Rob Boddice on Pain and Well-being

 

Pain experience is not a human universal. It has a history. It changes over time and from place to place. Elaborating this history exposes the politics at the core of attempts to measure, validate or dismiss the experience of people in pain.

 The language of pain, stretching back to antiquity, conflated the emotional and the physical. The overlap of grief, anguish, despair and sorrow with physical pain lies at the heart of vernacular expressions of suffering in Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese, as well as in English and other European languages. For thousands of years, the statement ‘I am in pain’ was an emotional as well as a physical claim. While this semantic overlap seems consistent, the precise conceptualisation has varied enormously, from ὀδύvη (odúnē, Ancient Greek) to dolor (Latin), to wajaʿ (Arabic), to dard (Farsi, Hindi and Urdu), to tòng (Chinese). Moreover, there is a rich history of the iconography of the ineffable: representations of pain that, while it could not be uttered, was nonetheless expressed. By documenting the historically situated processes of experiencing and expressing types of pain, it is possible to show both an enormous variety while insisting upon a long history of the braiding of the emotional and the physical. This has the effect, in turn, of implicitly de-naturalising and situating present-day experiences of pain and of disrupting two centuries of modern medical expertise.

 Take, for example, the concept of grief in ancient Greece: ἄχεος (ákheos). It is one of the key terms for grief or distress at the heart in the Iliad, but it is also one of many words in Greek for pain/suffering. Despite the association of Achilles with other passions, it is grief-pain that he embodies in his very name, and it is in the name of this pain that most of Achilles’ violent actions are carried out in the final books of the epic. You might object that Achilles is a fictional character, a demi-god; that this pain is merely literary, not literal, and not human. Yet the Iliad framed ideas and practices of virtue, belief, warfare and ritual for centuries. It was key to Greek self-fashioning in the classical period. It was the central intertext of Plato’s Republic. If Greeks learnt how to do pain, they learnt it, in part, through Achilles.

 Those pain practices changed over time, despite the preservation of the stories. In the Iliad, when Achilles learns of the death of Patroclus, his friend, comrade and maybe lover, he flings himself into the dirt and tears out his hair, while his attendants all wail. When the body is finally recovered, Achilles is all tears, wails, groans and cries. He is like a lion whose cubs have been killed by a hunter, whose pain is quickly directed in anger (χόλος, khólos) and revenge. When Achilles’ mother finally arrives to deliver his new armour, she finds him still clinging to Patroclus’ dead body, openly weeping.

 Yet by the time of Plato many of the apparent virtues of the Iliad were in question. On an Attic red-figure volute-krater from about 460 BCE, perhaps some 300 years after the Iliad was first set down in writing, the figure of Achilles is discovered by his mother precisely at this moment of his grief. The artist does not show Achilles in tears, clinging to the body of Patroclus; instead, Achilles is depicted alone, entirely veiled in a shroud, save for the top of his head and the symbolically important heel of one foot.

 Veiling, according to the research of Douglas Cairns, became a prominent display rule in ancient Greek culture, precisely to conceal tears and the expression of grief. The scene is newly realised to make it conform to accepted practices in classical Athens, for the open shedding of tears would have contravened social norms. The vulnerability evinced by grief is shielded by the veil, both to protect the pained from a loss of status and to protect witnesses from the painful sight. The veil is the symbol of grief, a sign of pain that serves to conceal it. The artist shows a greater fidelity to the pain scripts of the 5th century BCE than to the epic poem of three centuries earlier, to spare the viewer – the user, the holder – from the spectacle of unconstrained grief. Achilles’ grief had become difficult to handle socially, difficult to read experientially. The veil, then, was the expressive way of saying, without words and without facial expression: ‘I am in [a particular kind of] pain.’

 In a different milieu, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch understood the potentiality of wordlessness and of the blank face. The blankness of his own pain(ted) visage demonstrates another sign of ineffable, emotional pain, that is nonetheless expressive and learnable. Fuelled by the Danish philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard’s angst and mired in grief, poverty and suicidal thoughts, Munch was plunged into fortvilelse, a mixture of despair and violent grief.

 This painful bearing inspired many of his paintings, including The Scream (1893), but undergirding them was a single experience, which he jotted next to his preparatory sketch for the painting Fortvilelse (Despair, 1892), reproduced here in a translation by the contemporary poet Eirill Falck:

 

I walked along the road with

two friends –

the sun set

the Sky suddenly blood

– and I felt as a gust of melancholy –

a sucking pain under the heart

I stopped – leaned against

the fence tired as death

over the blue-black fjord and city

laid clouds of blood dripping

{…} smoking blood

{…} My friends walked on and

I stood quivering with an open wound

in my breast … quivering with anxiety

I felt tearing through nature

a great unending shriek

 

Munch transfigures, in these words, the experience of a physical, humoral pain – his melancholy, his pain under the heart – into the pain of the world, where the sky bleeds and nature screams, not audibly, but sensibly. The inadequacy of Munch’s description of his own pain is marked by his erasure of the lines that attempt to express it. And while all the words would be eliminated entirely in the final painting, the erasure of the personal and physical embodiment of pain is mapped on to the painting. The face of the figure, leaning against the fence, is featureless – not an absence of expression, but simply nothing in the place of a face: not a mask, but deletion. The pain is mapped instead on to the sky. If, for the man, pain was ineffable, one needed only to look up to access it. This profundity of suffering put the pain everywhere. Munch’s language of pain, ultimately, was paint. The concepts required to express it are in evidence. They are situated – melancholy and angst, mixed with the bruised city and the bloody sky – and distinct. To access this pain requires cultural knowledge.

