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Emotions Have History

isaacmoris October 16, 2019 at 09:37 3900 views 13 comments
According to Martha Nussbaum, infancy and childhood emotions influence are current emotions. Our source of comfort, guilt and desire have a root and history that we can even trace back to infancy and childhood. Our adult emotion cannot be fully understood without understanding emotions from infancy and childhood. The way we respond to our emotions like anger may have to do with our emotions during infancy and childhood. Like for example, we hate and we burst in anger, especially to our partners when they break their promise because your father also break his promise when you were young,to be there by your side and support you. Can you guys please share some experience that you can connect your past experience to your current emotions.

Comments (13)

god must be atheist October 16, 2019 at 10:28 #342460
When I was a baby, I liked to suck on my mother's teats. These days I STILL like to suck on lady's breasts, despite the apparent lack of ensuing nutritional effects. It is clearly an emtional response that has its roots in my early infancy.

Fancy that.
god must be atheist October 16, 2019 at 10:32 #342461
Quoting isaacmoris
Martha Nussbaum


I am not sure, but did not Martha Nussbaum say that these learned emotional responses go back so early into our relationship with what was our world then, that we don't have any memories of it?

And I am not sure, but why are you crediting M.N. with this, @IsaacMoris, when all this was originally ideated by Sigmund Freud?
god must be atheist October 16, 2019 at 10:33 #342462
Quoting isaacmoris
Can you guys please share some experience that you can connect your past experience to your current emotions.


And I am not sure, but what is the philsosophical implication you are attempting to draw from this exercis, @isaacmoris?

And I am not sure, but your tone and explanatory style makes me think you think of us as grade 2 pupils. "Now, children, take out your rulers, and draw a straight line in your notebooks. Then draw another straight line across it. Can someone tell me what you just drew?"
uncanni October 17, 2019 at 14:36 #342731
Reply to god must be atheist Can you be a little bit more disparaging and unwelcoming to the newcomer?
Janus October 17, 2019 at 22:28 #342831
Reply to god must be atheist Oooh, you dirty little atheist! :joke:
Janus October 17, 2019 at 22:35 #342832
Reply to isaacmoris When I was a child my father always criticized and tried to control me. I rebelled from the start, and now, as an adult I have had to slowly come to realize that I fall into a state of anger and aggression when people, especially those close to me, criticize and/ or try to control me.

Understanding the origin of negative emotions does seem to help with gaining some control over and/or quickly letting go of them.
god must be atheist October 18, 2019 at 22:08 #343173
Quoting Janus
Understanding the origin of negative emotions does seem to help with gaining some control over and/or quickly letting go of them.


I have to disparage you, too, @Janus, :-P, but this is the mechanism that Freud employed extensively to treat his so-called neurotic patients.

@uncanni: I have issues too, and mine is the short memory of humankind, which takes an internet ninni such as Martha Nussbaum as source of an idea which is well over a hundred years old.
Janus October 18, 2019 at 22:30 #343174
Quoting god must be atheist
I have to disparage you, too, Janus, :-P, but this is the mechanism that Freud employed extensively to treat his so-called neurotic patients.


So what? What's your point?
god must be atheist October 18, 2019 at 22:58 #343182
Quoting Janus
So what? What's your point?

The point is that you guys, namely @Janus and @MarthaNussbaum think of great ideas the same way as world-class scientists of the past have. If I assume you never became familiar with Freud and his teachings, then you came upon the same great idea by yourself. That's grand.
Janus October 19, 2019 at 01:00 #343196
Reply to god must be atheist I haven't claimed that the idea that knowing the origin of negative emotions helps you let go of them is my own original idea, so your comment still seems pointless.
god must be atheist October 19, 2019 at 02:38 #343210
Quoting Janus
I haven't claimed that the idea that knowing the origin of negative emotions helps you let go of them is my own original idea, so your comment still seems pointless.


Please note that I hadn't made a claim to attribute a claim to you which you deny claiming as your claim. I put in a CONDITIONAL phrase that saves my skin. For you to make a claim that I made a pointless claim seems pointless as my claim had been made with a condition, the outcome of which was known to you, but not to me.

(I wonder how long this is going to go on...)
uncanni October 19, 2019 at 07:15 #343265
Quoting god must be atheist
I have issues too, and mine is the short memory of humankind, which takes an internet ninni such as Martha Nussbaum as source of an idea which is well over a hundred years old.


I ask my students if they know what Woodstock was, or who Freud was. Most of them say no.
I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled...

I doubt that Nussbaum is a ninny, but abreaction is, indeed, Breuer and Freud's terminology. A quick glance at her book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, on Amazon reveals that Freud is frequently cited.

But is abreaction really a novel concept? Could we say that Augustine had an abreaction when he resolved his "Whence evil"/split mind problem?
Janus October 19, 2019 at 18:44 #343384
Reply to god must be atheist Pointless!