The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

II.

The ancients defined anger as a short madness, which would relegate it at once and entirely to the region of pathology. Without qualification, this formula cannot be accepted. So long as anger is not injurious either to the individual himself, or to others, it is normal, and even useful; for an animal or man devoid of any instinct for active defence and reprisals, would be very poorly provided. However, it must be recognised that the area of normal anger is exceedingly restricted, and that no emotion more quickly assumes a morbid character. Of the three tests which permit us to judge whether it does so or not, one—that of violent reaction on the organism—is of no use, because it gives too much scope to personal estimates and conjecture. There remain two others: the absence of rational motives, and chronicity, or excessive duration, normal anger being only a passing affection. Now, we find among mental diseases two derivatives of anger, two heightenings of this condition in paroxysmal form, and we have to establish between them a psychological difference which is the repetition of the normal state.

Epileptic madness corresponds to the blind, animal, often bestial form of anger, composed entirely of violent movements and painful feelings.

The maniacal state corresponds to the violent and conscious form of anger, mingled with a pleasurable element.

1. I have nothing to say of the numerous varieties of epilepsy, its concomitant hallucinations, and its intellectual and moral consequences; I confine myself to those aspects which assimilate it to anger.

Even in periods of calm, the universally noted psychological traits reveal a sombre, morose, irritable, but above all, irascible disposition—the “choleric” character par excellence. In the paroxysmal period, we find the symptoms of anger carried to extremity: “The patient” (I borrow Schüle’s description) “throws himself on his surroundings with a blind rage, a bestial fury; he spits, strikes, bites, breaks everything he can reach, shouts and storms. His face is congested, his pupils are sometimes contracted, sometimes—and more frequently—dilated, the conjunctivæ are much injected, the look is fixed; there is abundant salivation, pulsation of the carotid, acceleration of the pulse.” Where is the starting-point of these discharges of fury, and by what mechanism are they produced? The authorities are not at one on this question, some attributing the principal share in this activity to the bulb, others to the brain. Recently an auto-intoxication of the nervous centres has been admitted. However, all this is only indirectly concerned with psychology. In the ensuing period of stupor, the acts of blind violence usually leave no trace in the memory; for it is a sort of psychological law that the intensity of consciousness should vary inversely as the intensity of the movements produced.

2. Mania presents many varieties. Let us take the typical form, acute mania, the nearest to anger. After a period of incubation, during which melancholia prevails, a violent reaction takes place, in sudden paroxysms. The maniacal state may pass through all degrees, from simple excitement to fury. Externally, it shows itself, in its milder form, by continual goings and comings, by an incessant craving for motion, a possibility of performing active exercise without feeling fatigue; in the intense form, we have the symptoms of rage already described: congestion of the vaso-motor system, redness of the face, violent palpitations of the heart, foaming at the mouth, furious and destructive impulses, etc. Internally the case is analogous; it is “chaos in motion” (Esquirol): and as the principal external symptom consists of motor disturbances, the principal internal symptom consists in an intellectual exuberance, a flux of ideas so disorderly and rapid that they succeed each other by no fixed rule, and the laws of association seem to be suspended, and speech, in its impetuous course, betrays the swiftness and discontinuity of thought. But there is besides, though not always, an expansive humour, a state of satisfaction, a feeling of pleasure scarcely in accordance with the rest. Many, after recovery, declare that they never felt so happy as during their illness.

The cause of this unexpected tendency to joy has been much discussed. Some attribute it to the superabundance of ideas, and consequently assign to it an intellectual origin. This is a fresh example of intellectualist prejudice which sees but a single effect in the modifications of the emotional life. Besides, as Krafft-Ebing remarks (vol. ii., sec. 1, chap. 2), in delirious fever-patients there is a flow of ideas without accompanying joyousness, and, inversely, alcohol may produce gaiety without accelerating the course of thought; and, accordingly, this author admits—and rightly, as it seems to me—that these two phenomena, viz., increased intellectual activity and pleasurable feeling, are subordinated to a deeper cause; they have their functional basis in an easier expenditure, and a deceptive sense of power and vigour, depending on pathological over-activity.