 Comparable contemporary pains also require different kinds of knowledge. Think, for example, of the pain knowledge required for the singer Lady Gaga (aka Stefani Germanotta) to express the lasting effects of trauma after she was raped at age 19, and of the pain knowledge we require to read about it and make it intelligible to ourselves. In an extraordinary interview in 2021 for Apple TV+, part of the series The Me You Can’t See on mental health, she described the ‘full-on pain’ she felt, before a numbness that meant she could not ‘feel’ her ‘own body’. The physiological manifestation of emotional pain led doctors to search the interior: ‘I’ve had so many MRIs and scans where they don’t find nothing,’ she said. All of the symptoms, in fact, stemmed from the rape. ‘[Y]our body remembers,’ she said. ‘The way that I feel when I feel pain was how I felt after I was raped.’ This ‘total psychotic break’ lasted ‘a couple [of] years’, where ‘getting triggered’ would bring back the full terror of physical and visceral pain.

 Such pains are now increasingly validated, both culturally and medically. They have nothing of nociception – the reduction of pain to sensory perception – and nothing of physical injury, but they are of the body, of the mind, and of the world in which they are situated, in a complex dynamic. Lady Gaga’s words, increasingly common currency in the present – of mental health, of psychotic breaks, of MRIs and triggering – are the right words, the correct cultural script, for the validation of her pain.

 Such accounts represent a moment of epistemological and cultural upheaval. Medical scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries had striven to pin down pain – to objectify how it works, how it feels, how to see it, and how to measure it. They attempted to isolate the physical pain caused by injury and disease from disturbances of the mind, in the hope of a mechanical explanation of pain that could be mapped on to the logics of prevailing civilisational assumptions about race, gender, age, class and species. As such, the skin and the face of the adult white male became the benchmark for pain sensitivity. At various historical junctures, women, infants, Jews, African Americans and Indigenous people from various countries were considered insensitive or oversensitive, disproportionately expressive of pain (complainers), or else entirely brutal, like other animals. The insensate correlated, at times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the criminal classes, who might also be identified, according to the prominent research of Cesare Lombroso, by their incapacity to feel pain.

 At the core of these attempts to stratify sensation was the implicit assertion that pain was a physical phenomenon, expressive of the relation between peripheral nerves and the brain. Through most of the 20th century, Western medical scientists laboured under the misconception that the experience of pain could be pegged to a scale of intensity. The greater the stimulus, the greater the pain. The more serious the wound, the more serious the pain. It is one of those apparently obvious correlations that have no foundation. The experiences of the war-wounded on a grand scale provided doctors with a wealth of empirical information that inconveniently disconnected damage from pain. Large wounds did not always hurt.

 These mysteries pointed researchers to the dynamics of nervous signalling: the traffic was not just in one direction, from the periphery to the centre, but also from the centre to the periphery. How a sensory stimulus feels is mediated by appraisal, and that appraisal is situated in terms of the personal experience of the individual, the degree of attention applied to the wound, to the immediate occasion of the injury (danger, fear, reassurance, safety) and to the cultural repertoire of pain concepts that provide the framework for expression. While in the 1960s these dynamics came to be understood in terms of an innovative model called the gate control theory (responsible for the automatic regulation of the messaging between the brain and the periphery), the challenge of pain was not solved by metaphors of electronic engineering. For, while it went part of the way to explaining the varieties of physical pain experiences, it did not solve the problem that, often, great pain could be found even in the absence of lesion. And then there was chronic pain. Neurological research alone could not provide an answer to pains that endured.

 A logical drift towards the unpredictability of pain and a multidisciplinary acknowledgement that experience is mutable ought to have been forthcoming, but the biological universality of pain processes and the objective readability of pain, either from the skin or from the universal pain face, remained attractive propositions. The quest for the universal pain face, based on the flawed notion that the expressive musculature was directly representative of inner experience, had been ongoing since the 17th century, and remains so. From mice to men, researchers have tried to pin down the pain face, but to no avail.

 The face of pain is no less situated than any other expression. Sometimes it smiles. Sometimes it frames a scream. Sometimes it grits the teeth. The face, per Munch’s depiction of it, is not by itself a reliable indicator of anything. There was a turn, in the late 1970s, toward a biopsychosocial understanding of pain that aggregated biological function, psychological disposition, and social situation. The experience of pain seemed always to depend on all three. Yet, in practice, the disciplinary logics of academia meant that pain research continued in its separate siloes. Around the same time, a group of prominent pain doctors crafted a formal definition of pain to address a fundamental lack of a consistent taxonomy of pain across the disciplines. They threw a bone to the psycho- and to the social, but essentially preserved the relationship of pain to damage.

 That definition from 1979, which was the foundation stone of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), read as follows: ‘[Pain is an] unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.’ The insistence on ‘tissue damage’, which maps neatly on to the concept of nociception at the heart of physiological research on pain, relegated emotional suffering and chronic pain without lesion. The emotional pain experience of humans through the ages seemed lost. It is not that such pain wasn’t a subject of research, but that the formal framing of pain in sensory and traumatic terms (trauma, from the Ancient Greek τρῶμᾰ for ‘wound’) limited the extent to which the biopsychosocial model could succeed.

 The inadequacy of that 1979 definition was finally acknowledged in July 2020, when the IASP added a list of revisions and qualifications:

 Pain is always a personal experience that is influenced to varying degrees by biological, psychological, and social factors.

Pain and nociception are different phenomena. Pain cannot be inferred solely from activity in sensory neurons.

Through their life experiences, individuals learn the concept of pain.

A person’s report of an experience as pain should be respected.

Although pain usually serves an adaptive role, it may have adverse effects on function and social and psychological wellbeing.

Verbal description is only one of several behaviours to express pain; inability to communicate does not negate the possibility that a human or a nonhuman animal experiences pain.

 These revisions formally propose a radical transformation not only in the way pain is treated, but in the way it is researched. That it is always personal belies any attempt to objectify; that it is formally separated from nociception means that all forms of pain without lesion – emotional pain, some kinds of chronic pain, social pain – fall under the medical purview; that pain is acknowledged to be a learnt concept raises the question of how it is learnt and who or what frames this conceptual education; that subjective accounts of pain are taken seriously means that medical processes of validation no longer have recourse to diagnostic measuring tools that would deny the patient voice; that pain is not necessarily adaptive (evolutionarily purposeful) means that the social and psychological causes and consequences of pain states can be taken seriously; and, finally, that pain does not have a universal signifier in language opens the door to the recognition of a world of pain expressions that go beyond the word.

