REVIEW. The History of Emotions: An Introduction by Jan Plamper

Posted on July 6, 2015 by

Professor William M. Reddy is William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, at Duke University.

Here he reviews Professor Jan Plamper‘s introduction to the field.

Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, translated by Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), a translation of Geschichte und Gefühl: Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2012)

plamperPlamper’s important new book has less to say about the treatment of emotions in the discipline of history than it does about their treatment in other disciplines. But this is as it should be. Study of emotions is peculiarly interdisciplinary. Several disciplines appear to have a special claim on the topic: literary studies, and more generally the study of artistic expression; religious studies; psychiatry; psychology (experimental, social, and clinical); and the neurosciences (cognitive and affective, as well as neurophysiology). In addition, certain anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers have focused their research and writing on the emotions. The anthropology of emotions and the sociology of emotions have almost the status of subfields, although, as Plamper notes, the study of emotions in anthropology (unlike in other disciplines) has been in something of a decline in the last fifteen years.[1] Behavioral economists like Robert Schiller have offered influential theories of emotional behavior in markets, especially in relation to bubbles and crises.[2]

Plamper thinks it is a good thing (and this reviewer agrees) that historians have not “come under the influence of the neurosciences” (298). But the best way to guard against such infelicitous influence, he insists, is to acquire a minimal facility with the whole range of assumptions and methods that scholars have deployed in various disciplines to delimit and account for “emotions.”

A number of scholars, including Daniel Gross and Ruth Leys, have already voiced carefully reasoned critiques of the routine methods of neuroscientists and experimental psychologists, of certain misleading (if not downright disingenous) “popularizations” of neuroscientific findings, and of the humanist scholars who have unreflectively borrowed from such popularizations, including certain proponents of Affect Theory and Cognitive Approaches to Literature.[3] A report of the US General Accountability Office of November 2013 has raised serious questions not just about lie detecting via study of facial muscle movements, but also, by implication, about the whole “basic emotions” approach to the study of affect, which treats affect as a package of genetically preprogrammed response modules.[4]

Within neuroscience itself, a vocal minority has raised persistent questions about the reigning “basic emotions” view, for example, in Luiz Pessoa’s recent book, The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). Pessoa, a prominent and innovative researcher on the amygdala, argues for something that most human beings throughout most of history would have regarded as common sense, that is, that emotion and thought are the same thing. Pessoa not only rejects basic emotions theory, but finds affect and cognition so deeply intertwined as to be indistinguishable in the brain. This view has been gathering adherents in neuroscience over the last fifteen years or so—in part as a result of increasingly sophisticated brain imaging technology.[5] Will it continue to win over more and more supporters? If it did, it might be because the structure of the brain is in conformity with the vocabulary of the vast majority of human languages. In Balinese, Ilongot, Sanskrit, ancient Hebrew, Homeric Greek—to name just a few—there are no terms for distinguishing the domain of thought from that of emotion.[6]

In view of this stark fact, and of neuroscience studies that increasingly support the view that the familiar thought-emotion distinction is a local cultural construct, one must ask why this thought-emotion distinction continues to have such a strong hold on the “cogmotion” and on the behaviors of so many “Westerners”?[7] To say nothing of the equally important question, why so many scholars have failed to ask this question up to now.

These are questions that require historical answers, and if the history of emotions is about anything, then it must also be about answers to these questions. Historians of emotion do, of course, have many other matters to examine. But they neglect this question at their peril: Why have millions of European and European-influenced persons continued, since the times of Plato, Cicero, and Seneca, to live lives in which some version of the thought-emotion distinction seems concrete and unassailable, even though a survey of other traditions indicates most human beings do not parse “experience” in accord with this distinction, and even though an emerging group of neuroscientists has challenged the validity of the distinction with compelling brain-imaging evidence?

One of the great merits of Plamper’s book, then, is that his reviews of research on emotion in various disciplines are organized historically. That is, for history, anthropology, and the “life sciences” (including physiology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and the neurosciences), Plamper walks the reader through the development of each field’s treatment of emotions, starting back in the nineteenth century or earlier. In doing so, he often relies on the research of other historians of emotion such as Thomas Dixon or Otniel Dror. But Plamper has also done a lot of prospecting of his own into original publications, doing valuable spade work that provides many starting points for further research. History has pride of place as the first discipline to be examined historically in this way, and also as the concern of the final chapter, in which Plamper tries to draw some conclusions from his survey. But the book as a whole provides an admirable introduction to the virtues of thinking historically about emotions—not just thinking about emotions in history. Because, when examined historically, the supposedly universally valid “findings” of research carried out on emotion in various disciplines begin to reveal their heavy debt to time and place, their highly contingent normative implications, their politics. Just as historians have discovered with race, gender, and sexuality, with concepts such as “class,” “incarceration,” “madness,” or “unemployment,” so with emotions: taking a historical perspective on emotions soon compels one to historicize and relativize the concept of emotions itself.

While Plamper does not deny that human nature has a role to play in emotions, he believes that too much energy has been absorbed by efforts to sort out the independent contribution of nature and nurture. This may be a blind alley, he believes. At least part of the contribution of the “nature” end of the polarity, after all, is the human proclivity to respond to utterances, including utterances about the self. As a result, “conceptions of emotion have an impact upon the way emotion is experienced in the self-perception of the feeling subject—the qualia, as it is called in psychology.” Recent research has “drawn attention to a feedback effect between the articulation of an ‘emotional word’ and the sensation of emotion. If I say ‘I am happy,’ a mechanism of self-examination can be set in motion to determine whether I do really feel happy at this moment.” Its “self-exploratory process” can find that I do not, or find the opposite, “and overwrite other emotions felt at the same time. The current vogue in popular psychology for Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is to a large extent based upon this latter postulate, as is counselling that founds everything upon the transformative power of verbalized feelings.” (32-33) As William Ian Miller has put it, notes Plamper, “ ‘once we name an emotion it takes on a life of its own.’”[8]

In fact, not just naming emotions, but all kinds of expression of what many Westerners tend to call “emotions”—including intended and unintended facial and gestural movements as well as bodily changes such as tears or blushing—have shaping and/or exploratory effects on the self. Plamper quotes historian Monique Scheer with approval on this point. “Scheer thinks that there is always a physical dimension to emotion, even if this is drenched with culture and history. One does not ‘have’ emotions; it is more like trying them out, or doing emotion, ‘along a continuum from wholly conscious and deliberate to completely inadvertent, shifting in the course of their [emotions] execution along this continuum.’” Scheer thus urges attention to bodily language, to all forms of physical feeling, as aspects of collectively shaped practices.[9] I am entirely in accord with Scheer’s suggestions; they represent a significant improvement on my own earlier proposals, as Plamper indicates.[10]

Thus the history of emotions, for Plamper, is first and foremost the history of collective and individual experimentation and improvisation with idioms or politically significant “regimes” of emotional expression. Scientific research on emotions, especially insofar as it has been too deeply inflected by a traditional Western split between reason and emotion (itself an aspect of Western expressive regimes), comes up as yet another episode in the history to be recounted.

