Abstract
In this chapter I explore various issues relating to the ‘fractured self’, the self that suffers from symptoms of poor mental health, symptoms that plausibly often have their source in emotion. Here, I am particularly concerned to spell out the implications that claims advanced earlier in the book may have for our understanding of the role of emotion in explaining symptoms associated with various mental health conditions, including disorders of conduct and thought. I also consider the implications that some of the claims made earlier in the book have for issues pertaining to the treatment of distressing or maladaptive emotions, including and especially the theoretical underpinnings of cognitive therapy.
Madness is the extreme of tragic passion. Oedipus’s curse against his sons is uttered in pain and anger with ‘a raving heart.’ Antigone’s phrén ‘is mad with grieving’ at her brothers’ deaths. Clytemnestra is suspected of being ‘mad with pleasure’ to hear of Orestes’ death. Hippolytus’s horses are mad with fear; Medea went off with Jason mad with love, ‘with a raving heart.’ In Greek tragedy, as in other eras of tragedy, ‘the possibility of madness is … implicit in the very phenomenon of passion.’
—Ruth Padel (1995, 164)
Again, that Madnesse is nothing else, but too much appearing Passion, may be gathered out of the effects of Wine, which are the same with those of the evill disposition of the organs. For the variety of behavior in men that have drunk too much, is the same with that of Mad-men: some of them Raging, others Loving, others Laughing, all extravagantly, but according to their severall domineering Passions.
—Thomas Hobbes, in Macpherson, ed. (1968, 141–142)
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Notes
- 1.
This might be illustrated with the following example by Peter Chadwick: “As the months went by, my mind was getting riskier and riskier in decision making style. [In time] I was actually walking past people listening almost masochistically for “comments at my expense”. Every “him” or “he” was now a hit… A woman in a main street took a long, very hard look at my face as she was walking towards me, ran ahead, with urgency, to catch up her partner and said loudly, “Hey”. I didn’t hear the rest of what she said but it must have been about me.” (2008; cited in Garety et al. 2011, 334). Plausibly, then, this person’s reasoning bias consisted in a mental state whose nature was to cause the person to believe that someone was talking about them in the event of receiving certain auditory stimuli (comments such as ‘he’ or ‘him’) and visual stimuli (such as long and very hard looks).
- 2.
To be clear, I am speaking here of mental phenomena regarding which we might fail to consciously register or reflect on, and not mental phenomena that fail to possess a characteristic phenomenology (see Chap. 2 for a detailed explanation of the relevant distinction). We can leave it an open question as to whether the evaluative thoughts that the cognitive theorist has in mind lack a characteristic phenomenology or not, though as far as I can see the cognitive theorist is certainly not committed to the view that the thoughts in question lack a phenomenology (which arguably is a good thing too, since plausibly thoughts, as with emotions, are nothing but their characteristic ways of appearing —on this point, see Chap. 2 and Whiting 2016).
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Whiting, D. (2020). Emotion and the Fractured Self. In: Emotions as Original Existences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54682-3_8
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