 All of this – from the perspective of millions of sufferers of chronic pain, emotional pain (grief, loneliness, depression, psychological trauma, and so on) and mysterious pain conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome – is welcome news. To pain researchers outside both medical science and clinical research, a great challenge and an opportunity emerges. For this meaningful turn to the subjective and to the processes of conceptual learning, coupled with the acknowledgement that pain does not need to have an element of physical damage, marks the encroachment of medical science upon the humanities. It especially resonates with the historian, who explores the vicissitudes of pain experience in different times and places. As a historian of pain, I take seriously the problem that pain is a multidisciplinary affair. No one approach has the tools to crack it, so to speak. But the changing orientation of pain studies within medical science now demands that disciplines such as history be acknowledged as producers of pain knowledge that has a bearing on what medical science understands pain to be and how it should be treated.

 Historical pain knowledge is actively useful. A conscious engagement with pain studies prompts a historiographical revision that re-casts the history of painful experience according to the terms in which the IASP has now defined it. If people were in pain when they said they were, suddenly the archives seem to overflow with pain testimony. Medicine may not have always validated such pains, but they can be validated now. To do so emphasises the need to learn situated concepts of pain and to read for expressions that go beyond the word and beyond the expectation of particular faces of pain. For, to whatever extent the IASP accedes that pain is learnt, it remains difficult to see the power dynamics that inhere in the encounter with medicine, whether a patient presents with a broken leg or a broken heart or, indeed, whether the ‘patient’, the literal sufferer, seeks out medicine at all.

 Therapeutic processes have their own inertia. Patient and medical authorities each read from invisible cultural scripts how to navigate and negotiate an instance of pain, the experience of which is being mediated precisely by and through those scripts. The politics of diagnosis, the logics of prescription, the cultural fabric that underwrites medical validation and dismissal – all this is typically invisible, or apparently natural, in the encounter of the person in pain with someone else, be they doctor, friend or stranger. By showing, through historical example, the social and cultural dynamics that operate in such encounters, and how the (in)validation of pain is contextualised, patients and medical authorities alike can be better equipped to ask questions of one another: to see and read the politics of pain.

The politics of pain :  Medical science can only tell us so much. To understand pain, we need the cultural tools of history, philosophy and art. By Rob Boddice. Aeon, January 3, 2023.

‘Be happy!’ Mary Wollstonecraft exhorted her estranged lover and tormentor, Gilbert Imlay, in late 1795. What did she mean? It had been only days since she had been fished from the Thames, having failed in a bid to drown herself. Scorned, shamed and diminished in her view of herself in the world, Wollstonecraft had chosen death. Here too she was thwarted, ‘inhumanly brought back to life and misery’. Imlay’s philandering was the source of her ills, and she told him as much. Why, then, wish him to be happy? Was this forgiveness? Hardly. Wollstonecraft knew Imlay’s new mistress was ‘the only thing sacred’ in his eyes, and that her death would not quell his ‘enjoyment’.
 
Wollstonecraft’s use of ‘happiness’ was not idiosyncratic. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defined it as ‘felicity’ or ‘blissfulness’ or the ‘state in which the desires are satisfied’. Wollstonecraft was telling Imlay to satiate himself physically, implying that he had no depth of feeling. This fleshly happiness, in other words, was all she thought him capable of. In her suicide note, addressed to Imlay, she wrote: ‘Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasures, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.’ Be happy then but, if it turns out you are human, you’ll be thinking of me when you fuck her.
 
A recent paper in Nature Human Behaviour claimed to present ‘historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing’. To do so, it relied on a quantitative analysis of digitised books, newspapers and magazines from the past two centuries. It focused on ‘words with stable historical meanings’. The effort, by Thomas T Hills of the Turing Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in the UK, caused dismay and not a little mockery from historians. The Wollstonecraft story above shows what many ‘Twitterstorians’ pointed out: there are no words with ‘stable historical meanings’, particularly not big and important words. ‘Happiness’ is an unstable historical concept, a false friend in historical sources. Nonetheless, the popular press fastened onto the claim that the 1880s were the happiest Britons had ever been. If only the mill workers of Manchester and slum dwellers of London had known.
 
The ignorance of the basic methods of the discipline of history is surprising given the robustness of the subfield of the history of emotions. Over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past. These concepts and the experiences associated with them are not historically stable. In addition, many emotions have ceased to exist, from ‘acedia’ (apathy) to viriditas (greenness); from ‘ennobling love’ to tendre (the tender emotion). Accessing them involves building an understanding of past concepts and past expressions in order to unlock what people once felt and experienced. This requires the forensic reconstruction of cultural-historical context. It is inherently qualitative work.
 
Not too long before Wollstonecraft presented happiness as the shallow satiation of desire, her acquaintance and fellow revolutionary writer Thomas Paine had consciously remade happiness as part of a republican vision. To do this, he elaborated an innovative concept of ‘common sense’ as a social and political sensibility. Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (1776) had as much to do with the creation of a new field of feeling as it did with reason. By scripting it, Paine helped to fashion the American public to which he sold it. He instructed Americans that happiness was entangled with authority and government, and that a breed of happiness associated with monarchy must be the wrong sort. Good government, Paine taught, is for ‘freedom and security’, to safeguard happiness. Monarchy was not the ‘means of happiness’ but the means of ‘misery to mankind’.

 
While reason has oft been heralded as the vanguard of revolutionary ideas, Paine understood it was guided by feelings, and those feelings had to be brought into existence in order to validate practices of revolt. Revolt had to feel right in order to be right. For all that the new American constitution was to be formed ‘in a cool deliberate manner’, it was to be formed so as to guarantee ‘the greatest sum of individual happiness’. This historically specific and inherently political happiness became a precondition for nation-building, a process that also depended upon assertions of dishonour, pain and disgust at the colonial yoke. America would not be built on pure reason, but on controlled emotion.
 
