Logic of Madness : A New Theory of Mental Illness (9780992796143) by Blakeway Matthew

Logic of Madness : A New Theory of Mental Illness (9780992796143) by Blakeway Matthew

Author:Blakeway, Matthew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc


DEVIANT PROACTION

Let us consider a generic driving emotion that I am going to call ‘Driver 1’. We can describe it in the following diagram (Figure 10):

… except we are going to imagine that we are considering a girl who was raised in a family where the behaviour associated with Driver 1 was suppressed systematically. This may have arisen because her family thought such behaviour was shameful or a sign of weakness, but why it happens does not really matter much for the purposes of this thought experiment.

When she first encountered the emotion in herself, naturally the behaviour would follow—a child will not suppress behaviour unless it has a reason to do so. But the family will express shock at the behavioural display (because it is shameful or a sign of weakness) and so she will learn to suppress it too.

Her family is not an island. It lives in a world where there are other people who do not think that there is anything wrong with displaying this behaviour. Her parents might tell her that a person in the street who displays Behaviour 1 is experiencing the emotion that we are calling Driver 1. (‘Tsk, tsk!’) Her parents might explain that this occurred because of a specific instance of a Biological Stimuli within set of Circumstances 1 and she can see this person in the street performing Action 1. She will therefore have a word for it ‘Driver 1’ and she can identify the emotion in other people via the behaviour. Her concept of it could even be pretty complete from the perspective of her observing it in other people (outside her family). Note that the set of circumstances that serve as Biological Stimuli for Driver 1 might be quite wide, and if she does not see this behaviour within her own family, she may only have an awareness of a limited subset of this totality. Also note that her family may only suppress the behaviour for just a subset of the total set of such Biological Stimuli, so again she would have an understanding of Driver 1, but maybe not the complete set of circumstances that normally trigger it. Mostly, I am going to describe binary misconceptions of emotions—purely for simplicity, but we should remember that misconceptions can vary by minute degrees. This situation, results in her growing up with an impaired ability to identify this emotion in herself because it can only be identified via the behaviour—and this is missing (wholly or in part) in herself because she has been trained to suppress it.

Now let us assume that exactly the same thing happens to this girl with respect to another emotion that I will call ‘Driver 2’. So the girl has an ability to understand this emotion in other people (outside the family)—she has a limited understanding of the set of Circumstances 2, but recognises Action 2 and Behaviour 2. Again, she has a greatly impaired ability to identify it in herself.

Let us say that the emotion Driver 1 arises in her in adolescence.



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