One might fault Plamper for failing to examine one or more illustrative cases in depth. Without an appreciation of how the history of emotions works in practice, in coming to grips with the documents, it is impossible to evaluate its strengths. But this would be asking Plamper’s book to do something it was not intended to do. Together with its bibliography (expanded since the appearance of the original German edition), and a new glossary of technical terms useful to anyone working in this interdisciplinary field, the book serves as a splendid guide to further reading.

Follow William Reddy on Twitter: @WilliamMReddy

Preview the first chapter of Jan Plamper’s book at the Oxford University Press website.

Read a review of Jan Plamper’s book by Rob Boddice, with an author’s response, on the IHR Reviews in History website.

Read a roundtable of reviews on William Reddy’s The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE.

Read other book reviews on the History of Emotions Blog

REFERENCES

[1] For Sociology, see Jonathan H.Turner and Jan E. Stets, The Sociology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); on anthropology, see Andrew Beatty, “Current Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field,” Emotion Review 5(2013):414-422; Bonnie McElhinny, “The Audacity of Affect: Gender, Race, and History in Linguistic Accounts of Legitimacy and Belonging,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39(2010):309-28.

[2] Robert J. Schiller, Irrational Exuberance, revised edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015): George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

[3] Gross, Daniel M., The Secret History of Emotions: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Daniel M. Gross and Stephanie D. Preston, “Emotion Science and the Heart of a Two-Cultures Problem,” in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Translatlantic Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 96-117; Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?” Representations No. 110(2010):66-104; Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37(2011):434-472.

[4] United States Government Accountability Office, Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities, released 14 November 2013, downloaded from www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-158T, on 18 November 2013.

[5] Kristen A. Lindquist, Tor D. Wager, Hedy Kober, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “The Brain Basis of Emotion: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Behavioral and Brain Science 35 (2012): 121–43; Tor D. Wager, Jian Kang, Timothy D. Johnson, Thomas E. Nichols, Ajay B. Satpute, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “A Bayesian Model of Categor-Specific Emotional Response,” PloS Computational Biology, DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004066 April 8, 2015, pp. 1-27.

[6] As Bonnie McElhinny remarks, anthropological work on emotions in the 1980s and 1990s undermined “binary approaches to thinking about emotion and reason, which tended to associate emotion with negative characteristics such as irrationality, instinct, or irresponsibility, all not incidentally associated with negatively stereotyped groups, such as women, racialized groups, children, and/or the poor …” McElhinny, “The Audacity of Affect,” 311. See also, on Sanskrit, June McDaniel, “Emotion in Bengali Religious Thought: Substance and Metaphor,” in Emotions in Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 39–63; on Homeric Greek, Barbara Koziak, “Homeric Thumos: The Early History of Gender, Emotion, and Politics,” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 1068–91; for further discussion, see William M. Reddy, “Humanists and the Experimental Study of Emotion,” in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transnational Perspective, edited by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2014), 41-66.

[7] “Cogmotion” is a term coined by Douglas Barnett and Hilary Horn Ratner, “Introduction: The Organization and Integration of Cognition and Emotion in Development,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 67(1997):303-316; see also Ute Frevert, “Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35(2009):183-208, see p. 190.

[8] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 31; cited by Plamper, p. 32.

[9] Plamper, The History of Emotions, 269, quoting Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotions,” History and Theory 51(2012):193-220, quote from p.207.

[10] William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

 

REVIEW: The Happiness Industry, by William Davies

Posted on June 20, 2015 by

9781781688458-4171756f689401c14d3e2d09906a9e3fWatch out folks. There is a murky world lurking behind the scenes, a sinister cabal of policy-makers, psychologists, CEOs, advertizers and life-coaches, watching you, measuring you, nudging you, monitoring your every smile, all to try and make you happy. We must resist. This, broadly, is the message of sociologist William Davies’ book, The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.

I opened Davies’ book expecting a historical critique of the so-called ‘politics of well-being’, a movement which arose in the last decade. Cognitive psychologists like Aaron Beck, Martin Seligman and Daniel Kahneman found ways to measure how our thoughts can make us miserable, and how cognitive behavioural interventions can help us to be wiser and happier. The evidence-base they built up persuaded policy-makers – particularly in the UK, but increasingly around the world – that governments can and should try to measure and improve citizens’ well-being.

The science of flourishing became a way for policy-makers to move beyond the cultural relativism bequeathed us by Nietzsche, through a marriage of ancient wisdom (Buddhist, ancient Greek) and empirical science. Governments could then try and improve citizens’ ‘flourishing’ without being accused of imposing their version of the good life on every else. ‘It’s not our version’, they could say. ‘It’s science.’

The politics of well-being is still quite an undeveloped movement, but in England it’s led to specific policies, particularly to the collection of well-being data to guide policies; an on-going attempt to teach ‘well-being’ and ‘character’ in schools; and the expansion of free talking therapies on the NHS.

Davies has written well on this movement for the New Left Review. But what we get in this book is a much more sprawling narrative, which looks at the history of the attempt, in economics, psychology, statistics and neuroscience, to measure moods and emotions, and to use that data either to ‘nudge’ us towards policy-outcomes, or sell us things, or keep us working. The story meanders from Bentham to JB Watson via whiplash, social networks theory, the DSM, the history of management consultancy, the Chicago school, the history of stress and the Quantified Self movement. It risks becoming a history of everything, and could more coherently have concentrated on the last decade (although oddly he doesn’t mention Kahneman, or happiness economist Ed Diener, or the various attempts to teach well-being in schools, or Martin Seligman’s attempt to teach ‘resilience’ to the entire US Army).

The ‘enemy’ of his book seems to be an overly-mechanistic or behaviourist model of the mind, in which scientific experts measure our mood-machine and try to steer it without asking people what they mean or care about. Certainly, the politics of well-being can be anti-democratic and positivistic. When our government came up with a national definition of well-being, for example, it did so via a small panel of experts, entirely made up of economists and psychologists.

However, Davies’ story risks confusing the behaviourist with the cognitive behavioural. Much of the politics of well-being sprung from the success of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which arose in the 1960s as a critical response to behaviourism. In CBT, people’s beliefs, meanings and values are all-important, so it’s more humanistic and potentially more democratic. It’s true that CBT can over-emphasize people’s agency, and turn into individual pathology what may be normal responses to adversity and poverty. But people are developing more collective forms which equip us to change our circumstances (like being in debt to loan sharks) as well as our inner lives.

Probably the biggest impact of the politics of well-being so far has been to increase public funding for talking therapies, and to put mental health on the political map – there is a new campaign in the UK for ‘parity of esteem’ between physical and mental health in the NHS. But Davies ignores this. Instead, he focuses on the possibility of therapy or life-coaching being forced onto benefit-claimants in England and Wales. The Department for Work and Pensions denies therapy is ever mandatory, although it may be on occasion, and this should be vigorously opposed as an ethical breach and a waste of tax-payer money. But we also need to vigorously defend and expand free therapy for those who need it and want it. Davies doesn’t lift a finger in support.

