For the control advocated here nothing is needed but a new picture of love, uncorrupted by the ignorance of traditional lore and superstition. What is needed is more creative imagination in married life, not spoiled by cynicism or emasculated by fatalism. Control can be secured!
CHAPTER III
EMOTIONS
§ 33
Emotions, including moods and many nameless feelings, are some of the innate organic sensations evoked in our bodies by sensations that are not organic. In other words, they form a part of the internal sensations, which so far as generally named are originally associated with external sensations.
Frink remarks that “the emotion, from the point of view of physiology, is these various preparatory changes in the content of the blood, in the innervation of the various muscles, endocrine glands and other viscera. The emotion, from the point of view of psychology, is the afferent, sensory report of these changes.” And William James’ classical statement is as follows: “Bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.... The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may be.”
While most emotions of the simple type, like surprise, admiration, joy and others are in infancy and childhood originally, though not innately associated with certain definite sensations from the outer world, they are frequently reassociated by experience through the influence of the environment, so that, in later life, one enjoys or detests quite the opposite of what caused instinctive attraction or repulsion in early life.
The complex emotions of love, jealousy and hate are not, in their greatest complexity, existent in humans before puberty, although the unsynthetized elements out of which they are finally composed are present in childhood, particularly hate. This, according to psychoanalysis, is a more archaic emotion than love and is not its direct opposite. It is likely that human emotions are progressing from a dominant hatred toward a reigning love.
Love in its fully synthetic and complicated form is not only impossible in children, but its higher types, spoken of in this book as erotic, occur at their best in those more intricately complicated personalities that are the peculiar product of modern civilization.