Wisdom Notes on Spirituality

Notes on Emotion and Abreaction

This article is a precis of some main ideas in the full articles on the Home page.

Model of Emotion

When I used to practise meditation I learned to detect three kinds of feelings: the positive, the negative, and the neutral ones. When I followed the progress of these feelings, they led me to emotions. So I learned that feelings are the basis of emotions. The neutral feeling is rather rare, so in a practical sense emotions can be arranged into two groups, those that are based on the positive feeling and those that are based on the negative feeling.

In order to create a suitable model for describing emotion, I adapted a traditional model of consciousness. In my model, consciousness is an arrangement of three factors: will power, mind, and feeling. So unlike some past thinkers, I consider that consciousness is not the same as mind.

Each of the three factors I call a mode of consciousness. Since consciousness is seamless and has no natural barriers between the factors, so the factors have to interact with each other. The way that this interaction occurs is through the activity of the mind. The mind links to both will power and feeling, but this linking has the effect of modifying the way that they are expressed. The interaction between mind and will power produces desires, and the interaction between mind and feeling produces emotions. The mind uses ideas or concepts to help create desires and emotions. 

I give a couple of definitions.

• Will power is a pure striving, an undirected effort. When will power is united with mind, it generates desire. Desire is the activity of will power directed by a mental concept. The concept governs the use of will power. The concept directs the will power.


• When feeling is united with mind, it generates emotion. Emotion is the activity of feeling directed by a mental concept. The feeling energises a conceptual response to a stimulus.

Table 1: Binary Emotions

Fear – Anger
Love – Hate
Jealousy – Narcissism
Pride – Guilt

Vanity – Self-pity
Resentment – Bitterness
Envy – Greed

To complicate matters, some emotions have an additional complexity: they are compound in their nature and consist of two simpler emotions (so we can say that the two simpler emotions are factors of the compound emotion). The factors do not exert their influence simultaneously; only one is dominant at any particular time. I use the term mode to indicate which factor is being dominant at that time, that is, to indicate the manner in which the compound emotion is being experienced. This means that each compound emotion can be experienced in two different ways.

For example, guilt is a compound emotion and comprises the two simpler emotions of self-pity and self-hate. So when the self-pity factor is being dominant, I describe this as experiencing guilt (in the mode of self-pity). Similarly, when the self-hate factor is being dominant, this is guilt (in the mode of self-hate). I list some compound emotions.

Table 2: Compound Emotions

Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.

Resentment = guilt + idealism.
Bitterness = pride + idealism
Repentance = regret + guilt (mode of self-pity).
Sadness = regret + jealousy (mode of self-pity).

Paranoia = fear + pride (mode of vanity).
Anxiety = fear + vanity.

Resentment arises when the person’s sense of idealism (whether materialistic, moral, ethical, or spiritual) is restricted by guilt; bitterness arises when idealism is restricted by pride.

Abreaction

From the 1980s onwards, I kept notebooks on what I was thinking and what I was experiencing. Not much of value is in these notebooks until I learned to identify a few emotions that seemed to be almost habitual companions in normal life. In the early 1990s, when I looked through my notes, I saw that some of these emotions kept occurring, not in random order but in regular patterns. Then I started watching the flow of emotion, seeing what happened when one emotion faded away and the next emotion arose. From this observation I discovered that there are four main sequences of emotion that flow through the mind on a regular basis. At a later date I discovered two more sequences.

The sequential flow in any one of these sequences is always the same and so I consider that they are invariable in their operation, by which I mean that they do not change. I consider that they represent laws of mental functioning, and so I call them laws of the unconscious mind. The driving force that activates them is anxiety. The name that I give to these sequences is abreaction. For the ancient Greek dramatists, abreaction was the purging (cathartic) effect that the release of emotion gave. Sigmund Freud kept to this view. However, neither the ancient dramatists nor Freud understood the full process of abreaction. They just saw the cathartic effect.

What I have found is that the emotion which is released is always anxiety. The four main sequences are four kinds of abreaction. These four laws eliminate the anxiety that is attached to four other emotions, these being guilt, pride, narcissism, and jealousy. The four kinds of abreaction become the abreaction of guilt, the abreaction of pride, the abreaction of narcissism, and the abreaction of jealousy.

I introduce a change in traditional terminology. Up till now the terms catharsis and abreaction have been more or less synonymous. Now I separate them. I name the invariable sequences abreaction, and restrict the term catharsis to the stage of excitement that begins just one particular sequence. Catharsis is now simply the first stage in the abreaction of guilt.

The Abreaction of Guilt

As an example of abreaction, I give the sequence of the abreaction of guilt. During the abreaction, when one emotion fades away the next one arises. I use the phrase “leads to” to indicate this transition. Therefore the notation narcissism leads to jealousy means that when narcissism fades away then jealousy arises. 

The abreaction of guilt begins with catharsis (in the stage of narcissism) and ends in resentment. The usual sequence is:

Narcissism leads to jealousy; then jealousy leads to guilt; then guilt leads to resentment.

There is an optional end to an abreaction. This occurs when the resentment (or other final emotion) is resolved into acceptance. However, the resolution is rarely attained.

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