Instead, he lays into corporate wellness programmes and the booming wellness industry, and slams the proliferation of ‘chief happiness officers’ and ‘happiness apps’ monitoring our every smile. Are they? Does your company have a chief happiness officer? Have you ever used a ‘happiness measuring app’? It’s true that a handful of companies are taking well-being seriously (a few, like Zappos, take it too seriously). On the whole I think this is a good thing, and could mean companies take employee satisfaction and corporate ethics more seriously as well. But at the moment, most companies’ well-being programmes amount to little more than a salad option at lunch, cheap gym membership, and one away-day a year for some wacky team-building and half-baked resilience-training. Hardly Brave New World.

The over-riding tone of Davies’ book is the hermeneutics of suspicion – he is constantly expressing ‘unease’, ‘disquiet’ and the need for ‘critical resistance’ to the ‘hidden agenda’ of the elite. This is left-wing academics’ favourite posture, but it’s not really radical in that it undermines people’s agency: the ‘well-being agenda’ in this narrative is always something the elite imposes on us, never something we develop for ourselves (as is actually the case with the Quantified Self movement). And his ‘perpetual unease’ doesn’t change anything. What are you actually for?

It turns out Davies is for co-operatives, for co-owned companies in which decision-making is shared. Such companies make us happier, according to research. He’s also for local community mental health initiatives like therapeutic gardening, which research suggests make us happier. And he’s for more equal and less competitive societies, which some research suggests make us happier. So on the occasions he’s arguing for something positive, Davies also turns to well-being data for support.

At the extreme of his argument, he says governments should ignore people’s moods and feelings altogether, and focus on the serious business of improving material circumstances. That’s exactly the argument successive governments have used to deprive mental health services of funding. Hopefully, this is finally changing, but Davies’ book does little to help the cause.

Jules Evans writes about the philosophy and psychology of well-being, and has taught it in organizations including Saracens, Arsenal FC and HMP Low Moss.

REVIEW: The Recent History of Seasonal Affective Disorder

Posted on June 4, 2015 by

JanssonDr Åsa Jansson completed her PhD at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London in 2014. Her thesis mapped the re-conceptualisation of melancholia as a modern biomedical mental disease in Victorian medicine.

In this blog post Åsa reviews the 51st volume in the series Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine, which is devoted to the recent history of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD.

C. Overy and E. M. Tansey (eds), The Recent History of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine, vol. 51. London: Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. 132 pages. ISBN 978 0 90223 897 8

In 1976, South African psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal moved to New York with his family, where both he and his wife soon discovered that they were profoundly affected by the seasonal changes. During the dark winter months, they felt lethargic and suffered from low mood, but would begin to feel well again as the snow melted and the days got longer. When Rosenthal met Alfred Lewy at a party the two started talking about Lewy’s ongoing research on melatonin and the relationship between light and mood, and Rosenthal eventually joined Lewy’s research group at the National Institute of Health. The group was subsequently contacted by Herbert Kern, a man who had kept a detailed record of his seasonal mood changes. Kern himself believed that these changes were related to light exposure, and he became the first patient to be successfully treated with Rosenthal and Lewy’s experimental light therapy. The NIH research group proceeded to advertise in the Washington Post for people with seasonal mood changes, and received thousands of responses (Overy & Tansey, 2014: 9-17). In 1984, they published their research findings in a seminal article, ‘Seasonal affective disorder: A description of the syndrome and preliminary findings with light therapy’ (Rosenthal et al., 1984). SAD was born.

So begins the history of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as retold by the actors themselves and transcribed into the 51st volume of the Wellcome Trust witness seminar series. The current diagnostic status of SAD is contested, as is its targeted treatment, light therapy. One might argue that few people are oblivious to the emotional impact of seasonal changes, but the existence of the SAD diagnosis suggests an important difference between the ‘winter blues’ and a full-blown seasonal psychiatric disorder characterised by depressed mood, inertia, sleeplessness and over-eating. Moreover, these symptoms are believed to have a traceable biological aetiology. The diagnostic criteria for SAD are underpinned by three decades of research into the relationship between light, mood, and melatonin. Thus, the SAD experts participating in the witness seminar do not only claim that a distinct seasonally contingent depression exists, but that SAD is the first and as yet only psychiatric condition with defined and consistent biological markers. Judging by popular response to the advent of SAD, there is a significant population corresponding to the psychological and biological profile of this diagnostic category – people who suffer from debilitating depression during the darker months and whose symptoms are alleviated or even cured by daily exposure to bright light.

N0024197 Lightbox treatment in seasonal affective disorder

Lightbox treatment for SAD. Image credit: Libby Welch, Wellcome Images

The Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine Seminars are organised by Tilli Tansey’s History of Modern Biomedicine group, and constitute a space where participants in medical developments and events are invited to talk about their own memories of what happened. Since the first such meeting was held in 1993, the group have organised an impressive number of witness seminars on a wide range of topics, including heart transplant surgery, the medicalization of cannabis, and palliative care. Tansey describes the seminars as ‘a form of open peer review’, which provide ‘the opportunity to hear an array of voices, many little known, of individuals who were “there at the time” and thus able to question, ratify, or disagree with others’ accounts’ (quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: v). The seminars are transcribed, and participants are invited to add notes and clarifications to the transcripts, which are subsequently published. All volumes produced to date are freely available online. The witness seminar on SAD emerged through a collaboration between the History of Modern Biomedicine group and the Centre for the History of the Emotions, both presently located at Queen Mary, University of London. The seminar brings together several of the scientists and clinicians who were instrumental in the early development and reification of SAD; in addition to Rosenthal and Lewy most notably Josephine Arendt, a biologist who carried out pioneering research on melatonin and circadian rhythms in the 1980s. Other participants include prominent patient activists, such as Jennifer Eastwood, who founded the Seasonal Affective Disorder Organisation (SADA), a British patient organisation for SAD sufferers, as well as the organisaton’s current chair, Helen Hanson. The seminar was also attended by Tansey, as well as Thomas Dixon, Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions.

Historians of the emotions and of psychiatry will no doubt find this witness seminar volume of particular interest. The seminar, held last year, was organised to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication on SAD. SAD is, in other words, a young psychiatric disorder. This brief history makes it a particularly fascinating object of historical study. It is, in every sense of the word, a modern disorder created and reified through the interaction between clinicians, scientists, patients, funding bodies, insurance companies, policy makers, and the media. The SAD witness seminar sheds light on some of the key developments, particularly in the early years of the diagnosis. It also brings into focus a pertinent question that concerns most historians of medicine to a greater or lesser extent: ‘How do you create a belief in a real disorder that scientists and doctors and patients and the general public and journalists believe in and recognize and can all talk about?’ (Dixon, quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: 62). The evolution of a new medical concept is rarely a straightforward or inevitable development, but rather one that requires a significant amount of intellectual work. And, as illustrated by the SAD witness seminar, much also depends on chance and circumstances, on people being in a particular place at a particular time.

