feeling, but the core of what it means to feel remains irreducible.

Speaking of and attempting to delineate particular emotions is easier than defining what it is to feel. Each emotion to be considered in this book has a structure, that is, elements without which we ought not to say the feeling exists in the moment. Each has as well certain variations that occur with frequency and deserve to be noted but are not essential to defining the state. These structures and their variants designate orientations toward an object – an other, a part of the self, or the self as a whole – and speak to changes in the self that aim to increase or reduce contact, to draw back, shake off, or drink in and absorb.

Also of note are precursor states. These are early developmental states that may be part of the lineage of one of the four feelings, but are not the full emotion. The person feeling them may lack self-awareness that recognizes “I am in this state,” and may be absent the ability to assign a name to what he or she feels. Such cognitive acts are a necessary part of adult and later childhood experience of discrete moments of emotion. Naming is itself an important element in the achievement of emotional maturity. It shapes our experience, as described by Philip Fisher (2002), who tells us that “naming always remembers only certain details about an object, thrusting them to the front whenever we want to think about it at all, with certain lines of thought already favored, the table tilted even before thought begins to roll” (pp. 112–113).

Many moments of life experience defy labeling with a nameable emotion with its clear structure. Feeling or emotion can be rapidly shifting, akin to a flickering flame, so that we move between one state and another and cannot simply say, it is this. Or perhaps we cannot get hold of the thing we want to denote: it slips in and out of cognitive definition as if it were a tree viewed in light so shifting that it throws complex shadows. We do not know what the moment is. Is it disgust? Horror? Both at once? Some emotion is subtle and entails little ideation or bodily bent. It calls forth none of the common labels we use for “the” emotions. It is a darkness or a brightness, a fog, or a bogged-down condition. Though it is feeling, it does not rise to the level of “a” feeling. I might have great difficulty describing it and no confidence that I could elicit an image of it in another person through descriptive words. It is as challenging to convey as a dreamscape.

Emotions are not all or nothing, present or absent; they come in partial forms and gradations. The fear I feel while reading a book about climbing Mt Everest and the fear I know scaling a mountain of rock and scree differ in important respects. Reading of a risky ascent, I maintain an awareness of my own physical safety that is absent when my foot slips on shingle and stone. I am in a state that has been called “mental simulation” (Walton, 1997, p. 38) Both, however, have elements that lead me to call them fear, though philosophers of art debate whether the emotion aroused by fiction is “actual” fear (Walton, 1997, p. 38).

In the chapters to follow, I will focus on four emotions that have names and identifiable structures; they have relatively clear form rather than vague contours that resist delineation. I will look at the moment of emotion and also at the life occurrences that stimulate it. In both tasks, three related concepts will be of help: each involves attention to important boundaries within human experience.

The first concept is that of category-breaching. Category-breaching is a term that characterizes certain events that stimulate emotion. Within this broad concept are four narrower ideas: the intercategorical, the marginal, the category-bursting, and the alien. The intercategorical breaches the boundary by lying between two defined concepts. Anthropologists (Leach, 1964; Douglas, 1966) have considered this terrain as has the psychoanalyst, Theodore Lidz (1973). An example of the intercategorical is the gender concept of hermaphroditism, which designates what sits between male and female. Categories are human constructions and so are malleable, and are influenced by culture and history. Contemporary feminist thinking (Butler, 1993, 2002; Dimen, 2002, 2003; Goldner, 2002; Layton, 2002) might move hermaphroditism out of the intercategorical realm and simply consider it a category unto itself.

Assigning something an intercategorical status affects what emotions it arouses. Consider the human fetus, which can be seen as lying between the categories of baby and tissue mass in a middle space that for many arouses a very uncomfortable confusion of emotions if abortion is under consideration. In an ethnography of rural north India, Jeffery and Jeffery (1996) speak of women, in the first months of pregnancy, who refer to miscarriage bleeding as a late period. “Women will say, ‘there was no pregnancy’ merely a ‘blob of flesh’ …” (p. 24). Women avoid the troubling intercategorical realm of early pregnancy. In Jamaican culture, denying the reality of early pregnancy enables abortions that would otherwise be conflictual. In the case of a wanted child, it mitigates grief (Sobo, 1996, p. 52).

The second variety of category breach is marginality, an idea much-explored in modern psychoanalytic and feminist theory (Benjamin, 1995; Corbett, 2009, 2016; Creed, 1993). Like the intercategorical, the marginal takes shape in relation to existing category. It positions an experience just outside a familiar grouping so that the parent-classification stays within our field of view. In some societies, a gay man would be thought of as categorically marginal in deviating from a familiar definition of male. In many cultures, a childless woman is marginal (Cecil, 1996). An adult woman should be a mother. One who is not has no comfortable, alternative category such as “child-free by choice.” We see how crucial cultural forces are: some people, in some times and places, would not see the gay man or child-free woman as marginal. The weight of culture is not a problem for our conceptualization, but is a primary reality of it.

Douglas (1966) explores the power that marginality has to evoke emotions. She considers, for example, the margins of the human body:

[A]ll margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most vulnerable kind.

(p. 122)

Matters at the margin can elicit fear, due to their dangerousness. We will see as well the role of marginality in the elicitation of disgust and sometimes horror.

The third type of category breach is category-bursting. This term refers to an active or explosive rupture of a classification. Category-bursting occurs when something new is formed by destroying an existing structure. An apposite image would be a seed pod that erupts, sending seeds into the air and tearing the pod itself. A short story too big for its genre would belong as well. A man whose mother elicits disgust by infantilizing him in a way that disturbs the category, “my adult self,” would also be an example.

The fourth category breach is alien status. To categorize something as alien is to say it does not fit in any familiar class of things, thus it merits its own grouping. The status of alien says that the most salient thing about the person, thing, or experience is difference from the familiar. The word familiar contains “family” and the alien is not of the family or self. It is foreign. The power of the word, alien, and concept has been marshaled in efforts to exclude or deport those without legal status within a country. In the US, arguments over the use of the word reflect understanding, on both sides, of its power to dehumanize.

Looking at these categorizations and attempting to use them, we quickly learn that I can construe an occurrence as intercategorical or as category-bursting, even alien, depending on how I conceive of it. Nevertheless, the classifications are useful if not taken to be mutually exclusive.

The second core concept I will use is self, an experience of delineation of what is and is not me in any given moment. The feeling that a border exists, containing the self, is shifting and can be elusive but is an important element in human consciousness that has relevance to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Entering the world of emotion
• 2 The gatekeeper emotion: disgust
• 3 The breakdown emotion: horror
• 4 The imbibing emotion: awe
• 5 The fixed eye of fascination
• 6 Concluding comments
• Notes
• References
• Index