Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Chapter 1. Losing emotions

19 Chapter 1 Losing emotions Losing emotions in trauma There are many ways in which emotions get lost. An individual can lose them as a direct result of a traumatic incident. Some of us might know someone who has undergone successful brain surgery. The tumour is gone, everybody is happy, except for the patient who can no longer experience happiness or sadness. Instead they start behaving in a strange and bewildering way. They have no empathy. They cannot relate to those who used to be very close to them before surgery. They do not even seem to care much about themselves. Neuroscientists like Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio write about these cases. Their earliest and most prominent example is Phineas Gage, the railroad construction worker from New Hampshire, who suffered a horrible accident in 1848. A blast of powder carried an iron bar through his head damaging part of his brain tissue. Although Gage miraculously 20 survived, he later suffered from all kinds of convulsions and died in 1860. The “melancholy affair” (as the Boston Post called it) brought him much fame, though, and he made frequent public appearances, proudly holding his iron. After his death, his skull was deposited (along with the bar) in the Harvard Medical School’s museum, where it is still on display. Neurologists soon got interested in the case and tried to build all kinds of theories on it, connecting mental faculties to brain regions. Antonio Damasio, among others, used it to link frontal lobes and deeper brain centres that store emotional memories, to personal and social decision making. His assumptions, however, mainly rested on reports recording how Gage had mentally changed after the accident. Those reports have since been criticised as rather unreliable and hardly deserve the power of evidence attributed to them by later scientists .23 But there are more recent cases that allow for better -grounded hypotheses. Brain lesions and prefrontal damage are thought to impair a person’s ability to process neural signals that form the basis of emotions. Cognitive skills might remain unharmed, and patients can carry on with their work, leading a seemingly normal life—except for issues that heavily depend on emotional investment. Perhaps not surprisingly, those 21 issues turn out to be absolutely crucial and wideranging . Despite the patient’s ability to solve logical problems and perceive their environment, they can no longer refer to their surroundings in an appropriate way. They prove unable to make sound decisions about their life, and they fail to properly display social emotions like embarrassment, sympathy, and guilt, which appear diminished or altogether absent. Since every decision, even the most rational one, implies emotions and is based, at least partly, on emotions, the absence of the latter, caused by brain damage, invariably has serious consequences.24 There are other ways in which a person might lose the ability to experience emotions. It does not have to be a brain lesion, a trauma in the medical sense of the Greek word. It can also be a psychological trauma: something people have experienced as a crucial event in their life, something that happened to them, that was done to them, with which they could not adequately cope. This kind of trauma might be associated with a blockage of feelings connected to the event and its memory. In this case, it is usually not the whole emotional system that is impaired and distorted. More often, it is particular emotions that are at stake here: emotions linked to psychic damage, such as pride and shame.25 22 Psychology and neuroscience have produced piles of evidence and a growing literature on these kinds of lost emotions. But how do historians approach the topic? Losing emotions in psychology and historiography They might first turn to psychologists for advice; after all, emotions have been on psychology’s agenda ever since the discipline was founded. And indeed, the relevant literature starting with William James offers a wealth of definitions, explorations and classifications.26 Still, emotions do not seem to be an easy topic. In 1984, there were many “questions about emotion” (to quote Paul Ekman’s and Klaus Scherer’s introduction to their volume), and a decade later, Ekman and Richard Davidson still asked “fundamental questions” on “the nature of emotion.” Are there basic emotions? How do they function? How do we distinguish them from moods, temperament, and other related affective constructs? Are there universal...