Considering our emotions as 'flags' not our 'ego' or 'self'....

On a recent episode of the nineties television comedy, “Frasier,” the radio-talk-show-host psychiatrist returned to his mentor because he was feeling down, lonely and unfulfilled. In the course of the ‘session’ it became apparent that, in answer to each of his mentor’s inquiries, Frasier had a rational or logical explanation, or rationalization. Missing from each response were his ‘emotions,’ his feelings. And, as his mentor insightfully pointed out, he had ‘distanced’ himself from everyone, essentially causing his own predicament.

Many of the clinical therapies that have evolved over the last twenty year plus, especially in the field of clinical pastoral training, have focused on helping the client search for, identify and claim ownership of his/her emotions. It is as if these features of one’s life, previously unnoted, unnoticed, unmentioned and thereby under-valued were active in a form of psychological repression. And the theory goes that by naming and releasing emotions, including the whole range from the most pleasant and happy to the deepest anger and sadness, the client would come to know him/herself better and feel less constricted. Culturally, too, the expression of emotions in professional and public life, has been circumscribed by unwritten rules that foreclose on their full release. And while emotional intimacy as well as emotionally destructive actions are not tolerated in public, the question of the ‘stiff upper lip’ and all that goes with a Stoic version of how to ‘be’ with others, has been a norm for well over a century, possibly rooted in a stoicism that has deep historic roots. The question of being responsible for one’s emotions, however, has been paramount in much of our cultural perceptions of how we respond to various emotions. Indeed, whether verbalized or not, how we “feel” about a situation, or a person, or a negative circumstance has a significant impact on how we react that that person/event, and how others react to our reaction, at a level that exceeds mere naming.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), more recently, has emerged as a different way to approach psychological stress, providing the link between ‘thoughts and actions’ that, while not eliminating emotions, gives them less clout in the person’s angst. Used to improve the symptoms of a variety of mental health challenges and disorders such as anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, phobias, substance use disorders. The approach typically works by identifying unhelpful or incorrect thought patterns and digging into how they may be affecting a person’s emotions and behaviors before actively replacing them with healthier thought patterns, thus positively impacting the person’s feelings and actions. (From ‘What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Updated March 17, 2023, Medically Reviewed by Melissa Guarnaccia, LCSW, on betterhelp.com)

The intersection of thoughts and feelings, cognition and emotional intelligence, has been at the centre of much research and theory among the psychological and psychiatric professions seemingly forever. Different from both clinical therapies that work with the client to unearth deep emotions and CBT that works through thoughts and their linkage to actions, James Hillman posits a different approach. He writes in Revisioning Psychology:
Archetypal psychology…attempts to envision emotions less personally, less as resultants of human forces. For when freed from human eccentricity, reverted to fantasies, and then to mythic patterns, emotions have a different quality of experience. The family quarrels, the lovers’ enthusiasms, the office explosions, all have profound backgrounds; whether epic, tragic, or comic they area always mythic, far larger than life and at a distance from life. (p. 177) …Like afflictions, emotions put me in the center of things, giving importance and existential assurance to human being. They seem so centrally mine. Yet they are external to the individual person. We share in emotions and hold them in common; they transcend history and locality; we read them in another’s face beyond language and culture, feel them in the gestalt of landscapes and natural things, receive them from images buried thousands of years ago and from the sounds and shapes and words of inorganic art objects. Grief, jealousy, comedy have their images that require no interpretative apparatus; they bear archetypal significance beyond your or my personal experiences of them…By showing emotion’s phylogenic (evolutionary) sources and parallel expressions in animals, (scientific) psychology was indirectly recognizing the nonpersonal background of human affect. In theological accounts of emotion, it has been attributed to a sinful essence or a cataclysmic prehuman event (the Fall), or to the generative principle of the beast, only accidentally rather than essentially attached to man. This perspective toward emotion which in one way or another keeps its origin or its essence distinct from human being has led to many practical methods which further support the fantasy of the separability of emotion from man. Ataraxia (tranquillizing), apathia (freeing from passion), and katharsis (casting off or washing away) are all methods which work from the premise of this distinction: the psychic events of emotion can be discriminated from human being. We do not use these guised of concealment for what we want to say. They are in any case pejorative, their way of making the distinction is in value language; emotion is archaic, inferior, sinful, disordering. Whereas our distinction between human and emotion treats it as a ‘divine influe,’ to use the poetical language that appealed to Blake. Emotion is a gift that comes by surprise, a mythic statement rather than a human property. It announces a movement in soul, a statement of the process going on in a myth which we may perceive in the fantast images that emotion accompanies. This means that human beings are not responsible for their statements of emotion. Aesthetics recognizes this, finding emotion an incomplete artistic statement which requires personal shaping to be considered valid art. Law, too, recognizes this, and so does common speech. We are not altogether ourselves in undergoing strong affects and so not humanely accountable for what is not our property. (p.176-7)