The seminar is preliminarily structured along three themes, outlined at the beginning of the transcript. The first of these aims to shed light on why the condition appeared and how it has changed over time, who was involved, and how the diagnosis has been received by the medical community. The second theme focuses on causation, that is, the perceived physiological basis of SAD, and the third addresses diagnostic criteria, treatment, and patient activism. The seminar starts off with Arendt offering a brief overview of scientific interest in mood, melatonin and circadian rhythms in the 1980s. Following her testimony, Rosenthal and Lewy talk about the early years of SAD research. Their stories form part of a detailed discussion about the science of circadian rhythms, light exposure, and mood changes. While the meeting as a whole loosely follows the prescribed format, the biological basis of SAD predominates. This should not deter readers from the humanities. On the contrary, this is partly what makes the SAD witness seminar such a valuable contribution to the history of psychiatry and of mood disorders in particular. What emerges is a biological history of a psychiatric condition that is contextual, limited, and (with the exception of a couple of brief references to seasonal depression in the works of Esquirol and Kraepelin) does not resort to ahistorical claims of universality by attempting to extend the research findings on seasonal mood changes into a past where SAD had not yet been invented. Moreover, the stories on offer are colourful and engaging, telling of a multitude of strategies and creative ideas that emerged through attempts to better understand why some people feel depressed during winter. What the testimonies from Rosenthal, Lewy, Arendt, and others illustrate more than anything is the human curiosity and desire to understand how things work that drive scientific research. Indeed, historians of early modern science will no doubt be pleased to find that the practice of self-experiment has not entirely gone out of fashion, with Lewy deciding to measure how his own melatonin levels changed when travelling through the time zones from Sydney to Washington (Overy & Tansey, 2014: 13-14).

HHwinterlight400res.doc

‘Winter Light’ by Helen Hanson, artist and SADA chair (see also SAD at Thirty)

If the story of SAD in the laboratory is one of innovation and excitement, the story of how the diagnosis has been received in society at large is more chequered, but no less significant. The testimonies of Eastwood and other prominent patient activists in the UK provide an important perspective on the British situation. Unfortunately, however, no British clinicians were present at the seminar. Tansey states ‘on the record’ that this is not ‘for want of trying to find them, nor for inviting them’ (quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: 44). While this absence is regrettable, it is also informative. Eastwood and the other patient activists present speak of a reluctance of the National Health Service, as well as of British medical practitioners, to embrace the diagnosis or its targeted treatment. According to the narrative presented, the history of SAD in the UK has primarily been one of patient activism and (irregular) media attention.

Eastwood’s testimony of SAD in the UK highlights the relationship between the acceptance of a diagnosis and the presence of a marketable treatment, which largely makes up the final theme, but which also informs the seminar as a whole. According to Lewy, the ‘discovery’ of SAD was to a large extent facilitated by the simultaneous development of a successful treatment – light therapy. ‘Doctors don’t like feeling helpless and for them to be interested in a disorder they need to have a treatment’ (Lewy, quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: 12). Historians, particularly those concerned with the history of psychiatry, might beg to differ. It is no doubt the case that many psychiatric conditions have emerged and/or been popularised in correlation with the marketing of specific, predominantly pharmaceutical, treatments – what Healy (1999: 180) has termed ‘the Luke effect’.[1] However, psychiatrists have also paid significant attention to conditions perceived to be particularly difficult to treat – think, for instance, Borderline Personality Disorder prior to the advent and spread of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. The interesting thing about SAD is that it belongs to neither of these categories. It is a disorder for which a clear and targeted treatment has existed more or less from the outset, but this has not been translated into widespread acceptance of the diagnosis by medical practitioners and mental health policy makers. The witness seminar discussion demonstrates that there exists a significant body of research on the role of melatonin and the sleep-wake cycle in seasonal depression. Yet despite existing evidence and patient testimonies on the efficacy of light therapy, national health services, funding bodies, and medical insurance companies have not been so quick to endorse this treatment. Most importantly perhaps, light therapy has negligible market value and is of little interest to pharmaceutical companies since, as Rosenthal poignantly remarks, ‘light is not a drug and not patentable’ (quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: 23).

The seminar participants emphasise that scientists are not in universal agreement over the precise mechanisms of light therapy, and that there is still much research to be done. Nevertheless, the comparatively advanced existing knowledge about the biological basis of SAD and the explicit and well-documented link between SAD as a diagnosis and light therapy as a targeted treatment makes this a highly unusual affective disorder. The question of biological markers for emotional illnesses has perturbed physicians since the emergence of psychiatric autopsies in early nineteenth-century asylum medicine. The practice of cutting into the brains of dead ‘lunatics’ often revealed tissue changes in patients suffering from severe, delusional forms of insanity, but in the case of emotional disorders, such as melancholia and moral insanity, visible lesions were usually absent. Physicians turned instead to the language of physiology to provide affective insanity with a biomedical foundation, but the search for quantifiable biological markers continued. In the seminar, SAD is referred to as the first successful case. Rosenthal remarks that it was once believed that ‘the so-called dexamethasone suppression test was the litmus test for depression, but it turned out to be non-specific’ (quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: 38). However, while the dexamethasone suppression test (DST) has not been widely incorporated into psychiatric diagnostics, the non-specificity Rosenthal refers to is strongly contested by many clinicians in the field, on the basis that there are two distinct illnesses that currently both fall under the banner of Major Depressive Episode. According to this view, the DST, which is used to measure production of the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol, is specific for what is referred to as melancholic or psychotic depression, or simply as melancholia (see e.g. Carroll, et al., 1981; Taylor & Fink, 2007; Shorter & Fink, 2010). This distinction between the ‘mainstream’ (non-psychotic) depression and a more severe type of mood disorder is not, however, recognised in the ‘psychiatric bible’, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, despite attempts to have ‘melancholia’ instated as a separate diagnosis in DSM-5.

SAD 2

Infographic from Access Healthcare Services.

This comparison between SAD and melancholic depression is symbolic of the ambivalence of diagnostic criteria and boundaries. The history of diagnostic practices in psychiatry is characterised by a constant re-drawing of categories, prompted at least as much by epistemological trends, fraternal relationships, market forces, and wider cultural norms as by new empirical evidence. Thus, the seminar transcript does not only constitute a fascinating and much-needed contribution to the history of the biological basis of disordered affectivity, it also helps shed light on a topic of much significance for clinicians and historians alike: the politics of diagnosis. Classification has been a topic of heated debate throughout the history of the psychiatric profession, and remains so today, as evidenced by reactions to the publication of DSM-5 in 2013 (see for instance the series of ‘Responses to DSM-5’ in the British Medical Journal). The SAD witness seminar transcript offers a snapshot of the relationship between psychiatry, the market, policy concerns, and patient advocacy. With the exception of a brief statement by Dixon (Overy & Tansey, 2014: 62-63), what the witness seminar format does not do is explicitly address the historical contingency of psychiatric diagnoses, or offer critical reflections on the narrative(s) presented. The question arises, then, whether the SAD volume should be approached as a history of this disorder, or whether it should be treated primarily as raw source material for scholars interested in the history of mood disorders. Tansey suggests that ‘the point of these meetings is not to hear from historians like Thomas and me but to hear from you, the authentic voices’ (quoted in Overy & Tansey, 2014: 4). This prompts a question that underpins the witness seminar format, and upon which there is much disagreement both within and outside of historical scholarship: can we ever recover ‘what really happened’?

