The Nature of Emotion

By Ian Heath

Are you perplexed when bad things seem to happen to you without any apparent cause? Are you confused about relationships? Do you begin a good relationship but find that sooner or later it goes downhill? When you have done some creative work and feel excited about it, do you find that you feel sexy afterwards and may even want sex? If so, then this book is for you. 

The overall reason is that you are unaware of your emotional responses, mainly because you cannot accurately identify those responses.

Learn how to handle your emotions in harmonious ways and improve your relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398481008

Ian Heath

He was born in 1944, during World War II. He has a science education and is a free thinker, in the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual thought that can range over many disciplines. The range of his ideas is mainly in psychology, philosophy, New Age spirituality, history, and sexuality. After spending several years studying psychology and philosophy at evening classes, he began a psycho-analysis around 1988. He specialised in analysing emotion, and developed many new ideas about them. The Nature of Emotion is his first book.

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About the Author

He was born in 1944, during World War II. He has a science education and is a free thinker, in the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual thought that can range over many disciplines. The range of his ideas is mainly in psychology, philosophy, New Age spirituality, history, and sexuality.

After spending several years studying psychology and philosophy at evening classes, he began a psycho-analysis around 1988. He specialised in analysing emotion, and developed many new ideas about them. The Nature of Emotion is his first book.

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Ian Heath 2023

The right of Ian Heath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398480988 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398480995 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398481008 (ePub e-book)

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First Published 2023

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Introduction

This book is a presentation of new ideas on emotions: what they are, how to define them, and how to identify them. The mind is peculiarly susceptible to being influenced by a few principal emotions that flow together in various sequences. I call these sequences by the name of abreaction. They are likely to be common occurrences in the life of a person, and they are responsible for much of the distress, confusion and unhappiness that he or she faces in life.

Abreaction is a much more complicated process than it has previously been thought to be. It is a very important feature of therapy, and it functions whatever kind of therapy is being engaged in.

My ideas arose from a deep and prolonged psycho-analysis that has been continuing, on and off, for around 30 years. Most of the articles were written in the late 1990s and then put on the Internet for many years.

In this book, I use the term psychology to mean the kind of psychology that leads to an increase in the level of self-awareness of a person. This is primarily the scope of psycho-analysis and existential counselling theories.

The ideas presented in this book will be developed in later books.

Chapter 1

Overview of Consciousness

Article 1

The Hidden Layers of the Mind

1. The Basic Problem

What is confusing everybody today is that the average level of stress in societies all over the world is gradually increasing. A significant effect of this increase is that social and personal difficulties are becoming more difficult to handle adequately. Everyone has inadequate aspects to their personality, and most people try to hide their deficiencies from others. This is easiest to do when the level of stress on the person is within his ability to manage it fairly well. So up to, say, 100 years ago, most people could contain their inadequacies for most of their life, though occasionally they would get out of their depth in some situation or relationship and respond by violence, abuse, getting drunk regularly, and other ways of negative adaptation. However, with the increased level of stress in modern societies, the pace of life has increased too. Nowadays people can less and less hide their deficiencies and negative responses. So we see an increasing level of violence, abuse, and breakdown of relationships in the modern world.

The basic problem that modern life faces us with is that of managing emotions in mature and harmonious ways. Emotional immaturity is the most difficult task in life for a person to overcome and it affects all our relationships. The part that emotions play is that they put intensity into life. Think of the difference between liking a person and loving a person. When some of our emotions are intense, then they help to create drama in our life, irrespective of whether the drama is good or bad. It would be nice if we could put the intensity only into emotions that we like, and keep it out of the emotions that we don’t like. But the mind does not work that way.

How do we learn to manage our emotions? First, we have to learn about them, and this is the province of psychology. Then we learn to improve our social skills, by applying the psychological knowledge that we have learned. But there is a problem here. In the early 1990s when I was exploring my emotions, I found that in psychology textbooks there was no clear idea of what an emotion was. A wide variety of opinions were expressed about emotions in those books, and many of those opinions contradicted other opinions. I decided that I had to form my own ideas; as I analysed my emotional responses, I was able eventually to produce a theory of emotion.

The basic problem we have when we are immersed in intense emotional problems is that our mind is a mixture of psychological confusion and vagueness. Confusion means that our ideas have fuzzy boundaries, that is, different beliefs about ourself are overlapping so that we don’t know where one belief ends and the next one begins. This means that our responses to our usual problems can be contradictory and erratic. The way to resolve this predicament is to start sorting out the confusion and vagueness into different ideas, ideas which are clear and distinct, because each belief needs to be treated in its own way. Each belief has its own cause and produces its own effects. If we remain in a state of vagueness, all that the psychiatrist can do for us is to give us pills. The way out of this difficulty is to bring clarity to the mind by the development of self-awareness. In order to develop self-awareness, we need ideas on how the mind works. By studying the mind, we begin to know ourself.

