The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

III.

We may conclude, from what goes before, that though physical pain (of which alone I am speaking at present) is always bound to an internal or external sensation, and forms part of a psychic complexus, it may be separated and disjoined. It has then its own conditions of existence, and we may, in advance, say as much for pleasure.

What are these conditions of existence? or, more simply, what is pain in its nature? At the present time there are two distinct doctrines on this point: one, which counts few adherents, regards physical pain as properly a sensation; the other, more generally admitted, regards it as a quality of sensation, or more correctly, as an accompaniment, a concomitant.[^[27]]

The first, though recent in its complete form, is not without antecedents. It found a momentary support in the supposed discovery of pain-bearing nerves. Nichols, one of the promoters of this hypothesis, has developed it in this direction; but the attempt has proved futile. Strong, one of its warmest partisans, supported himself on other grounds. In his opinion the difficulty arises from the ambiguity of the word pain, which may mean two things—displeasure (Unlust), or physical pain in the positive sense. He reduces the latter to cuts, pricks, burns—in short, to those pains that affect the skin. It is, in his opinion, strictly a sensation like blue or red—not an attribute, but a substantive. The pain of a burn, for instance, is a mixture of two sensations, heat and pain. General sensibility is composed of four kinds of sensibility: touch, heat, cold, and pain. Each can be abolished separately. Cocaine and chloroform suppress pain, not touch; saponine suppresses touch, not pain; syringomyelia destroys sensibility to pain and heat, not touch; in some forms of neuritis there is suppression of touch without analgesia. These various facts are invoked as the chief arguments in favour of the hypothesis of pain-sensation, though they may all be explained also by the other doctrine.

This hypothesis is full of difficulties. First, there is the absence of anatomical basis, of special organs and nerves. It will be necessary to return to this important point when dealing with pleasure (Chap. iii.). Nichols tells us that there is nothing to prove that nerves of pain do not exist, though they have not been experimentally established—which is indeed something; that histological research could not determine in the peripheral apparatus what belongs to touch and what belongs to pain; and that proof must be deduced from cases of tactile sensation without pain and vice versâ—which fails to constitute any degree of proof. Moreover, the distinction set up between displeasure (moral pain?) and physical pain is arbitrary, factitious, wholly unjustified. There is, however, a still less admissible distinction. Strong expressly declares that he limits himself to pains localised on the cutaneous surface. Now by what right can we cut off the group of physical—strictly physical—pains, the states of torture originating in the internal organs, the multiple neuralgias as intolerable as any external pain, without speaking of discomfort, prostration, exhaustion? Are these also sensations, or something else? We are not told. Finally—and Strong himself has stated the objection—it must be acknowledged that we should here have a strange kind of sensations which do not externalise themselves. While other impressions, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactive, are referred to causes which provoke them, the pains of a prick, a cut, a burn remain strictly subjective and are not located in the needle, the knife, the burning coal, as we locate a sound in the bell, a bitter taste in absinth. The only possible reply (which the partisans of pain-sensation have not made) would be that this phenomenon has a character of its own; it always remains a sensation, and never becomes a perception, whence the absence of externalisation. But then why assimilate it to blue or red? Moreover, pain-sensation, as it exists in the adult, approaches so closely to the affective state, that what is essential in the doctrine of pain-sensation vanishes. Whatever may be thought of the probability of some future discovery of terminal organs for physical pain, as Rutgers Marshall remarks, it must be agreed that there is no proof of the existence in the environment of a special stimulus to which physical pain specially corresponds, and for that reason also it would be a great mistake to place in the well-determined class “sensation,” a mental state which lacks one of the most marked characteristics of sensation in general. That conclusion is mine also.

The opposite doctrine, which has of late been called the quale-theory, is often maintained in an unsatisfactory form, because in fact it reduces itself to an affirmation of quantity. The pain which accompanies sensation may depend either on its intensity or on its quality alone.

It is needless to insist on the first case, since many old authors never cease repeating that the painful impression is the result of a stimulation which is strong, intense, violent, prolonged.

On the contrary, it is necessary to remark that this exclusive affirmation cannot be applied everywhere and always. This evidently appears in the cases of hyperalgesia, which is the reason why I brought them forward. The very disagreeable sensation which is caused by a knife against the skin certainly comes from the nature rather than the intensity of the stimulus. Beaunis remarks that certain odours, tastes, and contacts are painful at once, and do not need to be intense. Did the contact of the quill which threw Weir Mitchell’s patient into a state of anguish act by its intensity? No doubt we must recognise that hyperalgesias constitute a group apart, not strictly comparable with ordinary cases; they are pathological forms, variable in degree; but the pathological is merely an exaggeration of the normal. The error of those who refer pain solely to intensity of stimulation is in considering objective conditions only; they forget the part played by the sentient subjects. Pains which depend on the quality of the stimulus are especially of subjective origin, because the degree of excitability in the patient’s nervous elements is the essential ruling factor.

If we admit that these two conditions—intensity and quality—act one upon the other, what afterwards happens? What is the intimate nature of the pain-producing process? The hypothesis which is most natural and simple, and in agreement with the mechanical conceptions predominant in the biological sciences, would be founded on the admission that pain corresponds to a particular form of movement. On this supposition, the affective nervous road, from the periphery to the centres, would be traversed by three different kinds of movement or of molecular disturbance: the first giving birth to pure sensation, that is to say a state of knowledge, an intellectual state; the second, which may or may not be present, giving birth to pain; the third, also either present or absent, giving birth to pleasure.

There is another possible hypothesis, quite different from the others, which I should be willing to accept, but which cannot be presented as more than a theory. It would consist in attributing the genesis of pain to chemical modifications in the tissues and nerves, especially the production of local or general toxins in the organism. Pain would thus be one of the forms of auto-intoxication. Oppenheimer alone seems to me to have worked in this direction.[^[28]] In his opinion, as regards the origin of pain, “the real cause, in any sensorial or other organ, resides in a change in the tissues, especially a chemical change, by which either the products of destruction rise above the normal average, or else modifications result from the presence of a foreign body in the organism.” The connection between the peripheral tissues and the centres would be by the vaso-motor nerves (constrictor or dilator). The tissues would be the terminal organs of pain, the vaso-motors the paths of conduction. In organs which only undergo slight changes when active (tendons, ligaments, bones, etc.) conscious sensibility is almost absent. “Pain is not, as many believe, the highest degree of sensation produced in the organs of special sense; it is the most intense sensation produced in the vaso-motor nerves under the influence of violent stimulation.”

This hypothesis will perhaps be justified by the future. I shall return to it when studying the emotions. We shall then see that these are accompanied by deep and well-established chemical modifications in the organism.

Physical pain is a large subject, which, as may be seen, has not been neglected of late, and concerning which there is still much to say. It is not possible, however, to deal further with it here, since it only occupies a limited area in the psychology of the emotions.

CHAPTER II.
MORAL PAIN.

Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain: (1) the pure result of memory; (2) connected with representations; positive form, negative form; (3) connected with concepts—Its external study; physical signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A typical case of hypochondriasis.

In passing from physical pain to moral pain we by no means change our subject, or enter another world. Languages with their special terms—“tristesse,” “chagrin,” “sorrow,” “Kummer,” etc.—create an illusion by which psychologists for the most part seem to have been duped—the illusion that between these two forms of pain there is a difference of nature. In any case they do not explain themselves clearly on the point, and seem to share the common opinion.[^[29]] It is the object of this chapter to establish that, on the contrary, there is a fundamental identity between physical and moral pain, and that they only differ from each other in the point of departure, the first being connected with a sensation, the second with some form of representation, an image or an idea.