Notwithstanding Tansey’s remark, the role of historians in the SAD seminar, and in the witness seminar format more generally, is ambivalent. Tansey and Dixon are not merely passive observers; moreover, the seminar would not have occurred in the first place had they not taken an interest in SAD, organised the meeting, and decided who to invite. At the same time, they do not intervene into the storylines offered by the other participants, the ‘authentic voices’. Would a more active participation of historians in the SAD witness seminar have resulted in a more ‘complete’ history? It would undoubtedly have produced a different kind of history, but there is a risk that the ‘snapshot’ testimonies and some of the valuable scientific detail would be lost. Moreover, historians are no more capable of ‘objective’ history than the subjects they study (though some might like to think so!). An historian’s ‘observer’ perspective on SAD would be as partial and subjective as the testimonies of historical actors. This is precisely why the witness seminars form such an invaluable contribution to the history of medicine. We need as many different partial perspectives as possible; this is where the real ‘promise of objectivity’ lies (Haraway, 1988: 586). What the SAD story illustrates above all is the pressing need for closer interaction – in any format – between clinicians, patients, and historians of medicine, particularly where psychiatry is concerned. Psychological distress is one of the greatest public (and individual) health challenges of our time, yet mental health services remain disastrously under-funded, and treatment approaches are perilously reliant upon on the interests of drug manufacturers. In this climate, a more flexible and dynamic approach to psychiatric illness is urgently needed, one that will allow each individual who experiences psychological distress to receive the best possible support, whether that takes the form of medication, community activities, counselling, or very bright light. Because, as Dixon suggests during the seminar, what the history of SAD is really about is ‘real human beings having real suffering and frustrations of trying to create knowledge and treatment around that’ (p. 62).

 Download the full transcript of the SAD Witness Seminar

Listen to Natlalie Steed’s specially commissioned podcast ‘SAD at Thirty’

Watch video clips of Norman Rosenthal talking about SAD

Read an interview with Norman Rosenthal by Jules Evans

Read more from Åsa Jansson about melancholia and problems of retrospective diagnosis

Notes:

[1] Healy derives the term from the Parable of the Sower in the Gospel of Luke, in which the sower scatters seeds that fall on the path, on the rocks, among the thorns, and on fertile soil (respectively). Only the latter yield a good crop, the lesson from which is that bountiful crops will come to those who listen and retain what they hear, which, Healy argues, ‘drug companies do very successfully.’

Bibliography:

Carroll, BJ et al. (1981) A specific laboratory test for the diagnosis of melancholia. Standardization, validation and clinical utility. Archives of General Psychiatry (38)1: 15-22.

Haraway, D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Theory (14)3: 575-599.

Healy, D (1997) The Antidepressant Era. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Rosenthal NE et al. (1984) Seasonal affective disorder: A description of the syndrome and preliminary findings with light therapy. Archives of General Psychiatry (41)1: 72–80.

Shorter E and Fink M (2010) Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taylor MA and Fink M (2007) Resurrecting melancholia. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (115) Supplement 433: 14-20.

Non-verbal ecstasy in rock & roll

Posted on June 4, 2015 by

Here’s a 15-minute podcast I made about non-verbal ecstasy in rock & roll, with clips from some of my favourite ecstatic performers – Little Richard, James Brown, The Beatles, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen and others. It’s part of my research into ecstasy in modern culture. Enjoy!

Lunchtime Seminars, June 2015

Posted on May 28, 2015 by

We are pleased to announce two summer lunchtime seminars.

On 12th June, Una McIlvenna will explore the emotion of shame and its place in early modern public executions then, a week later on 19th June, Yukiko Kinoshita will talk about the far-eastern emotional sensibilities discernible in the writings of Virginia Woolf. See below for titles and abstracts.

Seminars begin at 1pm and a sandwich lunch is provided. 

Please email Emma Sutton on e.sutton@qmul.ac.uk to reserve a place.

Friday 12th June 2015, 1pm

Mile End campus, Arts One building, room 136

Shame in Early Modern Public Execution
Una McIlvenna (Queen Mary University of London)

Do you know what the world will do to you? It will make you understand that these things bring you great shame and wrong you: the tolling of the bell, the reading of the condemnation, your being tied and led before the people…

Bologna Comforters’ Manual in The Art of Executing Well, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008)

This paper looks at how the emotion of shame was conceived around early modern public execution, and further, how shame was then portrayed in the broadside ballads that broadcast information about executions. It seems paradoxical that in the moments before their death condemned criminals were deeply concerned about the shame their punishment would create. Why would a person about to die care about feeling shame? I explore how, in contrast to our current understanding of it as a private, personal emotion, shame was conceived as a communal emotion in the early modern period, one that people shared, and which had tangible consequences for one’s family and friends. In that sense, can shame even be considered an emotion in early modern thought? I discuss these issues from the perspective of the ballads that were sung about these executions. How did balladry perpetuate – or subvert – the message of shame that was central to the purpose of execution?

Friday 19th June 2015, 1pm

Mile End campus, Arts One building, room 136

Exploring A(h)ware and (W)okashi, or the Exquisite in the Trivial: An Attempt to Identify Far-Eastern Sensibilities and Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s Writings
Yukiko Kinoshita

In 1925, Virginia Woolf reviewed Arthur Waley’s translation of Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, a Japanese classic supposedly written around 1000. The second chapter of Murasaki’s novel reveals to the reader her aesthetics and aesthetic of novel-writing, which, I would like to suggest, appealed to Woolf’s pacifism, feminism and aesthetics and encouraged her to explore her own themes and Modernist method of writing. Lady Murasaki’s aesthetic sensibilities were shared by her contemporary and rival, Sei Shonagon, well known for her masterpiece, The Pillow-Book, part of which Waley translated in 1927. Theirs could be summarized as heightened sensibilities which perceive the exquisite in the trivial or the ordinary. The attitude to discover things that matter in the seemingly trivial and common, poetic prose style, keen sensibilities and pictorial descriptions conscious of colour scheme—these characteristics are something in common between the two female Japanese authors, although Lady Murasaki’s characteristics lie in her sense of “a(h)ware” —an impassioned response to beauty—whereas Sei Shonagon’s in her sense of “(w)okashi”—an intellectual response to beauty.

The two authoresses’ aesthetics or approach to beauty is subjective, and I would like to suggest that it is, in nature, close to what Walter Pater termed as “strangeness in beauty” and “sweet strangeness,” and, therefore, something that Woolf as well as other Western readers can identify. My presentation is an attempt to introduce to the audience the aesthetics and sensibilities which the two terms—aw(h)re and (w)okashi—represent, to clarify the connection between Woolf’s and the two Japanese authoresses’ sensibilities, aesthetic and aesthetics, and to throw light on the development of Woolf’s Modernist aesthetics and method.