The ‘pursuit of happiness’ that found its way into the Declaration of Independence was Thomas Jefferson’s adaptation of John Locke’s ideas on the pursuit of life, liberty, and property. As the historian Nicole Eustace has shown, it was a happiness that endorsed and justified the practice of slavery. Slave owners’ happiness depended upon slavery, after all. To the signers of the Declaration, the right to pursue happiness was for white men. When critics held up the principles of slavery and the pursuit of happiness as contradictory, a paradox to be smashed, the racists shifted tack, asserting that slaves had no capacity for happiness. Blackness itself was, they averred, an inescapable biological cause of unhappiness. While happiness was a right offered up to all humans as the product of a political system, it was nonetheless predicated on limiting the category ‘human’ to those deemed capable of the quality of ‘happiness’. Wollstonecraft understood that the revolutionary age had also put women outside of the category ‘human’. ‘Happy would it be for the world,’ she wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ‘if all this unavailing solicitude to attain worldly happiness … were turned into an anxious desire to improve the understanding.’
 
These contradictions and conflicts tell us that, whatever happiness is or was, politics is never far away. The recent history of happiness, of which Hills’s paper forms a part, is entwined with neoliberal metrics of, and prescriptions for, ‘wellbeing’. A whole academic industry has emerged from an all-too-easy translation of Aristotelian eudaimonia into ‘happiness’, which does not pass the sniff test. Those who operationalised happiness had capitalist efficiencies in mind: how could the workforce be maximally productive while liking it? In this ‘emotional capitalism’, as the sociologist Eva Illouz of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem styled it, happiness has been repackaged as a confidence trick to reward conformity or else to erase the individual in the name of abstract categories of wellness, and all for the sake of economic gain.
 
While authoritarian regimes from Venezuela to the United Arab Emirates have created ministries of happiness in order to institute population-wide surveillance and reward ‘good’ – which is to say, conformist – behaviour, the same ideas are alive in Western democracies. They are celebrated through United Nations programmes such as the World Happiness Report and the OECD’s commitment to placing wellbeing ‘at the centre of governments’ efforts’ in the name of growth. This is ‘happiness’ far removed from quotidian definitions. A country such as Denmark, for example, which regularly tops the ‘happiness’ charts, nonetheless has a history of high suicide rates. Happiness and wellbeing markers for the state of a national economy have little to do with how a given individual feels. They are part of a complex history of happiness. How to pursue, experience or eschew it should give us pause, for what happiness means is far from self-evident.
 
 
The happy emotions are not necessarily what they appear. By Rob Boddice. Aeon, January 15, 2020. 

“You can’t measure love,” I said.
 
The consternation among the assembled psychologists, eating lunch in the garden of a Swiss chateau outside Geneva, was palpable. I had, unwittingly, uttered an unorthodox phrase; a heresy that, if it were taken seriously, would make many of the assembled company redundant. The scale of the chasm between us became clear. We were at the International Summer School of the Affective Sciences seemingly with a common purpose: to talk about emotions and emotion research. But it is apparent that when it comes to “emotions,” scientists in different disciplines are scarcely talking about the same things at all.
 
Of course you can measure love. “Imagine, you see two people, standing in a field on a sunny day, gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands,” said a bewildered lunchmate. “You can say with confidence that they are in love. And of course you can measure what’s going on in that moment.” Heart rate, blood pressure, all manner of hormone levels, but especially the “love hormone,” oxytocin, and brain activity: emotion scientists can measure all this, and study what’s going on in our bodies and in our heads in real time. My interlocutor was in earnest, and had on his side the methodological inertia of a century of physiological and psychological research methods that have promised to bring the inside out. Since we all know what love is when we see it, and since we can assess it qualitatively just like that—the two lovers in a field—why not also subject it to functional magnetic resonance imaging and see what is “really” going on in the brain?
 
The problem, and the sticking point I was trying to articulate when I had brazenly claimed that you can’t measure love, is that whatever measurements come out of this scenario, even the most simplistic reading of the observer of two lovers in a field, are only good for that particular context, and for that particular time. The very image in question is highly specific. It is, implicitly, modern, western, and romantic. In the vast majority of public spaces in the world, it is also implicitly heteronormative. Where the people in question are imagined to be of the same sex, the image is confined to places characterized by specific liberal progressive value systems. And the more tightly we focus on such configurations, the more we see the implicit whiteness of the loving couple in the field. In how many places in the world is this scene imaginable? And where such public displays, heterosexual or otherwise, are not permitted or tolerated, what then for our easy recognition of what love is, what it feels like, how it is practiced?
 
If this is a problem along the axis of space or culture, then it is compounded along the axis of time. My historicist alarm immediately sounded on hearing this bundle of common sense and accepted truths, as if this were an image of love for the ages. If the casual ethnocentrism weren’t troubling enough, the apparent naivete concerning the history of “love” heightened my sense of unease. Gestures—holding hands, for example—are historically specific and subject to historical research. There’s no way to know, without contextual information, what the holding of hands means. The same might be said of the gaze. And, of course, romantic love also has a history. People haven’t always “fallen” into it. It emerged at a specific historical and cultural juncture, and its prescribed “rules” have changed over time. Looking more broadly at love over time, we find that it is political, social, filial, strategic. If we include other languages in our survey we find that, more often than not, “love” isn’t actually love at all. Love is amor and caritas in Latin. Love is philia, storge, agape, and eros (among others) in Greek. C. Stephen Jaeger famously documented the medieval history of “ennobling love,” now lost; Nicole Eustace wrote the story of “love” in pre-revolutionary America, when the self was conceived of socially, not individually, and where “matches” were made according to status politics, with affection being a consequence, not a precondition, of marriage. I have tried to chart the history of the “tender emotion(s),” or tendre, under which love was subsumed, for at least two centuries of European history. It would be crude and simplistic to say that, at the end of the day, it’s all the “love” that we—a word that is already a bundle of assumptions—already know. What I really mean, therefore, by “you can’t measure love,” is that any measurements you may make of whatever love you identify will be good for that love and that methodology in that time and space. As a science, that sounds a bit limited. Such was my point. Having lunch among the vineyards, under the Alps, the point was missed.
 
