I'm reading Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotion (Chicago, 2006), which reclaims the tradition of theories of the emotion s(or "the passions" as they were so often called) that stress social embeddedness. The basic idea is that social position structures the emotional experience open to a particular person. Gross illustrates this thesis by a discussion of Aristotle and shame:
there is shame where social institutions are most dense... passions are inequitably distributed, exchanged, and monopolized where social difference is most extreme. A slave, for instance, does not provoke in a master passions such as friendly feeling, confidence, or even pity, because, according to Aristotle, pity is directed toward those of equal standing who have suffered a wrong unjustly. (42)
In Chapter 5, Gross discusses a case study of man suffering from delusions of grandeur laid out by William Perfect's "immensely popular" Annals of Insanity (1778). Gross focuses on Perfect's claim that the man exhibited "extreme sensibility." This is someone who had undergone an
unexpected miscarriage in commercial affairs that apparently precipitated his mental decline; he is susceptible to disappointment at the hands of creditors real and imagined, to the statutes of lunacy, and to his disgruntled relatives who would dispatch him to the madhouse. Once so confined, even the despotic arrogance and self-importance of patient X seems, according to the logic of Perfect's narrative, a delusional overreaction to abject helplessness. This is the brilliance of Perfect's work as an author of popular psychiatric case studies, and it is one of the things we have to relearn in the wake of scientific psychology's later triumph: the psyche is a precipitate of social relations, and as such it is subject to historical variation. (164)
But in order to achieve a finer sense of this variation we must remember to distinguish Perfect's social passions from the more familiar Cartesian emotions. According to Perfect, the trials for the human breast that can overwhelm susceptible minds are the various passions such as fanaticism, joy, grief, hatred, anger, jealousy, pride, ill-requited love, misplaced confidence, as well as the compassion that fails when one is deserted by friends or accused "with the pointed finger of conscious superiority"-social passions, in other words, not the individual instantiations of universally shared emotions that captured Descartes's imagination, as I discussed in chapter 1, and that are still considered "primary" by leading neurophysiologists such as Antonio Damasio. (164)
I don't have too much to add here at this point; I'm working on the "Politics" chapter for an essay collection on Collective Emotions, eds. Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela (Oxford UP), and will be blogging on interesting passages I come across in my reading. I hope to be able to post a draft of the chapter in a few weeks.
[UPDATE, 2 August, 9:42 am CDT: oh hell, I might as well throw this in here: the line that really caught my eye was this one: "the psyche is a precipitate of social relations, and as such it is subject to historical variation." And the reason it caught my eye is its resonance with Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, both Chapter 2, the critique of Freudian "familialism" by means of DG's thesis on the direct libidinal investment of the social, and Chapter 3, the "universal history of desiring-production."]