Why Our Emotions Should Matter - Raphael Henry

All too often, when we pursue philosophy, we are told to leave our emotions at the door. The reasoning behind this common position is that emotions – especially motivationally strong ones such as anger or grief – are said to be fundamentally irrational, and hence they (and by proxy the emotional speakers themselves) have no place in rational debate (the cornerstone of modern philosophy).

Using the complex and highly emotional topic of grief as an example, I aim to demonstrate that there are instances in which ‘leaving our emotions at the door’ would in fact prove irrational, and we should instead recognise that emotion and logic, far from being inherently incompatible, are in some cases practically inseparable.

The fact that modern philosophy often shuns emotion doesn’t mean that philosophers have ignored emotions entirely: in Symposium, for example, Plato (360 B.C.E.) outlines detailed accounts of what it might mean to be in love. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s (350 B.C.E./2009) concept of eudaimonia (well-being/happiness) still appears in any discussion of what it means to live a happy life (although our modern understanding of happiness is quite different from Aristotle’s). The ancient Stoic philosophers were perhaps even more influential in the formation of Western thought about emotion, with their teachings often interpreted as stating that one must escape the influence of one’s emotions entirely if one hopes to fully embrace rationality and live a good life (Graver 2007). This thought has been a particularly major driving force behind Western philosophy ever since, resulting in pendulum-like swings in thinking between periods of pure rationality and eras of decadent emotion.

The pendulum of history was certainly to be found in this latter category during the Romantic period, when artists, poets and scholars popularised the nobility and desirability of strong emotions, above all love and grief (Stroebe et al. 1996). But Romanticism was promptly succeeded by a strong return to the Stoic ideal of emotional detachment, thanks in large part to Sigmund Freud and his successors. In his 1917 article Mourning and Melancholia, Freud presented his theory that grief is a process of gradual detachment, in which the grieving person brings up memories of their departed loved one and withdraws all their ‘psychic energy’ from the former relationship. Once this process is done, Freud hypothesised, the psychic energy of the bereaved is no longer tangled up in residual attachment to the deceased, and so the bereaved is now ready to “reinvest” their energy into new relationships. Since, according to Freud, this is the function of grieving, any failure to completely withdraw one’s psychic energy from the deceased would count as failing to grieve correctly, and would require that the bereaved seek professional help in cutting away their lingering sense of connection.

According to Stroebe et al. (1996), the problem was that Freud based his theory on ideology, not evidence: he saw emotional detachment as desirable, and so reverseengineered a theory of grief that led to that endpoint. In doing so, he disregarded the evidence that comes from the actual lived experience of grieving individuals, which suggested that this was not an emotionally healthy way of coping with loss. Despite demonstrating little-to-no sensitivity towards the actual feelings of the grieving individual –and labelling any continuing emotional attachment as pathological – Freud’s ‘detachment theory’ of grief held sway over the psychiatric profession well into the 20th Century, only finding significant challenge in the aftermath of the Second World War (interestingly, this apparently came despite Freud himself refuting his own theory upon the death of his nephew – see Stroebe et al. 1996). John Bowlby, who has since become well-known thanks to his psychological theory of attachment types in relationships, began to recognise the enormous harm that came from giving Freud’s advice to children who had lost their parents during the war (see Field et al. 2006). He understood that if these children were told to withdraw the energy they had invested in their parents (enabling them to form new meaningful relationships), they were likely to develop deeply unhealthy coping mechanisms for their losses.

This slow shift away from Freud’s theory was finally cemented as inevitable in 1996, when Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman published their collected philosophical and psychological works on ‘continuing bonds’ – their term for the continuing connections that we often maintain with our loved ones, even after their deaths. Contrary to Freud, their research shows that it can actually be healthy for a person to maintain a sort of ‘relationship’ with their deceased loved one, albeit a very different relationship than the one that existed before their death. Maintaining a sort of ‘inner representation’ of the deceased can be a source of comfort and guidance, as well as a way of recovering from the loss. This can also unfold on the communal level, with members of the affected group (a family, for example) coming together in remembrance to preserve the sense that the deceased remains present in their lives – which can be especially important for children who have lost a parent, and who will go on to grow up without them. Today, we are coming to understand grief as a complicated process of responding to the monumental disruption to one’s life that is caused by the death of a loved one. According to Matthew Ratcliffe, Louise Richardson and Becky Millar (2022), we experience the death of a loved one as the irretrievable loss of not only them as a person, but also the life possibilities that they represent: for example, we lose the possibility of growing old with them. We now know that the grieving process often never truly comes to an end, and instead that we are entirely capable of forming new relationships whilst still holding those who came before in our hearts, in direct contradiction to what Freud outlined.

The major insight of this research, I would contend, is that we must be sensitive to the subjective emotional needs of grieving individuals not only in our treatment of those individuals but more fundamentally in how we theorise about grief. The failure of Freud’s theory is not simply that it does not account for all of the empirical evidence (although this is a glaring issue), but rather that it does not attend to a key facet of grief, the emotional experience. It is precisely because Freud’s theory employs sound logical arguments to reach its conclusion that it fails because he attempts to logically explain an emotional process without any reference to how it feels. There are two forms of denying the validity of talking about emotions in logical debates. Freud is an example of the first, which is to disregard emotional evidence and attempt to explain everything with cold logic. The second form of denial is to accept that certain topics cannot be handled in a purely logical way but to conclude as a result that such topics do not belong in philosophy and are not appropriate topics for logical debate. I would respond to this briefly by pointing out that, just because grief is emotional, does not mean it is therefore irrational: grief makes sense, and it follows rules. We are more than capable of constructing theories of grief and debating the relative upsides and downsides of competing claims. When philosophers write off topics such as grief as being ‘outside of the realm of philosophy’, they are as a result committing the worst error possible for a philosopher: they are employing faulty reasoning. Grief, and emotions more generally, should not be viewed as somehow separate from our rational capacities as philosophers just because they concern topics which cannot be approached unemotionally. Instead, we must become far more comfortable with the notion that some topics in philosophy simply cannot be approached without considering the important role that emotions play in how we engage with the world around us.

References

Aristotle (2009). The Nicomachean Ethics. In D. Ross.(Tr.), Oxford World Classics. Oxford University Press.

Field, N., B. Gao & L. Paderna (2006). Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: an Attachment Theory Based Perspective. Death Studies, 29(4), 277-299. doi: 10.1080/07481180590923689

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Tr.), On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (pp. 243258). Hogarth Press.

Graver, M. (2007). Stoicism and Emotion. University of Chicago Press.

Klass, D., P. R. Silverman, & S. L. Nickman (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Routledge.

Plato (360 B.C.E.). Symposium. B. Jowett. (Tr.). The Internet Classics Archive. Retrieved December 2023, from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html

Ratcliffe, M., L. Richardson & B. Millar (2022). On the Appropriateness of Grief to Its Object. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 8(1), 1-17. doi: 10.1017/apa.2021.55

Stroebe, M., Gergen M., Gergen K., & Stroebe W. (1996). Broken Hearts or Broken Bonds? In Klass, D., Silverman, P.R., & Nickman, S. (Eds.) Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (pp. 31-44) Taylor & Francis