What was a historian doing among so many psychologists in the first place? In recent years I’ve had these kinds of conversations with neuroscientists, psychiatrists and psychologists. My aim is to break the history of emotions out of its disciplinary fetters and confront the wider world of emotion science or emotion research with its particular knowledge claims. Two decades of concentrated empirical research into the history of emotions has armed historians with broad knowledge claims about what emotions are, how they work, and upon what they are contingent. After many years of going unheeded by the emotion-science world, something has changed. The door to the humanities stands open. The promise is of a truly interdisciplinary sphere of knowledge on human feelings, but in order to fulfil it, first there must be disruption. It is already messy.
 
In order to understand the current sense of disorder and disquiet among emotion scientists, first we have to understand what has been at stake. Since the 1970s, a small group of scholars—American psychologists and evolutionary biologists, principally—have carved out a theory of emotions that has dominated western thinking on the affective lives of humans. The core claims of these theories, usually presented as inflexible facts, are as follows: emotions in humans are universal; they are limited in number (the canonical number of “basic” emotions is six, but claims have ranged between three and ten); they are accounted for by the “deep” brain, that is, the structures of the human mind that evolved tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years ago; they are automatic psychological and somatic responses to situations; they are represented on the face by expressions that are also automatic and universal across humanity. Often, within this set of axioms, a bone is thrown to cultural influence on emotional coloring or expression. On the whole, however, culture has been presented as nothing more than a gloss or veneer, sitting atop, and not fundamentally altering, biological constants that lie beneath. The better-known names associated with all this are Paul Ekman, Carrol Izard, Sylvan Tomkins and Antonio Damasio, but the influence of this line of thinking has been profound, both within and beyond the world of science.
 
Ekman, for example, sought to dominate not only the academic understanding of emotions, but also the policy implications of such an understanding and the public reception of emotion knowledge. His theory of universal affect, as witnessed on the universal human face, allowed him to pioneer and market facial profiling as an important component of security screening in the United States. He made a successful business out of his methodology. Moreover, he was the inspiration for (and consultant behind) the Fox television show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth, whose character Cal Lightman was a dramatic rendering of Ekman himself. Even more influentially, Ekman consulted on the Pixar/Disney film Inside Out, which was predicated on the existence of basic emotions (this time only five—“surprise” was left out). At the US box office, it grossed in excess of $356 million. It’s the kind of public impact for scholarly work about which most academics wouldn’t even dare to dream. Basic emotions, universality, and automaticity became, in an all-encompassing sense, orthodox. Anthropological research ran in parallel with the rise of emotion science, gainsaying many of its central claims by direct observation and hard-won experience, but to no avail.
 
Enter Lisa Feldman Barrett. Her work, as a psychologist, radically upset the prevailing paradigm, and caught the attention of historians and anthropologists who finally saw an opening for their influence. Feldman Barrett has seen through Ekman’s methodological holes and, in her own research, summed up in her best-selling book, How Emotions Are Made, found no evidence of universality or of basic emotions at all. Instead, Feldman Barrett posits a theory of biocultural construction, providing empirical data in support of her claims. The plastic, developing brain learns how to feel in the worldly context in which it is situated. Brain, body and world are dynamically interrelated, such that the color palette of emotion is as varied as cultural contexts are richly distinct from one another. Moreover, she rejects the notion that discrete emotions are “located” in discrete parts of the brain, pointing to whole-brain engagement in affective experiences. The only law, in Feldman Barrett’s estimation, is the law of infinite variation. The essence of this law jives substantially with the findings of historians and anthropologists. It is a chance to square the disciplinary circle. Feldman Barrett goes so far as to say that “emotion” itself, as a category of analysis, might be rejected, since it implies that there is an objectively real thing called emotion that only has to be found and studied. Her emphasis on construction totally changes how we might go about understanding how we feel. The assumption that emotion simply exists somewhere in the brain looks increasingly like an obstacle to understanding. Historical research has reached the same position. Far from being a master category with which to understand the affective lives of humans (and other animals), the casual employment of the category “emotion” seems to risk misdirection and anachronism. Unless we are prepared to start our research by challenging our assumptions about what emotions are, we shall likely only confirm those assumptions.
 
As the incoming president of the Association for Psychological Science, and as one of the founders, in 2009, of the journal Emotion Review, Feldman Barrett wields considerable power over the discipline of psychology. Combining influential academic publication with a slick presence in the popular press and social media, her Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory has radically upset the orthodoxy. Ekman, along with Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at Berkeley, has indicated, via an official response of the Paul Ekman Group to Feldman Barrett’s work, that Feldman Barrett is misleading the public, getting the science wrong, missing the point, and ignoring important data. Bearing in mind that the Paul Ekman Group is a private company selling training tools and workshops to individuals and businesses, selling Ekman’s science as an application, readily accessible to all, we should take his denunciation of Feldman Barrett’s challenges as the perception of a serious threat.
 
June 2018 saw the inaugural conference of the North American Chapter of the History of Emotions (NACHE) at George Mason University, Virginia. It was the brainchild of Peter Stearns, who has more claim to the title of father of the history of emotions than any other living scholar. Since the mid-1980s, Stearns has created an impressive body of work, with a particular focus on the history of modern American emotions, and he is responsible for one of the field’s defining theoretical tools: “emotionology.” In a seminal piece in the American Historical Review in 1985, written together with Carol Z. Stearns, emotionology was introduced as a way of understanding the situational contingency of emotional style.[5] People emote according to sets of feeling rules that limit the possibilities for what kind of things can be expressed and in what manner. This was developed by William Reddy, who postulated that such prescriptions do not merely limit what can be expressed. They must be in a dynamic relationship with feeling itself, such that inward feeling and outward expression are both tied to a cultural context of possibilities.
 
