The Psychology of the Emotions

by Th. Ribot

II.

The transformation of simple into derivative emotions, by arrest of development, is of less frequent occurrence. While, in the preceding case, there was a forward movement in a straight line, intellectual evolution involving emotional evolution according to the law of transference, here the mental process is more complicated; it supposes an antagonism between two states of consciousness, resolving itself into a compromise. There are, on the one hand, emotional tendencies going in the direction of impulse; on the other, images, ideas, intellectual states of all sorts acting by way of arrest, so that the resultant emotion is composed at the same time of movements and inhibitions of movement.

Except fear, all primary emotions imply tendencies to movement, sometimes blind and violent, like natural forces. This is seen in infants, animals, savages, the Barbarians of the first centuries of our era as depicted by contemporary chroniclers; the passage of emotion into action, good or bad, is instantaneous, rapid, and fatal as a reflex movement.

Reflection is, by its nature, slow and inhibitory. How can an image or a conception produce an arrest of movement? This is a very obscure question, the psychological and physiological mechanism of which has had but little light thrown on it; it is useless to treat it here in a cursory manner; we need only remark that the arrest exists as a matter of fact.

The intervention of this new factor, reflection, may result in two ways. On the one hand, it may obstruct and finally suppress; thus a passion kept in check ends, after various oscillations backward and forward, in being altogether extinguished. The second is a transformation or metamorphosis by arrest of development; the passion is not extinguished, but it has changed its nature.

The biological sciences have familiarised us with the notion of arrested development and the morphological modifications resulting therefrom. We know that the parts of a living being are so closely connected that none can change without involving a change on the part of the others; such is the formula of the “Law of Organic Correlations,” and it has its equivalent in the functional order. The “compensation of development” exists beyond all doubt in psychology, though it has not been as much studied as it deserves; thus experience shows us that hypertrophy of certain faculties entails as a consequence the hypertrophy or atrophy of certain others.

I have previously (Chap. III.) mentioned hatred as an abortive form of anger, the result of arrested development. I have only to add a few supplementary remarks on the two antagonistic elements. One is primary and tends to the partial or total destruction of the enemy, attacking him in his own person or in that of his friends, in his reputation, his honour, his interests. The other, made up of reflection and calculation, consists in the representation of consequences, in the fear of reprisals and of Divine or human laws. Hence arises an emotional state comparable to the movement of a body rotating on itself and incapable of passing certain limits; and it must be admitted that the metamorphic process is here very thorough-going, since many writers, so far from grasping the affinities between hatred and anger, set up the former as a primary emotion, the antithesis of love. Yet it is very clear that hatred, by the inhibitory character peculiar to it, is not and cannot be a primary emotion; it corresponds to a second stage. If it is objected that we might as well assert that anger is the developed form of hatred (i.e., that the latter is primary), and not hatred an abortive form of anger, I should answer that this position is inadmissible, because in experience we have no example of the inhibitory form appearing before the corresponding impulsive form. What is primary is an instinctive, unconscious movement of retreat, of aversion (in the etymological sense), but this is no more the emotion of hatred than the instinctive and unconscious movement of attraction is the emotion of love.

Resignation, with its varieties and gradations, is an abortive form of grief. Its mode of expression has been described in detail by Darwin (Chap. XI.). This state is the resultant of two currents: on one side, moral pain, grief, which by itself and in its complete form shows itself in prostration, tears, etc.; on the other hand, an intellectual notion—that of the irreparable and irremediable, of the futility of all efforts. The intellect has its teleology, which is not that of feeling; if it prevails and asserts itself in the consciousness, we shall have, after a period of oscillation, a fixed state, in which the loss will be accepted and perceived in a mitigated form.

Mystic, platonic, or intellectual love (there is no advantage in distinguishing the exact shades expressed by these various epithets) is, as we have seen, an abortive form of sexual love. Predominance of the intellectual element, the conceived ideal; weakening of the physiological and emotional manifestations and the organic erethism, of the tendency to movements of contact and embrace, and everything which constitutes emotion in its plenitude: such are its characteristics. Here, more than elsewhere, the term “arrest of development” is strictly accurate, because mystical love results, not from a voluntary inhibition which mutilates or checks emotion, but from an impotence on the part of emotion to develop its complete form.

Experience furnishes the counterproof: let the antagonistic action of reflection, or of the intellectual state—whatever it may be—cease, and hatred will once more become anger, resignation grief, or despair; mystical will change to sexual love, and the primitive form reappears under the ruins of the derivative.