PART IV
How Can We Feel Better?
In the search for a mutual body/mind that is emerging from the systemic paradigm shift, we have looked at bodily clues that can indicate when changes have pushed us outside the limits of dynamic stability and the formula that brings us back into that healthful state. In part III we compared explanations for human behavior that are based on mechanistic assumptions with those arising from a systemic worldview. We recognized the limits of conscious mental processing and became aware of how to listen to the quieter connections that flow from the back of the brain when we set up a context for insight. In this part we turn to a topic that has been seen, in turns, as the enemy of civilized behavior, an indicator of mental illness, a missing element in understanding cognition, the key to motivation, an indicator of happiness, or the secret of social success: feelings, emotions, or “affect,” as they tend to be called in research.
In the ideology that justified Western Europe’s exploration and “discovery” of so-called primitive peoples and their genocide or enslavement to support its expansion, “savages” (and women) were thought to be ruled by their emotions. Objective, rational thought was the mark of men who thereby had the right, even the duty, to make others their subjects. Emotional outbursts ought to be controllable by rational, scientific argument. Cases where that control failed were surely indications of mental illness, as with women who persisted in claiming they had been abused by “gentlemen” who by definition could not be guilty of such wanton behavior. Psychotherapy, literally “tending the soul,” arose in the 19th and 20th centuries to treat these and other emotional disorders. However, the mechanistic paradigm limited the conception of these disorders, and of feelings in general, in a number of ways:
• Emotional disturbances, and emotions themselves, were seen as determined by heredity, environment, or intrapersonal failures.
• The role of interpersonal relationships was minimized or conceived of as consisting only of objectively measurable stimuli.
• The fleeting nature of emotions made them untrustworthy as indicators of happiness, so the goal of psychotherapy had more to do with reducing symptoms of illness than promoting some value-laden (and therefore unscientific) measure of health and wellness.
• Feelings and thoughts were separated, making it possible to imagine that thinking was a higher-order process than emotions and should control them.
In pursuing the question “How can we feel better?” we trace the changes in these conceptions and the emergence of the systemic paradigm.
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