At that meeting I launched my book, The History of Emotions, on an interdisciplinary panel chaired by Stearns. I witnessed first-hand the implications of the schism in the emotion-science community. Commenting on my book were Reddy and the Georgetown psychologist and neuroscientist Abigail Marsh. Reddy, for his part, dwelt at length on the recent work of Ruth Leys, whose book The Ascent of Affect had been published only a couple of months before mine. It is a searing critical demolition of the emotion-science orthodoxy of Ekman, Tomkins, et al, pointing out the enormous magnitude of methodological flaws, and the tremendous damage done to emotion enquiry by limiting the scope of emotion research to that which was assumed to be hard-wired, built in, basic, automatic. Given that my own work sympathizes with all of this, Marsh doubtless felt somewhat embattled, especially by our trumpeting of Feldman Barrett’s research and by my claim that historians’ knowledge claims have just as much merit as science as anything coming out of psychological laboratory work.
 
What Marsh presented, then, was the bald claim that science is a neutral recorder of objective data. Scientists do not forge knowledge claims, but report findings. Emotion knowledge is found, not made. What I was doing, according to the charge, was attempting to persuade via charisma. All of this took me by surprise. Decades of work in science and technology studies (STS) has thoroughly exposed the culture of scientific work, its political dynamics and the situationality of its guiding assumptions. Scientist, coined by William Whewell in 1834, is literally someone who makes (the suffix -ist) knowledge (scientia), just like an artist makes art. Practices of objectivity, cultivated in earnest from the late nineteenth century, served to distance the person who made science from the activity of its making, and from its accompanying affects. All of this was brilliantly historicized and analyzed by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their 2007 book Objectivity. There is no such thing as “neutral” knowledge. Among historians, this claim is hardly radical; it is lore.
 
Marsh’s own work on fear, altruism and psychopathy hinges, in part, on facial affect methodology and, in part, on neuroscience that locates emotions, especially fear, in certain parts of the brain.[9] It depends, therefore, upon the prevailing orthodoxy. Being flanked by a couple of Feldman Barrett boosters probably felt like a stitch up. But if our collective attempts to wed science to culture, to put emotions in the world, as it were, was discountenanced, then more specific ire was reserved for some perceived implications of Feldman Barrett’s work.
 
One of Feldman Barrett’s central claims is that the language we use to conceptualize emotions is, in turn, formative of the experience of those emotions. Feeling and experience are directly connected to conceptual understandings of what feeling and experience are. This conceit, which Feldman Barrett explores via neuroscientific data and imaging, appeals to historians and anthropologists because it allows us to imagine affective worlds that are completely different from our own, in a time or a place where “emotions” do not exist. If Feldman Barrett is right, then the possibilities for exploring the cultural variability of lived experience opens up. Where people have conceived of their affective lives through pathos, passion, affectus, sentiment, Gefühl, and so on, they must, ipso facto, have experienced their affective lives in accord with these concepts. It would be reductive and misleading to apply an objective and universal standard of “emotion” to all of this.
 
Critics, Marsh among them, have pointed out one of the insidious consequences of taking this view too far. If language—the conceptual framework of affective life—is so important, then non-human animals must have no emotions at all, since they have no emotion words. Comparative psychologists reel at the thought of the rise of such neo-Cartesian thinking, and the looming spectre of the animal machine. This was thrown into the mix at the NACHE conference, willy-nilly, as a sort of death blow to the kind of emotion science being pedalled by Feldman Barrett et al., and touted by the likes of Reddy and me. The charge is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Only a fool would argue that animals don’t have an affective life. But the gap between humans who use linguistic conceptual constructions that we can access and understand, and animals that do not, represents a serious ontological and epistemological problem. If I am reluctant to talk of “emotions” among humans in times and in languages where the category “emotion” did not exist, then imagine my scepticism about talking of “emotions” in animals. That a dog, for example, has affective experiences is obvious to me. That I cannot make sense of a dog’s affective experiences through modern concepts in the English language seems to me to be equally obvious. I have a clue that something is happening, from the dog’s point of view, but what I can say about a dog’s “fear,” “jealousy,” “love,” or “rage” will actually say more about my own experience of those things than the dog’s, just as it did for Charles Darwin and his erstwhile disciple, George John Romanes, who were among the first to take such things seriously. The dog’s subjective experience eludes me, which is not the same as to say it has no subjective experience. For comparative psychologists, this throws up an intractable problem: how to get at the experience of animals without anthropomorphic projection? It is a problem as old as comparative psychology itself. It rattles nerves because the alternative, apart from Descartes’ automaton, has been behaviorism, now consigned to the dustbin of errant philosophies. Disturbing the orthodox paradigm of emotion research therefore has massive implications for an enormous number of scholars, who, quite understandably, are unlikely to go quietly back to the theoretical and methodological drawing board.
 
Back in June 2017, at a conference of the Finnish Network for the History of Emotions, I had a hard time selling the idea of rapprochement with the social neurosciences. The psychologists, I was told, don’t care about our research, and we don’t need them to justify or validate our research in order for it to be important. We’re so far apart. There is too much to sacrifice, and all of it on the side of the historians, for us to come together. These sentiments came from Ute Frevert, a major European figure in the history of emotions, and founding Director of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. I spent five years under that roof. I know where she is coming from. It is simply true that the institutionalization of the history of emotions at that site has actually mitigated against understanding and collaboration. Sharing a roof with scores of psychologists of various stripes has led, in the course of a decade, to no fruitful collaboration. It might be thought of as an opportunity missed, but it is perhaps better seen as evidence of the impenetrability of disciplinary walls and the lack of a shared epistemology. A psychologist colleague in the Netherlands recently told me that, since historians tend to write books, and since the articles they do write tend to appear in general, rather than specialist, journals, our work is as good as invisible to psychologists. The latter, so he told me, think of books as summaries of previously published research, not as peer-reviewed research in its own right. Our scholarly procedures are alien to each other. And where academic structures are profoundly hierarchical, as in Germany, making interdisciplinary headway is all the more difficult. But is not like this everywhere.
 