These last statements from Hillman do not come to this scribe, or doubtless to you dear reader, as just another cup of morning coffee, predictable, comprehensible, digestible and totally grasped/drunk. Rather, they come as a kind of ‘shock’ to the senses, to the mind, to the body and to the sense of where and how we each see ourselves, our emotions and their place in our lives. Emotions, as gifts, seem to be considered by Hillman as gifts, yes, but also as leaves on a deeper and flowing river of the myth on which the emotions surface and pass. The commonly accepted notion, even the conventionally moral tenet of our culture is that we bear responsibility for our emotions, and if they are pleasing, then we are pleased with the ‘other’. If they are unpleasant, however, we find that unsettling, Like the weather-vane of the fantasy image which has engaged us, they are not the weather, or the myth itself. Taking them literally as expressions of the specific experience, as Hillman counsels, ‘results in literalizing the experience and the experiencer.’ He goes further, in his deconstruction of the notion of a centralized moral person…I am suggesting further that we entertain the extreme view that the notion of human being as centered in the moral person of free will is also a mythical fantasy, an archetypal perspective given by a single Hero or a single God; our freedom to choose, our moral center and decisiveness, our free will- all is the code of a transpersonal dominant. Moral codes, including those which attempt the simplification of universality (the Judaic, the Christian, the Kantian, or the Delphic) are the literalization of an archetypal position….The moralistic fallacy is central to the myth of man in the middle, humanism’s psychology of a self-identified ego, the Hero whose decisive sword divides in two so that he may choose between good and evil. Moralism plagues psychology, as it must if we remember psychology’s origins in the Reformation and Melanchthon’s attempt to bring about the ethical culture of Germany. Even empirical psychology ha sit moralistic tone, tending to be both descriptive and normative together. Whether in the fantasy of Watson, Skinner, and Mowrer (two factor theory of avoidance) or in Freud, Maslow, Laing (The Divided Self, Politics of the Family, wanted to make madness normal) and Jung, psychology want to show in the same demonstration both how we are and how we should be—the ‘should be’ disguised by saying, ‘This is how mankind really is; here is our basic nature; this is what it is to be human.’ What does not fi/, in becomes inhuman psychopathic, or evil. Every student of psychology is forced into moralistic positions and every patient of psychology caught in moral judgements about the soul.(p. 178)

The notion of a psychological/moral/ethical centre, achieved primarily in and through the therapy that seeks to identify and to clarify emotions as an expression of the self or the ego, is being challenged by Hillman, as, perhaps one of his most penetrating views.

The notion of ‘how mankind really is’ is about as epic a phrase as the phrase ‘knowing the mind of God’….and perhaps we live in the river that flows between these two banks. Attempting to discern either 'bank’, and certainly both, is one of, if not the most challenging of enigmas we all face. And, given the western history of attempting to ‘encircle’ the definition of ‘human being’ within a circumference of both therapy and morality that begins with a fixed notion of the limits and boundaries of that circle, we might be prompted to ask, “How is that working out for us?”

Our jails and courts are literally and metaphorically enduring a tsunami of human beings, whose behaviour has ‘crossed’ some line of law, based on some fixed notion of morality, at the time the law was written. And then, surprise, that notion of what was ‘right and good’ changed to something else. Of course, we are all immersed in the jargon of the arc of justice tending upward as the cliché has it. And for many minority communities, that arc has a seeming glacial pace, and has left them behind what they consider ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ with the while, straight, ‘christian’ majority.

Our “feelings” as Frasier’s psychiatrist mentor put it, have been at the centre of the many conversations about ‘evolved’ men, for example, as compared with many women who have been familiar and conversant with, and circled around their shared feelings for decades, if not longer. Our feelings have been considered to be integral to how we ‘consider’ or analyse, or diagnose, or respond to any specific situation or relationship. At the cores of those feelings, as the culture demonstrates so unequivocally, is the perception of whether we are being ‘respected, valued, honoured and in a position in which we are ‘sharing’ the power.

In any power differential, however, irrespective of the situation, whether in a family, a school, an athletic team, or a corporation, those who ‘have’ power are those who have demonstrated the capacity and the will to do what it takes to have attained that status, Those who do not ‘have’ power, on the other hand, are too often regarded by those with power as ‘less than’ and as ‘less worthy’ and as sometimes even ‘worthless.’

And while there is always an emotional component of each of our experiences, the emotions themselves are like ‘flags’ that can prompt serious delving into questions like “what is my part in this situation and what do I want to do about it?” For those who consider such questions as irrelevant, their perception of the ‘cause’ of their feelings lies with another person or force. For those open to such a question, they have already begun a reflective process of discernment of their own reality, how that reality might be impacting others, and if and how they might wish to amend both their perceptions, attitudes, and actions.

Hillman’s counsel, for each of us, irrespective of what professional or what social level we inhabit, is to detach our emotions from our ‘moral responsibiltiy’ (as in the adage, there are no wrong feelings) and to then reflect on what kinds of patterns we have embodied in our lives, as a more responsible and also humbling perspective on our ‘ego’ as our ‘identity’.

It was Admiral James Stavridis, (retired), former Supreme Allied Commander NATO from 2009-13, Dean, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University, 2013-2018), Vice-Chair, Global Affairs, Chair of the Board of Trustees, the Rockefeller Foundation, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who, when asked about the then impending visit of the Chinese Premier to Moscow and its implications for the United States, replied in words to the effect, ‘with both Russia and China enhancing their power and influence in the world, the United States will have to re-evaluate its position on the world stage, and consider a more humble approach given that it is no longer the solitary world power.’

If such an insight can and does come from that source, given Stavridis’ personal and professional history and legacy, one wonders, from outside the United States, if such a view of the world embracing American humility, and thereby even slightly ‘shading’ American ‘hubris’ can be uttered on national television, one wonders if the prospect of that perspective might not be enhanced at least partially, by a full reading and study of the American psychologist, James Hillman’s thoughts, perceptions and insights?

Human psychology can never be excised or surgically removed from any legitimate consideration of the zeitgeist, and thus theory and policy and practice in government, the military, the corporate world and the scientific community, as well as the ecclesial realm cannot be segregated from the ‘family’ and ‘personal’ realm of human psychology. As Hillman writes to this effect, ‘it is right to be angry and depressed about the world given the kind of decision and attitudes being displayed in the world. We can no longer tolerate the academic, political and conventional balkanization of our minds, our hearts and our souls from the world we are living in.