These two morbid forms, which have their psychological prototype in anger, suggest one remark. They are not evoked by any external excitement, such as the sight of an enemy, injury, or disobedience. Their cause, whatever it may be, is internal; it sets going a pre-established mechanism identical with that of anger (violent and disordered movements, vaso-motor phenomena, etc.), and the psychic state which follows is anger, or an analogous emotional form, with or without a concomitant state of pleasure. This seems to me a new argument in favour of James’s and Lange’s theory.

Epileptic and maniac rages are not the only ones to be entered under the heading of anger; there is besides these a group of irresistible impulses of a destructive character which ought, psychologically, to be included in the same class. With a difference, however: in the epileptic and maniac, the physical and psychical symptoms constitute a complexus similar or analogous to the normal form, and only to be reckoned as pathological on account of the want of adaptation and rational motives, while the irresistible impulses are only partial manifestations—disaggregated forms of anger.

Among overpowering tendencies we can only examine at present those which concern the offensive instinct. I therefore eliminate those grafted on another stem (dipsomania, erotomania, kleptomania, etc.) and those which, by their nature, are inoffensive, ridiculous, or puerile (the incessant craving for travelling, for counting, for discovering the names of men and things), and confine myself to those which have the violent and destructive character of anger, such as the impulses to wound, kill, destroy, or set on fire (pyromania). The fatal impulse to suicide will be studied under another heading (Chap. V.). It is needless to describe these violent impulses separately, or to recapitulate observations which may be found almost anywhere; a sketch of the characteristics common to all will be sufficient.

1. They pass through a physiological period of incubation, marked by palpitations and vaso-motor disturbances, rushes of heat to the head, headaches, præcordial anxiety, insomnia, agitation, fatigue, malaise, and undefined suffering. 2. The entrance into the psychological period is marked by the appearance of a fixed idea. Why one rather than another? This question will be examined later. The fixed idea, reigning as a tyrant in the consciousness, gives an aim to the tendency, determines its orientation. Some maintain that there are such things as purely intellectual fixed ideas, with no emotional accompaniment. Others think that the fixed idea always includes in some degree an emotional state. I share this second opinion, since every fixed idea is the beginning of an impulse. 3. The third period is that when it passes into action, sometimes sudden, more often preceded by a violent struggle between the overmastering impulse and the arrestive power of the will.[^[142]] There are some cases where the fixed idea never passes beyond the second stage; these are abortive forms, of incomplete development. The passage into action is the rule, it being a psychological law that every intense representation of a movement or an act is the beginning of a movement. The act, whatever it may be, is accomplished, and there results a feeling of satisfaction, peace, and relief.

As regards those destructive tendencies which are to anger what phobias are to fear, a problem presents itself, the only psychological problem: that of their origin or cause. This question I divide into two: How do they arise? How do they take a determinate direction?

I. To explain the origin and appearance of irresistible impulses, most writers have recourse to the hypothesis of degeneration. As it is also called in to explain the converse phenomenon of phobias, it becomes necessary to be a little more precise. Without entering for the moment on the discussion of the different interpretations of this vague word, degeneration, let us take it as synonymous with dissolution or regression.

The ideal of heredity, as a conservative principle, is to transmit under a healthy form a healthy organisation, i.e. (so far as our subject is concerned), one with harmonious and convergent tendencies. If dissolution is total, we have the idiot, or the dementia patient. If it is partial, we have a breach of equilibrium in favour of one or more tendencies. This disaggregation is not fortuitous; it has a retrogressive character, it is a return to the reflex movements. It approaches the character of the animal, the idiot, or the imbecile; it goes back to that stage of psychic life when the will under its higher form, the arrestive power, was not yet constituted.

II. In any case, there remains the principal question: Why was such a tendency predominant? What causes determined the particular direction taken by retrogression—homicide in one case, suicide or erotomania in another? Attempts have been made to explain this by alleging that every irresistible impulse results from the excessive irritation of an isolated group of brain-cells. Besides being purely hypothetical, this explanation is, in spite of its apparent precision, extremely vague. Is there an isolated group of homicidal, or one of kleptomaniac cells? This explanation is really too simple.