At the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, for example, a new seminar series on Culture, Mind and Brain aims to bring together a whole array of disciplines engaging critically with the cultural turn in the neurosciences. Here, psychiatrists look left and right, to history and anthropology, and to various stripes of psychology and neuroimaging, to build a critical approach to the brains they encounter in the clinic. Likewise, Columbia University’s Affect Studies seminar series in New York (active since 2015) invites people from all across the intellectual map, on the understanding that “interdisciplinary exchange on the question of affect is vital for understanding the many valences of affect studies’ vocabulary and concerns.” The word “vital” is key, but it demands that we understand what is really at stake for emotion researchers. As emotional manipulation has become an explicit strategic device for politicians and governments throughout the world, it has in turn become more important than ever that people have access to knowledge about their emotions, where they come from, and who or what they serve. While psychologists remain torn between evolutionary transcendentalism and biocultural constructivism, politicians in various parts of the world have expressed great confidence in the potential of constructing emotional regimes or contexts of emotional conformity, in which strains of happiness, anger, and fear hitherto unknown are becoming the definitive motifs of our age.

 
It all has an Orwellian ring to it. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, the Ministry of Happiness was established in 2016 to substantially make “happiness” a formal part of the government’s agenda. It forms part of a political landscape that has seen everything from the Venezuelan Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness (created 2013), and widely mocked in western mainstream media, to David Cameron’s “happiness agenda,” launched in 2010 with a mind to measuring wellbeing instead of GDP. All of it, regardless of the political culture of the time and place, is directed not at the free expression of subjective happiness, whatever that is, but at creating conditions of willing conformity to an ideological program. In the UAE, that means training “Happiness and Positivity Officers” at private western consultancy firms that sell strategies for increasing wellbeing, defined along capitalistic lines of innovation, meaningful productivity, and self-worth in the creation of value. As Eva Illouz has noted, psychologists were invited into the corporate realm of management precisely to “find solutions to the problem of discipline and productivity.” On the ground in the UAE this means “happiness meters” in offices, government-led policies of “positivity,” and “happiness patrols” that reward good drivers instead of punishing bad ones. It is surveillance governmentality with a positive spin, which rewards conformity. For those who cannot or do not want to conform, misery abounds. As of June 2017, the UAE remains on Amnesty International’s radar as a participant in torture campaigns, domestically and in Yemen. The US State Department Report on Human Rights Practices for 2016 noted the inability of UAE citizens to access free and fair elections, the limitations on their civil liberties (freedom of speech, press, assembly, association), as well as government practices of “arrest without charge, incommunicado detentions, lengthy pretrial detentions, and mistreatment during detention,” combined with evidence of “police and prison guard brutality; government interference with privacy rights, including arrests and detentions for internet postings or commentary; and a lack of judicial independence.” In short, be happy, or else.
 
This is not to single out the UAE in particular. Wherever an emotion is politicized and directed, be it the mobilization of populist anger in the US or of populist fear in the UK’s Brexit debacle, it is ordinary people who are being emotionally corralled. The context of possibilities for feeling and expressing is carefully constructed and delimited, on the understanding that feelings are mutable and malleable, and that emotional intention is the new political capital.
 
Historians and anthropologists, as one might expect, are alive to this phenomenon and are well placed to analyze it. The new direction of emotion science, toward an understanding of culture’s entanglement with biology, is primed to help give substance to critique. But, as my ride on the emotional rollercoaster has shown, the science of emotion is far from a settled business. The question, “How do you feel?” has become intellectually and politically charged. Never has it been more important, short of a meaningful consensus across the disciplines, for substantial interdisciplinary collaboration to take place. The object of study in emotion research is up for grabs.

Dispatches From The Emotional Rollercoaster. By Rob Boddice. Athenaeum Review , Summer 2019.

 

A prone rabbit, bolted to an operating table, stares sightlessly upwards into the glare of an electric light. Above its head a scalpel, held like a pen in the hand of a white-coated, white-bearded physiologist, is poised to make an incision. The raking light also illuminates the wraiths of the sick, the physically disabled, and the diseased, drawn to the scene in the hope of an end to their suffering. These abundant phantoms stalk the physiologist’s laboratory: a child on crutches, an ailing baby writhing in the arms of a frantic mother, a blind man. The other faces are those of the poor, whose own lives and the lives of their families are exposed to the ravages of polio, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and a host of other diseases. They yearn for security, for vaccines, sera, and curative medicines, and their hopes lie at the sharp edge of the scientist’s scalpel. They plead, this band of "Sufferers": "For Humanity's Sake, Go On!".
 
Across the other side of the operating table, in the dark shadows that stand for ignorance, the well-to-do make their protestations in small numbers. The ladies, who are in the majority, are bedecked in fur tippets and muffs, and adorned with the plumes of rare birds. The lone gentleman of the elite stands effetely to the rear, motioning in kid gloves. This group of "Sentimentalists", who literally wear their general lack of concern for animals, demand hysterically: "For Mercy’s Sake, Stop!".
 
Central to the piece the physiologist is distracted, annoyed, delayed in his work. His assistant too finds the clamour over his shoulder difficult to ignore. The experimental animal, the rabbit on the table, fixed into a holding apparatus, anaesthetised against pain by the assistant, lies motionless and objectified. Nobody’s gaze fixates on this instrumental being. Indeed, it is the only emotionless entity in the room. It feels nothing at the centre of the hubbub.
 
The image, styled simply "Vivisection", is from a 1911 edition of Puck magazine. A pioneer in graphical political satire in the United States, it is clear which side of the vivisection debate the magazine took. The debate had been raging since the early 1870s, beginning in England before appearing somewhat later in Germany and somewhat later again in the US. The controversy ran parallel to the emergence of physiology, which depended upon experimentation on living animals, as a significant professional specialism within medical research. Much of the debate centred on the effect of vivisection on the character – the feeling – of the men who did it. Indeed, even as this image clearly comes down on the side of physiology, its representation of the animal as object is an accurate portrayal of the majority of attitudes to those beings actually subjected to vivisection. Of chief concern were the moral qualities of scientists, as men of influence at the vanguard of society. If they were callous, hard-hearted, merciless, then there was a serious risk that society would follow their example. From the point of view of anti-vivisectionists, civilisation itself was risked by the insensitivity, cool detachment, or brutality of men of influence.
 