On Mad Men and the impossibility of transcending capitalism

Posted on May 22, 2015 by

Mad-men-season-6-dante-inferno-theoriesThe documentary maker Adam Curtis wrote in 2010: ‘In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.’

The system in which the characters are stuck forces them to live divided lives in divided selves. Don Draper, in particular, has learned to put on a mask in order to get ahead and leave behind his background of shame and poverty. But the cost of this pact with American capitalism – I will put on a mask if you let me become successful – is a gnawing loneliness and restlessness. In the first scene of the sixth series, we see him on a beach, next to his beautiful wife, reading in the sun. He’s reading Dante’s Inferno:

Midway through the journey of our life
I found myself within a dark forest,
For the straight path had been lost.

Of course, Dante gets out of the Inferno. How about Don? Is there any transcendence? Any redemption? Any escape from the system? This is one of the great questions which shows during TV’s Golden Age has asked us – from The Wire (no escape), to The Sopranos (no escape), to Six Feet Under and Twin Peaks (some escape maybe), to Breaking Bad (definitely no escape).

Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, used to write for The Sopranos, and both these shows excel at exploring some of the ways people try and escape from late capitalism through therapy or New Age spirituality, and yet somehow remain stuck in the system, just as confused and egotistical as ever.

Janice Soprano seeking escape through yoga

Janice Soprano seeking escape through yoga

In fact, as Mad Men explored, late capitalism rapidly co-opted the insights of therapy, the arts and New Age spirituality, and used them to sell us things (this is the main point of Adam Curtis’ documentary, Century of the Self, which aired three years before Mad Men began).

So, on the one hand, Don Draper has a sharp artistic insight into the human condition. Some of the key moments of the show are moments during a high-stakes pitch, where he seems to have run out of ideas, and then suddenly he has a brilliant epiphany, and everyone is wowed by his creative power. He’s a Michelangelo of Madison Avenue.

And yet what are these epiphanies? Revelations from God? Glimpses of a better world? No, they’re catchphrases to sell cars or cigarettes. That’s what the idea of epiphany has been reduced to in late capitalism: the magical creation of a new product or ad slogan. That’s what all those innovation companies and creativity gurus are selling: more imaginative ways to sell us things. It’s the least innovative definition of innovation in human history.

So is there no escape?

Certainly, various characters seek various forms of escape. The most common form of escape is booze. The show is swimming in it, the male characters keep their pain and frustration sedated with the bottle.

Paul seeks escape through the Hari Krishnas

Paul seeks escape through the Hari Krishnas

Others seek more radical forms of escape as the Sixties counterculture gains momentum: Paul the copy-writer joins the Hari Krishnas, though it seems pretty phony. Roger Sterling’s daughter joins a hippy commune, again it seems phonier than the capitalism it rejects. Roger himself spends a few seasons experimenting with LSD and group sex – it doesn’t really make him any less selfish, though he is perhaps the most likable and content character in the show. Don also finds an escape of sorts through his constant affairs and one slightly weird S&M dalliance. Ken Cosgrove has the option of escape into bohemian creativity by becoming a novelist, though he doesn’t take it. Ginsberg the eccentric copy-writer takes the escape of psychosis. And Lane Pryce takes the escape of suicide.

Don, meanwhile, often takes the escape of going on the road. That old American dream: let’s get lost. Let’s disappear. But this is not a long-term solution. By the final episode, after months of traveling, he feels truly lost, and washes up in a New Age retreat on the coast of California.

This retreat is clearly based on Esalen, which was the spiritual centre of the Human Potential Movement in the 1960s, the place where unhappy middle-class people came to learn yoga, give each other massages, and seek through endless workshops and encounter sessions for ‘the real me’, the pure me, the me stripped of all baggage. Here’s a clip on it from Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self:

As Curtis explored, the Human Potential Movement rapidly became absorbed by late capitalism. Today, there is a booming industry of business coaches who use the ideas and techniques of Human Potential in companies and weekend courses, to help people realize their potential within late capitalism. The system proved flexible enough to absorb all the radical experiments of the 60s counter-culture, and turn them into commodified experiences.

We see the apparent impossibility of genuine transcendence in the show’s final scene. Don is meditating and chanting ‘om’ – a very unlikely scene. Eyes closed, a quiet smile curls upon his face. A bell chimes. Has he finally found the answer? Has he unlocked the mystery of his self? The scene cuts, and its a famous 70s advert for Coca Cola, ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’. The implication is that Don’s epiphany at Esalen is merely another idea for an advert, another way to sell things. (Perhaps the ‘merely’ here is mine rather than Weiner’s – he says he thinks the Coke advert is genuinely beautiful).

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This might make Mad Men sound a very dark and cynical show, and it certainly has its dark edges. But for some reason it’s not a dark show. I think that’s because the characters and stories are drawn with such love, such deft words and gestures. None of them are all bad or all good. We care about them, want them to be OK, are interested in their progress. The writers respect our intelligence, and know they can tell a story through a word, a look or a gesture, and we’ll pick up a subtle reference to something earlier in the show. A point doesn’t have to be obvious: ‘subtext is pleasure’, Weiner says. Characters’ motivations are both revealed, and also mysterious – as in the Sopranos, motivation is never a simple cause-effect equation.

And, unlike every other Golden Age hit, this is a show where no one gets murdered. Think of the body-count in the Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad., The Walking Dead. Mad Men instead captures our attention with what Weiner calls ‘the quotidian’, with the details of office and domestic life in the maelstrom of the 60s. Office life can feel stale, flat, dull, but it never feels boring at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (particularly when half the office is on amphetamines). Like 30 Rock, it has a rosy view of the humour, creative anarchy and occasional love found in the office. Whatever late capitalism is, it’s interesting.

Even if there is no great transcendence from the system, we do see better life-opportunities open up for female and coloured characters as the civil rights movement progresses. Compare the autonomy and power of Joan and Peggy at the end of the show, with the simpering bimbos they were at its beginning.

So, in the words of the Peggy Lee song that begins the final season, ‘Is that all there is?’ The show seems to agree with Sigmund Freud – the only transcendence we can hope for are the consolations of work and love.

Peter Fonagy on psychoanalysis and IAPT

Posted on May 14, 2015 by

Peter Fonagy is is Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and head of the department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London. He has been instrumental in bringing in a new form of psychoanalytic therapy called Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT) into the NHS’ Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, and expanding IAPT into Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). We interviewed him about the place of psychoanalysis in IAPT.

How did you get interested in psychoanalysis?

I was quite severely depressed as an adolescent. I was sent by my family in Hungary to live and study in England, I didn’t speak any English, I didn’t have any friends. I became majorly depressed. I went into psychoanalysis at the Hampstead clinic. I went for three years and had wonderful analysis from a woman there named Anne Hurry. It was literally a life-saving experience.

Why was it so helpful?

I think it was very well suited to me – intellectually very challenging. Also she was very sensitive, kind, generous, genuine. Lots of the issues I had were to do with having come from a very intellectual family and having to survive in a different context. It helped move from being stuck in the past to bonding with the present day and the here-and-now.

