The Value of These Ideas

What is the use in identifying emotions ? . By being able to identify our emotions we can begin to acquire first-hand knowledge of the mind’s influence on the ego.

What is the value of identifying emotions ? . This knowledge is essential if we want to understand the meaning of sorrow and mental pain. So this knowledge lays the groundwork for clearing confusion and self-deception from consciousness.

Once we can identify our range of emotions we can begin to investigate, directly through our experience (that is, by empiricism), questions concerning truth and falsehood, and questions concerning ethics. We will then find that our empirical experience will challenge all traditional attitudes to these questions. G.E. Moore summarised a certain perspective in philosophy derived from Immanuel Kant (Moore, 1903) :

... just as, by reflection on our perceptual and sensory experience, we become aware of the distinction between truth and falsehood, so it is by reflection on our experience of feeling and willing that we become aware of ethical distinctions.

By considering what perception and sensation mean ‘we may discover what properties the world must have, if it is to be true’. So, too, by considering what feeling and willing mean ‘we may discover what properties the world must have, if it is to be good or beautiful’.

The way that I interpret this quotation is that the first kind of reflection develops self-consciousness, whereas the second kind of reflection develops a moral consciousness. [³]

More importantly for the therapeutic point of view, the identification of emotions enabled me to establish that the unconscious mind works in deterministic ways. Some emotions flow in invariable sequences -- these sequences underlie the major problems that present themselves to consciousness during a psycho-analysis. A long psycho-analysis will bring into awareness intense states of resentment, bitterness and anger.

The emotional sequences form part of the traditional concept of abreaction, which had not been clearly delineated till my investigations. The analysis of abreaction, and why it ends in resentment and bitterness, is the subject of the next article.

CONCLUSION

Emotions are just concepts which are energised by feelings. The concept introduces the factor of mind and so each emotion has its own cluster of ideas associated with it. Once a person learns to identify their full range of major emotional responses, then they can use them to clear confusion from the traditional debates about truth and goodness.

References

The number in brackets at the end of the reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it.
[¹]. More body symptoms and mental attitudes are described in the article Psycho-Somatics, on my website Patterns of Confusion. See Links page. [1]
[²]. In these articles on psychology I treat insight and intuition as equivalent terms. However, I separate them in my article Reason & Intuition on my website A Modern Thinker. See Links page. [2]
[³]. There is an additional comment to this view in the article Self-Awareness, section Value of These Ideas, on my website The Subconscious Mind. See Links page. [3]
Books
Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica. Cambridge 1903. (sections 78-79).
Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath.All Rights Reserved.

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