A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Modern and Post-Modern Age

Jane W. Davidson, Joy Damousi, Jane W. Davidson, Joy Damousi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350090989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grèce antique

The 20th century, with revolutionary and rapid developments in travel, communications and computerised technologies, offered new and seemingly limitless horizons which accompanied and amplified distinctive experiences of emotions. The birth of psychology and psychiatry revealed the importance of emotional life and that individuals could have control over their behaviour. Traditional religion was challenged and alternative forms of spiritualism emerged. Creative and performing arts continued to shape understandings and experiences of emotions, from realism to detachment, holistic to fragmented notions of self and society. The role of emotions in family life focused on how to deal with modern day freedom and anxiety. In the public sphere, people used emotion to oppress as well as liberate. Countering threats to national security, personal and cultural identity, a range of political motivated activities emerged embracing peace, humanitarian and environmental causes. This volume surveys the means by which modern experience shaped how, why and where emotions were expressed, monitored and controlled.

CHAPTER ONE

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Medical and Scientific Understandings

MARK JACKSON

In 1922, the Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock” drew a sharp distinction between physical and emotional causes of psychological breakdowns among British soldiers during the First World War. The Committee had been set up in 1920 not merely in response to concerns about the prevalence of what became known as “shell shock” in front-line troops; it was also the product of anxieties about the impact of traumatic neuroses on military efficiency and the economic burden of compensating large numbers of soldiers who had become sick during combat: approximately 200,000 British soldiers had returned home from the war suffering from some form of psychological disorder, accounting for nearly 15 per cent of all disabled servicemen receiving a war pension (for historical discussions of shell shock, see Bogacz 1989; Bourke 2000; Leese 2002; Lerner 2003; Merridale 2000; Shephard 2002; Winter 2000). Chaired by the civil servant, solicitor, and businessman Lord Southborough, the Committee was tasked with considering the meaning and utility of the term “shell shock”, collating evidence from medical and military personnel in order to understand more clearly the causes, manifestations, and treatments of shock, and advising military authorities about how best to prevent traumatic neuroses in future through appropriate military training and education (Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock” 1922: 3).¹

One of the key points of dispute during the Committee’s examination of witnesses was whether shell shock should be explained in terms of “commotional” or “emotional” factors. In his initial descriptions of shell shock in 1915 and 1916, the British physician and psychologist Charles S. Myers had attributed disorders of memory and sensation to the noise and dust associated with shells exploding in close proximity to afflicted soldiers (Myers 1915: 316–20; 1916a: 65–9; 1916b: 608–13). Myers’ emphasis on understanding traumatic shock in terms of physical injury to the brain and nervous system echoed earlier explanations of “railway spine” as the product of the damage to bones, ligaments, and nerves inflicted by high-speed travel, as well as contemporary accounts of insanity that stressed the ways in which direct injury to the head could cause “commotion” in the molecules of the brain (for somatic approaches to railway spine and insanity, see Erichsen 1867; Mercier 1890). However, just as somatic interpretations of railway spine and insanity were gradually displaced by an emphasis on emotional factors, so too were physical explanations of shell shock increasingly challenged by medical and military writers who considered the condition to be the product of psychological, rather than organic, disturbances. In an overview of shell shock published in 1917, for example, the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith and the psychologist T. H. Pear argued that symptoms of shell shock, including muscular contractures, blindness, deafness, and mutism, were largely due to the continual suppression of emotions, such as fear, remorse, anger, and disgust, triggered by trench warfare (Smith and Pear 1917: 5–12).

Reflecting this growing tendency to read trauma in psychological terms, the Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry was unequivocal in its conviction that shell shock was primarily the product of emotional, rather than commotional, disturbances in vulnerable soldiers. According to the Report, evidence suggested that “the purely emotional variety of shell-shock,” caused by cumulative physical and mental exhaustion, accounted for “about 80 per cent of all the cases” (1922: 94). Members of the Committee recognized that noise, loss of sleep, fatigue, and the “thousand and one ills of modern warfare” could all precipitate symptoms (ibid.). However, they insisted that distressing circumstances only affected unstable soldiers, those “incomplete men” who were thought to be constitutionally prone to cowardice and ill-adapted to responsibility (on the notion of “incomplete men,” see Oppenheim 1991; Moss 2000). “Most witnesses were of opinion,” the Report concluded, “that the stress of war rarely produced insanity in the stable man, but that it acted, as is commonly observed with other forms of stress, as a factor upon those who by predisposition were liable to breakdown” (ibid.: 97, 144).

As a number of historians have indicated, contemporary distinctions between commotional and emotional causes of shock,² as well as the conflation of shell shock with emotional vulnerability, femininity, and cowardice, served military and economic interests.³ Execution of shell-shocked soldiers was used to deter others from malingering during wartime; and discrimination between the deserving wounded and undeserving soldiers who had broken down emotionally allowed government ministers and civil servants to reduce the payment of war pensions, in Britain at least, by adopting narrow “interpretations of what constituted a war-related injury” (Winter 2000: 9; Bourke 1996; Jones and Wessely 2005). In his evidence to the Committee of Enquiry, Major W. J. Adie, an Australian-born neurologist who had fought in France during the First World War and was working for the Ministry of Pensions, expressly excluded shell-shocked soldiers from compensation for their injuries. “No man who has simply broken down mentally,” he argued, “should be given a wound stripe, but the man with an obvious commotional shock who has been buried or blown up deserves one. I distinguish rather sharply between the two conditions” (Report of the War Office Committee 1922: 17).⁴ In spite of such certainty, the Committee’s attempts to separate emotional from commotional shock and to distinguish convincingly between stable and unstable soldiers were confounded by much of the evidence. According to the Report, not only did soldiers suffering from commotional shock demonstrate “symptoms of exactly the same type as those who were suffering from the emotional form,” but it was also “extremely difficult to say beforehand what type of man is most likely to break down” (ibid.: 92–3).