What did Freud get right and wrong?

Freud got his model of the mind spot-on. He identified the importance of sexuality and aggression in human nature. No one has credibly challenged those assumptions. If they do, just look at the internet sites that get the most hits. He also understood the mechanisms of the mind – defenses, unconscious motivations. It’s a very sophisticated model of the mind, which is 60-70% true, which is pretty good going these days.

What he didn’t get right is his model of treatment. He wrote 23 volumes, 22 on models of the mind, and just one on technique. The technique volume is poor – it jumps from here to there, it’s not consistent. But that particular way of practicing got locked down after his death.

It became dogma.

Exactly. And it’s a joke. The idea of long-term deep introspection, of really studying your own mind, might be good for the training of therapists. Is it helpful for people with mental health problems? I think it probably does harm. People assume if one session a week is not enough, you need two. If two is not enough, you need three or four. The idea is flawed. So psychoanalysis got in a lot of trouble. The model of the mind became more and more complicated, but the treatment bit only improved in a patchy and incomplete way.

Some of his ideas seem so Gothic and unlikely to me – the death complex, for example. When I had depression, that idea depressed me even more!

Sure. I’m talking about his core ideas. But he was right about the inherent human capacity to destroy things we feel we can’t control.

Regarding Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT – which is the expansion of talking therapies within the NHS that’s happened since 2009), how unique is it? Do other countries have IAPT-type services?

A lot of countries have versions of it, and have for years. It’s just in this country the NHS didn’t have any psychological therapy to speak of. Only the occasional secondary care psychotherapy service, which maybe saw five people out of 100,000. Or we had counseling services in some GPs. We had no specially-trained psychotherapists in the NHS. We were totally lagging behind places like Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. I would say we have caught up in some areas, and exceeded in some areas. In other areas we have not quite reached the right level – we need to develop longer-term treatments at the primary care level.

Why is the expansion of IAPT not more celebrated in our society in the way the NHS as a whole is celebrated?

Show me any aspect of mental health care that is celebrated. The only one is helping depressed mums take care of their babies. The stigma even for kids with mental health problems is massive. And once you’re adult, forget it. In this country, mental health services as a whole are stigmatized along with the stigma for mental health patients.

Is it better now than when you started as a psychoanalyst?

When I started, I worked in a mental health hospital with long corridors smelling of urine, with patients who had forgotten their names, there were some old women in there who had been admitted in the 1920s for having an illegitimate child, and they’d been there ever since. It wasn’t good. So in that sense there’s been improvement.

The idea of going for therapy seems to have become more mainstream.

Yes, somewhat. If you say ‘coaching’ rather than ‘therapy’, it sounds a lot better. So counselling is done by coaches, people who are not qualified, who have no idea of mental health. That’s a booming business, largely dealing with people with diagnosable mental health problems, who would never in a thousand years go to a therapist.

There is some suspicion of IAPT among some psychotherapists.

That’s an understatement. There is hatred.

Why is that?

It’s a multi-layered thing. It’s something really to be regretted. I’m in the middle of it. I’m one of those people who believe in evidence-based treatment, and I believe that NICE [the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, a body which makes evidence-based recommendations for the NHS] is one of the great gifts that this country has given the world, next to the NHS. I’ve been very involved with NICE in low-level capacities. There is no doubt in my mind that psychological therapies, whatever their label, can do a great deal of harm. For me, evidence-based treatments with an outcome focus, monitored and delivered in a collaborate manner with the patient, are the minimum to justify psychological therapy being delivered. Remove any of those key elements, and there is potential for psychological therapy to do harm.

Some therapists say CBT has a monopoly within IAPT.

It’s not true. It’s about 66% CBT, the remainder is four things – couples counselling, counselling, Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy (DIT), and Interpersonal Therapy. Of that 33%, 80% is counselling. Very little goes to the other two. That’s an imbalance. Part of the problem is that some things are more difficult to train in. If you set the bar very low, or the training is cheap, you’ll get more people providing the therapy. The other modalities have to look at that – how to change their model so that they can train more people more efficiently. Pissing and moaning about it isn’t going to deliver the goods.

I’ve no interest in modalities. They’re guilds. In the 19th century, guilds specialized in making apprenticeships so difficult that they’d always be a scarce resource. That’s not the way to run a free-at-source health service. We should make it as open as possible to people needing therapy. And we should be training treatment people in multiple modalities to give them the maximum chance of treating people in the most effective way possible. That involves radically looking at some of the modalities.

Why and where is a psychoanalytic approach better than CBT?

I can tell you my intuition and then I can tell you the research programme we have to test it. My intuition is that Dynamoc Interpersonal Therapy works better if you have an individual who is reasonably psychologically-minded but actually crippled and traumatized, in the sense of not being able to take some aspects of CBT seriously enough, not because it doesn’t work but because they are cognitively unsuited to it – too paranoid, suspicious.

A lack of ‘epistemic trust’…

Yes, thank you. In that instance, you need a therapist who is going to step more readily and see the world from their point of view, and not work so closely from the perspective of a modality. So mentalization-based treatment is more suitable. That’s my intuition. We’re now finishing a randomised trial of CBT versus DIT for depression, to see the results. I’d like to do a larger study, where we see if DIT can treat people faster than CBT if they have a certain level of trauma.

How is DIT different to CBT?

Insight is very helpful. Insight into relationships, into your own role in a relationship, into how you got into that role. Is it important to discover what you’re thinking non-consciously? Yes. I would say to the person, we can do it two ways – I can equip you with skills that will help you deal with symptoms. Or we can try and think more deeply about the nature of the mess you’re in, and how you got into it, and maybe that will help lever you out of the mess.

Is DIT something new in the history of psychoanalysis, in the sense of being a shorter-term and evidence-based form of psychoanalysis?

Nothing is completely new. But yes – it’s 16 sessions, which is more than the NHS wants to fund. But it can probably achieve something that’s reasonable in that time. It’s structured. It’s focused on particular personal or interpersonal problems, which psychoanalysis is not.

You’ve been very involved in the introduction of Children and Young People’s IAPT (CYPI) and the improvement of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in England and Wales. How is that going?

I think it’s the thing I’ve done that I’m most proud of. The service was not fit for purpose. In many parts it may still not be. In a situation where CAMHS suffered a financial penalty greater than at any time in its history, it has not collapsed but regrouped around a very simple set of IAPT principles. First, work in partnership with young people and parents. Second, be outcome-focused and work towards shared goals that are set collaboratively with young people. Third, restrict treatments to those that are supported by randomised controlled trials, and ensure people are trained, supervised and managed in the best way to deliver them. And finally, ensure that the system is transparent, that results are monitored and reflected on in supervision. That way, if a treatment goes off-piste it’s noticed quickly.

These principles got taken up more quickly by CAMHS because it was seen as a way to get more money from the system. But once the principles were adopted, people liked working within them.

How is the money situation?

People like me have worked tirelessly to provide figures to politicians to try and get more money. First of all we got £30 million set aside to help young people with eating disorders. Then in the last budget of this government, £1.25 billion was set aside for children’s mental health – £250 million a year over the next five years. That’s getting back to the level it was at before the cuts began. If we couple that with the principles I mentioned, we have a chance to improve life for young people and their parents.