As far as we can penetrate the very obscure psychological genesis of the destructive impulses (and this may be held to apply to the whole group of irresistible tendencies), we find two sorts of causes at work, the essential and the accidental.

1. The essential, principal, fundamental cause which, after the period of physiological incubation, gives a determinate direction to the tendency is constitution, temperament, character. It may be admitted, at least theoretically, that all tendencies exist, actually or potentially, in every one of us. In ordinary cases, one or more predominate. Contemporary research has familiarised us with the fact of the varieties of memory. Such and such a person has an excellent one for figures, or music, or colour, or form, but only moderate for everything else. This is a natural gift singularly capable of being developed by exercise. This fact has its equivalent in the motor order, or that of tendencies: there exist natural dispositions only wanting an opportunity to become preponderant, and morbid conditions are the culture-medium which favours their development. The most violent tendency has its source in normal life. “There is,” says Gall, “an inclination gradually rising from the pleasure of seeing anything killed to the most overpowering desire to kill.” This is not put strongly enough; it is possible to pass, by imperceptible gradations, from the extreme case to the normal state in the following order: the pleasure of killing, the overpowering desire to kill, the pleasure of looking on at killing (the sight of a murder, gladiatorial combats, etc.), the pleasure of seeing the blood of animals shed (bull-fights, cock-fights, etc.), the pleasure due to the representation of violent and bloodthirsty melodramas (this is only in appearance, but the stage always presents a momentary illusion of reality); lastly, the pleasure of reading bloodthirsty novels, or hearing accounts of murders, which is purely an affair of the imagination. We thus pass from the act to the perception, the simulacrum, the mere image suggested by signs read or heard. I do not wish to assert, assuredly, that the spectators of the drama or readers of the novel are all potential murderers; but, as there are other men to whom such sights and such reading are abhorrent, we must recognise certain differences of natural disposition. Now the peculiarity of retrogression (or degeneration) is to act on the line of the strongest attraction or the least resistance, which is a characteristic of reflex action and the opposite of the inhibitive will, which acts on the lines of weakest attraction and strongest resistance.

2. The accidental causes which determine the direction of a tendency cannot be enumerated, because they vary for every individual case: we may note sex, social position, degree of culture, various maladies, etc. Tendencies to homicide and suicide are apt to spring up in a melancholic nature; alcoholism favours the incendiary impulse (pyromania); the epileptic and the general paralytic are more inclined to theft, and so on. Still more: the same impulse is variously modified, according to the soil in which it germinates; “the epileptic kills in a different way from the hypochondriac, the latter otherwise than the alcoholic or paralytic” (Schüle).

This shows the part played by accidental and consequently unassignable causes, and is still better shown in the abrupt substitution of one irresistible tendency for another in the same individual. Ordinarily, each shows his own special peculiarity; one constantly repeats his attempts at suicide, another at theft. But in cases of deep-seated dissolution, the direction is uncertain. The author of the theory of degeneration gives an excellent example of this: a hypochondriac possessed in turn by irresistible impulses to suicide, homicide, sexual excesses, dipsomania, and pyromania, and who finally gave himself up to justice, saying that he was “happy, because his sufferings were about to end.”[^[143]] We may say of all these overmastering impulses, in radice conveniunt; and thus the study of those which tend to destruction has led us, more than once, to speak of the other kinds.

CHAPTER IV.
SYMPATHY AND THE TENDER EMOTIONS.

Sympathy is not an instinct, but a highly generalised psycho-physiological property—Complete sense and restricted sense—Physiological phase: imitation—Psychological phase: first stage, psychological unison; second stage, addition of tender emotion—Tender emotion—Its physiological expression—Its relations with touch—The smile—Tears: hypotheses as to their causes—Tender emotion indecomposable.

Sympathy is not an instinct or a tendency, i.e., a group of co-ordinated movements adapted to a particular end, and showing itself in consciousness as an emotion, such as fear, anger, sex-attraction; it is, on the contrary, a highly generalised psycho-physiological property. To the specialised character of each emotion, it opposes a character of almost unlimited plasticity. We have not to consider it under all its aspects, but as one of the most important manifestations of emotional life, as the basis of the tender emotions, and one of the foundations of social and moral existence.