The War Office Committee of Enquiry revealed, or perhaps more accurately served to consolidate, a set of contradictions and tensions that continued to inflect scientific and clinical interpretations of the role of emotions in disease throughout the twentieth century. At one level, the Committee’s Report highlighted persistent ambiguities in medical understandings of the interrelations between mind and body, a situation that betrayed the emergent professional and institutional separation of scientific medicine from psychiatry and psychology. At another level, cultural preferences for physical rather than psychological explanations of disease during the early decades of the twentieth century helped to marginalize emotions in personal, professional, and political accounts of patterns and experiences of disease, even though contemporary commentators, such as the historian Caroline Playne (1925; 1928), were seeking to explain the origins and consequences of combat in terms of a collective emotional neurosis generated by the stresses and strains of modern work and warfare. In many ways, shell shock thus serves to capture and anticipate the ambivalence of modern Western societies towards the role of emotions, and their expression or repression, in shaping health.

There has been considerable scholarly interest recently in the cultural history of specific emotional states, most notably: fear and anxiety; the impact of Darwinian theories of evolution and adaptation on understanding emotions; the social and cultural roots of scientific studies of emotion (or what has been referred to as “emotionology”) in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the construction of emotional states as psychosocial phenomena; the place of emotions (anatomically and symbolically) in relation to the heart; and the ways in which emotions were incorporated into, or excluded from, scientific investigations of the onset and natural history of disease (Alberti 2006; 2010; Bourke 2005; Dixon 2006; Gouk and Hills 2005; Horwitz 2013; Gross 2006; O’Gorman 2015; Potegal and Novaco 2010: 9–24; Prinz 2003; Richardson 2013; Robin 2004; Stearns 1994; Matt and Stearns (eds) 2013; Stearns and Stearns 1985). Such studies have set the terms of discussion for historians of emotions, urging scholars to pay greater attention to personal and political narratives of emotional distress and to consider more carefully the complex interplay between minds, bodies, and languages across time. They have also challenged historians to recognize the ways in which contemporary understandings of emotions and their pathologies have been informed by gender and class relations, to problematize the apparent stability of emotional categories, and to develop more nuanced historical evaluations of the scientific and cultural drivers of disputes about the role of emotions in disease (Bourke 2003; Dixon 2012).

Emotions have also figured in histories of science. Otniel Dror has drawn attention to the manner in which emotions occupied a paradoxical conceptual space within experimental physiology around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Even while physiologists were studying the impact of emotions (as “objects of knowledge”) on bodily processes and devising new ways of inscribing and representing emotions within scientific research, they were endeavoring to establish the laboratory as an “emotionally neutral” masculine space, one in which regulating or eliminating the impact of disruptive emotions on experimental procedures became key to producing objective knowledge (Dror 2001; 1999). In an expansive and provocative special issue of Osiris published in 2016, Dror and his coeditors further explored the “emotion-denying” narratives of modern science, encouraging historians to expose more clearly the manner in which scientific technologies embodied both a “contemporary masculine emotional culture of self-control and restraint” and a “feminine emotional culture of sensitivity and feelings” (Dror, Hitzer, Laukötter and León-Sanz 2016: 11).

Similarly attuned to reading the modern science of emotions in broad contextual terms, contributors to a recent volume edited by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross have argued that, in the wake of what was regarded as the “excessive emotionalism” of Nazism, scientists in Europe and North America largely discarded emotions as objects of scientific enquiry after the Second World War. Instead, they focused primarily on models of rational control and self-regulation, at least until the growth of brain science combined with major social and cultural shifts to reinvigorate studies of emotions among neuroscientists, physicians, psychiatrists, and social scientists during the 1960s (Biess and Gross 2014). Collectively, these authors highlight the need to contest trans-historical and essentialist accounts of emotional states, to recognize conflicting constructions of emotions, to explore the social, political, and cultural specificity of scientific models of emotions in greater depth, and to acknowledge the benefits of more explicitly linking histories of science with histories of emotions.

Taking 1922 as its starting point, this chapter analyzes the shifting form and content of modern Western accounts of emotions and health.⁵ The first section explores Walter Cannon’s belief in the role of emotions in disease within the context of his conviction that physiological balance and mind–body unity are essential for health. Although not the only theory of emotions, Cannon’s model was influential in the development of psychosomatic medicine and physiological studies of stress during the mid-twentieth century. But, as the second section argues, scientists and clinicians who initially adopted Cannon’s framework began to dismantle his organismic vision of emotions as performative and embodied, preferring to reduce emotions to the psychological realm and to disregard his emphasis on the emotional origins of many diseases. The gradual disembodiment of emotions and their marginalization as factors in the etiology of disease were accompanied by a propensity for scientists, clinicians, and the media to trivialize emotions. In debates about seemingly emotional life stages, such as adolescence, midlife, and menopause, emotions became objects of ridicule, manifestations of individual weaknesses that once again foregrounded personal responsibility for governing reactions to the stress of life. While scientific medicine reinforced neo-liberal emphases on individual autonomous behavior, rather than structural inequalities, as the key driver of health and fitness, it also displayed a deep mistrust of emotional subjectivity as a causal factor in disease and warned against the physical, psychological, and political dangers of unregulated emotional expression.

THE MACHINERY OF EMOTION

In their analysis of shell shock in 1917, Grafton Elliot Smith and T. H. Pear referred admiringly to Walter Cannon’s “striking demonstration of the importance of emotion” in producing the “bodily disturbances” associated in particular with fear (Smith and Pear 1917: 8). Smith and Pear’s identification of Cannon’s work as ...