The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in psychology, philosophy, medicine, allied health sciences, sociology, and related subjects.

A Human History of Emotion: How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know is by the historian Richard Firth-Godbehere.

The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of emotion.

The publisher’s description follows:

We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold, hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. Events ranging from the origins of philosophy to the birth of the world’s major religions, the fall of Rome, the Scientific Revolution, and some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced can’t be properly understood without understanding emotions. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, art, and religious history, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes readers on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history—from Ancient Greece to Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and beyond. A Human History of Emotion vividly illustrates how our understanding and experience of emotions has changed over time, and how our beliefs about feelings—and our feelings themselves—profoundly shaped us and the world we inhabit. The concept of emotions is relatively recent: Emotions are the way we use the sum of our experiences to understand how we feel in particular circumstances.

• Emotions are complex processes that evoke positive and negative psychological responses and physical expressions, often involuntary.
• Emotions are often related to feelings, perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or relations between them, in reality or in the imagination.
• They typically arise spontaneously, rather than through conscious effort.
• An emotion is often different from a feeling, although the word feeling can mean emotion in some contexts.

The author examines such historical emotions as shame in Japan and vengeance in China. In 1872, Charles Darwin’s published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin defined emotions are mental states that cause typical bodily expressions. Many other interpretations followed.

Here are some thoughts on emotions by authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

• Henri Matisse in Matisse on Art (1912)

People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.

• D. Ouspensky, in The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (1950)

Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.

• Lao Tzu

Any person prey to emotions is not his own master.

• Benedict de Spinoza

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”

• Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. […] We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.

• Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

I don’t own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don’t want to drown. My head is my heart’s lifebelt.

• Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out–through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.

• Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

• Edward O. Wilson

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)