Lisa Appignanesi - A brief history of extreme emotions in the West

Lisa Appignanesi, Visiting Professor at King’s College London and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, gives a brief history of extreme emotions.

About Lisa Appignanesi
"I’m a Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities at King’s College London. I’ve written books on anger, on love and trials of passions, and on women.

I’m fascinated by the subject of emotions: extreme emotions, madness, Freud, the therapeutic and psychiatric professions."

Key Points

• The Western tradition of grappling with extreme emotions goes back to Ancient Greece – to Aristotle and to Homer’s The Iliad, in which Achilles enters a state of “melancholy” and grief at the death of his friend.
• The Greeks, in their medical system, attributed extreme emotions to “humours” that manifested in the mind, body and soul.
• In the Christian epoch, the understanding of emotions was connected to the seven deadly sins. The emotions that we now think of as negative, such as greed and lust, were thought of as “sins”.
• Psychiatry emerged in the 19th century: French “mind doctor” Pinel was the forefather of the asylum, where people diagnosed with madness were, among other methods, “distracted” as a form of treatment.
A very long Western tradition of thinking
There’s a very long Western tradition of thinking about the emotions and trying to grapple with them, trying to understand them. It goes back as far as the written word – back to the Greeks, who thought of the emotions as something that you didn’t want to allow to get out of control and to take precedence over reason, rationality and deliberation. Aristotle tells us that. Yet, we see extreme emotions everywhere in Greek society and literature. We find it in Homer, with Achilles worrying and being in a state of melancholia, of grief. He’s mourning his dead friend and he’s also being possessed by the gods.

So, there are two alternative descriptions of what we could call extreme emotion. One is the emotion that drives you mad from without, and the other is the one that drives you mad from within. One is linked to grief and the other is linked to a kind of possession.