One notable anti-vivisectionist, for example, Mrs. Caroline Earl White (founder of the American Anti-Vivisection Society in 1883), claimed that Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute in New York was "a thinking machine" in whom the "finer instincts of humanity are drowned in the one passion for so-called scientific research". Carrel would win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1912. Anti-vivisection as a movement had been driven largely by women in the English context, and White’s rhetoric echoed that of the chief English anti-vivisectionist, Frances Power Cobbe, who had wondered aloud whether "the advancement of the 'noble science of physiology' is so supreme an object of human effort that the corresponding retreat and disappearance of the sentiments of compassion and sympathy must be accounted as of no consequence in the balance?" In this context, the plea "For Mercy's sake" seems to be a direct exhortation to preserve the emotion of "mercy" itself, lest civilisation be lost in the quest for knowledge.
 
The arrival of anti-vivisection in the United States, with its rhetoric pre-formed from the English example, was immediately gendered and written off by the medical establishment as "womanish": an overly sentimental or hysterical reaction based on an aesthetic (literally, sensitive) response to the idea or the image of the knife-wielding mad scientist and his helpless victim. The public debate seemed to hinge on the question of what emotions were appropriate in different contexts. It was a pitted battle between the rational humanists of the scientific community, self-proclaimed "men of feeling" who claimed expertly to practice emotional control, and the (female or effeminate) advocates of "common compassion", Christian mercy, or "clemency", with their feeling-driven or aesthetic basis for civil society.
 
This graphical representation of the vivisection controversy conforms to the view of the medical establishment in America, whose chief aim as the controversy unfolded, first in New York and Massachusetts, was to wrest control of the emotional discourse surrounding vivisection, to reduce the complaints against it to mere "sentimentalism", and to flag up any apparent hypocrisy among anti-vivisectionists. Their case rested on two claims: first, the performance of vivisection had no ill effects on the moral character of the physiologist; second, the resulting gain in knowledge would serve, in a vast number of ways, to alleviate suffering at the level of humanity. The two claims were connected. Any visceral aesthetic responses to the specific setting of the physiological laboratory, in the name of sympathy or compassion for the creature under the knife, would be out of place, or "false". The animal, in most cases, was rendered insensitive to pain by anaesthetic. The medical establishment was at great pains to point out the widespread and matter-of-course use of chloroform to eliminate suffering from the operational setting. If the operator was struck by a sympathetic or compassionate response, to what could it be ascribed save for an incorrect – irrational – appraisal of the situation? The moral qualities of the physiologist were only jeopardised, so they argued, by a "feminine" response to the situation that would disable them from carrying out their research. The "true" sympathetic reaction lay at the other end of that research, in the alleviation of suffering among the diseased and disabled. The calm manner of their practice allowed them to defer sympathy in the name of a greater good. Far from becoming blunt instruments with knives, so they claimed, medical scientists were increasingly deepening and extending the range of "true" sympathy. This was "humanity", an old synonym for compassion, encompassing the human species per se.
 
Inspiration could be drawn from one of the chief defenders of vivisection, both in the US and in England. William Osler told the graduating class of medical students at the University of Pennsylvania in 1889 to have their ‘nerves well in hand’ and to avoid the slightest facial expression of "anxiety or fear" even under "the most serious circumstances". In the operating theatre, they were to put their "medullary centres under the highest control" and render their bodies "imperturbable" – a state of "coolness", "calmness", and "clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril". Their character was to be defined by "phlegm":
 
"Now a certain measure of insensibility is not only an advantage, but a positive necessity in the exercise of a clam judgment, and in carrying out delicate operations. Keen sensibility is doubtless a virtue of high order, when it does not interfere with steadiness of hand or coolness of nerve; but for the practitioner in his working-day world, a callousness which thinks only of the good to be effected, and goes ahead regardless of smaller considerations, is the preferable quality." He urged these young doctors to "cultivate […] such a judicious measure of obtuseness" that would "meet the exigencies of practice with firmness and courage, without, at the same time, hardening 'the human heart by which we live'".
 
There were clear echoes of this throughout the medical establishment’s defence of physiology in America, from the late 1880s up until the First World War. Defending physiology from an anti-vivisection Bill in the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1900, William Thompson Sedgwick (who would become president of the American Public Health Association the following year), defended the "honourable reputation" of his colleagues and attested that vivisection made "men more humane and tender-hearted".4 In 1908, the American Medical Association charged Walter B. Cannon of Harvard Medical School with heading up a Council on the Defense of Medical Research. He set about organising a public-education campaign concerning the merits of physiology. At all times, "sensationalism" was to be avoided. "Sentimentalism" was to be bypassed. Education was to be "sober", with reason prevailing.5The medical establishment even aimed to strike at what they thought was the core of anti-vivisection "hysteria": society women. William Williams Keen, a pioneering brain surgeon and at various times the president of the American Surgical Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Philosophical Society, wrote an article for the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1910 (re-printed as pamphlet XIV of the Council on the Defense of Medical Research series, and again in his collected works, Animal Experimentation and Medical Progress, 1914). He asked plainly, if rhetorically, which "was the more cruel:" experimentation on animals "with the pure and holy purpose of finding an antidote to a deadly disease and with the result of saving hundreds of human lives; or the women who were 'fanned into fury' in their opposition to all experiments on living animals"?6 This sentimental fury was, for Keen and the vast majority of his peers, an emotion out of place. The campaign to defend medical research sought to educate that emotion away.
 
The image in Puck captures precisely this contest for the feeling of the physiologist. Should he, remembering his Christian upbringing, preserve those "tender mercies" that served as the cornerstone of Gilded-Age philanthropy? Or should he project his sympathetic gaze to the non-present suffering of humanity, allowing him to practice with "equanimity"? The rapid expansion of physiology in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the failure of American anti-vivisectionists to make any significant headway before World War Two, are suggestive of the answer. In the name of "humanity", physiology went on.
 
Equanimity in the Laboratory? :  The Sentimentalists versus the Sufferers in America c. 1900. By Rob Boddice. History of Emotions—Insights into Research, October 2013

More on website Rob Boddice.