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Taking Responsibility for our Emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Nancy Sherman
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Georgetown University

Extract

We often hold people morally responsible for their emotions. We praise individuals for their compassion, think less of them for their ingratitude or hatred, reproach self-righteousness and unjust anger. In the cases I have in mind, the ascriptions of responsibility are not simply for offensive behaviors or actions which may accompany the emotions, but for the emotions themselves as motives or states of mind. We praise and blame people for what they feel and not just for how they act. In cases where people may subtly mask their hatred or ingratitude through more kindly actions, we still may find fault with the attitude we see leaking through the disguise.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1999

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References

1 For a helpful summary of positions on moral responsibility, see Fischer, John and Ravizza, Mark's introduction to their anthology Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. It is important to note that the notion of reactive attitudes which Peter Strawson develops in his classic essay “Freedom and Resentment” (reprinted in the above volume) includes the notion of praise and blame for emotional attitudes as well as actions.

2 Blum, Lawrence, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (New York: Routledge, 1980), 160207Google Scholar. See also Justin Oakley's valuable discussion of this position, in Oakley, , Morality and the Emotions (New York: Routledge, 1992), 160–90.Google Scholar

3 Adams, Robert, “Involuntary Sins,” The Philosophical Review 94, no. 3 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Adams's account includes an important criterion of “ethical appreciation” in virtue of which we are held accountable for emotions. However, insofar as that ethical appreciation is for data we may be unconscious of (even though we should have been sensitive to it), accountability for moral perception is still not within the province of the voluntary. My view, developed in the last part of this essay, is that there are ways that we can be active and responsible even with regard to our unconscious perceptions and emotions.

4 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a31–b21Google Scholar. See Sherman, Nancy, The Fabric of Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 5Google Scholar; and Sherman, Nancy, Making a Necessity of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 In Making a Necessity of Virtue, ch. 4, I suggest passages where Kant may be able to answer this charge.

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9 I have heard the following told anecdotally, though I have not been able to track down the reference. Freud was once asked: “What are the three things required for analysis?” He replied: “Courage, courage, courage.” It is also noteworthy that in the case of Miss Lucy R., Freud comments that the repression was, on the one hand, “a defensive measure which is at the disposal of the ego,” but on the other, “an act of moral cowardice,” and he says that “a greater amount of moral courage would have been of advantage to the person con cerned.” Though we need to bear in mind that these remarks date from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, and that they are made well outside the clinical office, still the thought expresses the expectation that a patient be responsible for working on psychological im provement. Freud, Sigmund, “Studies on Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 123.Google Scholar

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11 Stacker makes these points in “Responsibility Especially for Beliefs.”

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21 Sroufe, , Emotional Development, 74.Google Scholar

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23 The ability to mask emotions, to decouple what is being felt from its typical manifes tation (for example, smiling despite intense displeasure), is a much later developmental milestone observed in preschoolers. See Malatesta, Carol, Culver, Clayton, Tesman, Johanna Rich, and Shepard, Beth, “The Development of Emotion Expression during the First Two Years of Life,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 54 (1989): 78CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See also Sroufe, , Emotional Development, 107, 124–30.Google Scholar

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43 This period also corresponds to the Freudian anal period, marked by sphincter (muscular) control, and the ambivalence centered around wanting to control bowels, like an adult, and yet enjoying the old ways of being warm in one's own mess and then pampered with clean diapers in an intimate exchange.

44 Mahler, et al. , The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, 7779.Google Scholar

45 See Freud, Anna's classic work, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993).Google Scholar

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47 Ibid. For further discussion of verbalization as a form of emotional control, see Hesse, Petra and Cicchetti, Dante, “Perspectives on an Integrated Theory of Emotional Development,” in Emotional Development, ed. Cicchetti, Dante and Hesse, Petra (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1982), 3336Google Scholar; see also Dunn, Judy and Brown, Jane, “Relationships, Talk about Feelings, and the Development of Affect Regulation in Early Childhood,” in Garber, Judy and Dodge, Kenneth, eds., The Development of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

48 There are, of course, child analyses that center around play, but I focus on the “talking therapy” of adult analysis.

49 Indeed, it was Freud's view that psychoanalytic theory revealed the structure of the “normal” psyche, with its various agencies and stages of growth. (“Depth psychology” was Freud's term for a psychology that recognized the dynamic influence of the unconscious in mental life.)

50 “Psychoanalysis promotes autonomy by virtue of its expansion of the analysand's ability to recognize these intrapsychic conflicts and to utilize the signal function [i.e., anxiety or depressive feeling] generated by dysphoric affect to activate self-observing capacities rather than automatically resort to regression and defense.” Levy, Steven and Inderbitzin, Lawrence, “Neutrality, Interpretation, and Therapeutic Intent,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 40 (1992): 9891011.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

51 Leading contemporary proponents of ego psychology are Brenner, Charles, Psychoanal ytic Technique and Psychic Conflict (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Arlow, Jacob, “The Dynamics of Interpretation,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 56 (1987): 6887Google ScholarPubMed. A classic formulation of ego psychology, from the 1930s, is that of Ego, Heinz HartmannPsychology and the Problem of Adaptation (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1995).Google Scholar

52 Rothstein, Arnold, “Sadomasochism as a Compromise Formation,” Journal of the Amer ican Psychoanalytic Association 39 (1991): 363–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

53 Self-psychology is associated with Kohut, Heinz and his works, The Analysis of the Self (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and The Restoration of the Self (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1977).Google Scholar

54 For the here-and-now transference, see Gill, Merton, “The Analysis of the Transference,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 27 (supplement, 1979): 263–88Google ScholarPubMed; and Gray, Paul, “Psychoanalytic Technique and the Ego's Capacity for Viewing Intrapsychic Activity,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 21 (1973): 474–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

55 For further discussion of neutrality, see my “The Moral Perspective and the Psycho analytic Quest,” in The Journal of the Academy of Psychoanalysis 23 (1995): 223–40Google Scholar; see also Levy, and Inderbitzin, , “Neutrality, Interpretation, and Therapeutic Intent.”Google Scholar

56 Freud, , The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense.Google Scholar

57 Shaffer, Roy, The Analytic Attitude (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 241–46.Google Scholar

58 This is now the dominant view of emotions in cognitive psychology. See Lazarus, R. S., Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

59 Sherman, , Making a Necessity of Virtue, ch. 2.Google Scholar

60 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, ch. 13.Google Scholar

61 I develop this notion of psychoanalysis as extending the ancient model of character development in “The Moral Perspective and the Psychoanalytic Quest.”

62 And perhaps his modern-day counterparts in cognitive therapy.

63 Strawson, , “Freedom and Resentment,”Google Scholar in Fischer, and Ravizza, , eds., Perspectives on Moral Responsibility.Google Scholar