2. Confusion

Psychological confusion, which can also be called mental confusion, can take various forms, from petty irrationality to severe states of mental disorder. The effect of confusion on the person depends on the intensity of it; it may be of minor intensity and so is just irritating to the person, or it can progress up to high levels of intensity and precipitate states of madness.

As I discovered in myself, a state of confusion goes hand-in-hand with a shallow sense of self-awareness over the issues that are causing the confusion. This shallowness obscures the fact that mental confusion is a wide-spread phenomenon, perhaps occurring to everyone at some stage, even many stages, of their life. For example, I consider that confusion is a major factor in the universality of social violence.

The main difficulty with handling confusion is that it occurs below the level of the conscious mind. If we think of consciousness as having layers to it, then underneath the conscious mind are hidden layers of mind. Hence it is very hard to analyse and discover what the causes are. In essence, confusion occurs when there is conflict between the conscious mind of a person and the hidden layers of the mind.

From my exploration of my mind, it appears that there are two broad layers within the hidden part of mind. The reason that I believe there are two layers is that one of the hidden layers is focused on what is personal and specific to each person, whilst the other hidden layer is focused on what is universal to everyone. The hidden universal mind appears to be at a deeper layer of consciousness than the hidden personal mind. [As I explain later in this book, I use consciousness to represent the totality of a person, whilst mind is just one factor of consciousness].

The terminology that I have adopted is that the hidden personal mind I call the subconscious mind, whilst the hidden universal mind I call the unconscious mind.

Sigmund Freud brought the term the unconscious mind into common use, whilst Carl Jung brought the term the subconscious mind into common use. However, my usage of these two terms is not necessarily the same as these two thinkers used them.

This idea of the mind having more than one layer enabled me to describe the causes of confusion in this way: confusion occurs in a person when there is conflict between either the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, or the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.

Why does this confusion occur? To explain this, I need to introduce another term, that of ego. Consciousness does not do anything by itself; it needs an agent or doer. The conventional term for this agent is ego or I, and so the ego of a person is that part of himself that does things or thinks ideas or feels things with the consciousness. We can think of the ego as the personality. Each ego has boundaries to itself, and these boundaries are the distinguishing marks that separate one person from another one. The boundaries are really the ego’s abilities, strengths, weaknesses, beliefs and attitudes. Inside these boundaries is that which defines the ego. Outside them is the rest of the world.

Some of these boundaries are the product of the ego’s subjectivity (such as the ways in which he expresses his creativity), and some boundaries originate from social, sexual and political relationships (the rules and conventions of such relationships). These boundaries have some degree of flexibility because they are not fixed but learned, either directly or indirectly. Indirect learning occurs through what is called social conditioning, when the person learns rules and values without, however, knowing and understanding the reasons for them. Social conditioning occurs primarily in childhood, when the child absorbs the rules and values of the parents before it is at an age when it can choose rules and values for itself.

The boundaries determine how we act and how we think and how we feel. Usually the boundaries are a product of the moral, immoral or amoral trainings that we absorb in our journey through life. They are the rules and standards and values that we live by. Now I can give my view on how confusion is generated.

Confusion is generated when the boundaries of the ego of the person are either vague and fuzzy and not understood, or else are conflicting.

The person becomes confused about what he or she is experiencing.

Vague and fuzzy boundaries are usually the product of bonding in childhood: the child bonds to its parents and siblings. The child takes the parents as role models and absorbs some of their character traits, beliefs and values into itself. The more intense the bonding is, the more fuzzy the child’s boundaries may become. The greater the attachment that a child has to a parent, the harder it becomes for the child (when it has become an adult) to see itself as a separate individual. I was very closely attached to my mother. During my own psycho-analysis I analysed my bonding. To put it humorously, I had to discover how much of me was me and how much was mother!

An example of conflicting boundaries is where behaviour that is adequate in some kinds of situation becomes inadequate in other kinds of situation. A person may prefer to use will power or rational thinking as the major means of handling general social, political, or economic issues; such an approach reduces the influence of emotion on thinking and on decision making, and so may well be successful. Nevertheless, this approach will be unskilful when the person has to handle relationship issues which have a high level of emotional content.

Another example is when fast social change has the effect of quickly changing social beliefs and values. Then we find that some behaviours that were accepted in earlier decades become unacceptable in later decades. So, for instance, when the sexual ideas of a traditional male come into conflict with ideas of sexual equality, the man finds that his patriarchal values and beliefs are being challenged by the tide of change.

In general, when a person has unclear or conflicting boundaries over some issue, this indicates that the person, when the issue arises, experiences a flow of emotions that he or she cannot handle skilfully or harmoniously.

Unclear or conflicting boundaries generate confusing experiences.

3. Layers of the Mind

I assume that there are two main layers of mind hidden from normal consciousness. When I explored these layers, I eventually realised that each of these main layers has several sub-layers within it. Before proceeding further, I repeat the two terms that I use to denote these layers of mind. My use of the terms subconscious mind and unconscious mind are as follows.

Subconscious mind refers to those aspects of mind that are particular to a person. This layer is personal.

Unconscious mind refers to those aspects of mind that are general to all humanity. This layer is impersonal.