What still needs to be done?

CYPI needs to be rolled out 100% across CAMHS. At the moment it’s at around 60%. A lot of the people we’ve trained have been lost to the system because of cuts. So we need to bring some people back into the system. There is some repair to do. We also need to get to a situation quickly where CYPI principles are seen as principles for the entire children’s service – for education, health, youth justice. It should be brought together as an integrated service with the same principles.

If you enjoyed this, check out this interview with leading CBT researcher and chief-architect of IAPT David M. Clark about his vision for talking therapies in the NHS

David Byrne on music, ecstasy and catharsis

Posted on May 12, 2015 by

I’m researching the history of ecstasy and ecstatic experiences in modern western culture, how spiritual ecstasy got pathologised from the Enlightenment to the present day, and how people found new ways to get out of their heads.

An important part of that story is rock & roll and other forms of pop and dance music, which became in the 20th century a sort of substitute religion and means to ekstasis for the masses. Thanks to rock & roll, white agnostic kids got a way to access the release of ecstatic religion, without any of the ethical or metaphysical dogma.

Someone who has thought about that deeply is David Byrne, the artist, musician, and former lead-singer of Talking Heads. In his music, art and documentaries, he’s explored the different ways humans get out of their heads and into their bodies, or the group, or the unconscious, or the spirit world. He’s also explored the relationship between popular music and various forms of ecstatic religion, from charismatic Christianity to Yoruba and Candomble.

What’s unusual about both him and occasional collaborator Brian Eno, among rockers, is that they combine a critical, intellectual and academic rigour (they once gave journalists a reading list of anthroplogy and cybernetics to try and improve their interviews) with a willingness for personal and group exploration of ecstatic states. That tension between the self-conscious / intellectual / critical / ironic and the ecstatic is one of the things that makes both their work so interesting – because we’re all longing for ecstasy, but we’re also struggling with our irony, our detachment, our rational skepticism and our emotional inhibition.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to get an email interview with him. Here it is.

To what extent would you say that African American-inspired pop music got Western culture out of a ‘dead end’ and gave it a way to find ecstatic release from the iron cage of rationalization?

Wow…that’s some heavy lifting for pop music! But yes, though there were always ecstatic cults in Europe and North America, it would seem the African influence – whether Latin music, Yoruba-inspired spirituality that seeped into world culture, jazz, funk, dancing from the waist down…the renewed appreciation of rhythm and repetition…changed not just Western culture but the whole world’s culture. And I don’t just mean the music.

To be convinced and seduced by ecstasy is to be won over to a new way of looking at the world and oneself. The groove, which in the last 200 years, since slavery, ultimately derives in this form at least, from Africa, is found almost everywhere around the globe now – it’s a species of globalization, but one of joy and integration of body and spirit….

The musical meme is carried by deep and profound work but just as often by hackney’d and cliched pop songs. Any carrier will do, there’s no discrimination.

Here’s Born Under Punches, the first song from the Eno-produced 1980 album Remain In Light, which was one of the first white rock albums to consciously draw on Afro-beat influences. I love the groove of it, the rhythmic guitar, the layers of chanting and Byrne’s nonsensical yelps over the top. Plus the incredibly weird guitar solo.

You’ve written that performing brings catharsis for you and the audience too. I’m fascinated by the idea of what classicists call the ‘Dionysiac cure’ and how everyone from Aristotle to Nietzsche say it brings healing. How is music cathartic for you?

As ER Dodds pointed out in The Greeks and the Irrational, ecstatic cults (with drumming!) were always around…but when did they lose acceptance? With the triumph of the Enlightenment? Perhaps it was during the Renaissance that the view of the workings of the universe changed – from a universe that obeyed and was structured according to musical harmony – to one in which music was a subset of other, possibly more inclusive physical laws. The universe as a song is more poetic, but science has its glories and beauty too…And maybe not surprisingly, those cosmic harmonies, or at least the idea behind them, might be re-emerging in crazy entangled sub atomic physics and in the cosmos.

How is music cathartic for me? In so many ways, and often simultaneously. Psychologically, physically…music engages so many parts of the brain (and body) all at once that no one part is central- which is a key to it’s power I suppose. It integrates. It may be a spandrel, or mental cheesecake as Steven Pinker says, but it’s pretty potent.

For the listener that catharsis has always been there – everyone has heard the “music saved my life” story or “music got me through high school” and it’s true…and that’s just listening, not even making it!

When I was younger and more socially uncomfortable music was my outlet- my way of communicating and announcing my existence. It was cathartic, therapeutic, but hardly ecstatic. It was even painful at times- but completely necessary.

Later, and little by little, something in me began to change, and I began to sense that rhythmic and repetitive music could do something more that just be an outlet for my unspoken unheard self- it could gradually change that self….and it seemed to be most effective in music rooted in a something that had been repressed or cast aside by western culture….

I found myself more open to trance-rooted music – whether via dance or funk grooves (which I always loved) to the Pentecostal church, voudun, gamelan, salsa, samba etc etc…and the music I and others were making began to partake of some weird white-man version of all that African-rooted culture.

I sensed that as opposed to much of what I had done before – which amplified the individual or one’s persona – this swallowed the individual whole. And it was in that loss of identity that the ecstasy lay. In some ways this seemed counter intuitive….wasn’t the individual what we and our culture are about? Why would we ever want to let go of that?

Surely most of us have a some point, in sports, music or some other group activity, found ourselves lost, subsumed in the group, in the team or larger community – and we have experienced how wonderful that can be. Well, some kinds of music are a machine for making that happen- and happen reliably.

One senses a commonality with a lot of religious and spiritual practices – the surrender to something greater than oneself…and how good that feels. One realizes that the pleasure one derives and the seductiveness of the communal feeling can be manipulated to all sorts of ends. It can be directed towards Jesus or Jihad, whatever. So one has to be careful. I attribute this phenomena to innate human/social/neurological tendencies and structures- not to an outside agency like God or something like that….

Here’s a clip from the 1982 Channel 4 documentary The Name of This Programme is Talking Heads, which combined concert footage with interviews and anthropological clips of ecstatic religions – which Byrne helped to select.

Being a little analytical I also noticed that this music that induced trances and ecstatic states was made up of simple modular parts…and these parts are useless alone, they don’t work, without all or most of the others. No one instrument or beat in this world carries the entire groove/texture (unlike much western music where the melody played by the loudest instrument is king).

Each module here has its role to play, and only when all do their discrete parts does the emergent thing come into being and the floor drops away. It is, in this way, a model of a new, more perfectly functioning society one might say – where all are essential, all are needed and there is a great reward when all work together. A glimpse of utopia, for an instant- and a glimpse that is felt – felt unconsciously. There is a reason the feeling happens, but the impact does not come from reason.

Byrne has written of how the Stop Making Sense tour gave Talking Heads a sense of ‘mystical communion’ , ego release, and even a glimpse of a new utopian community. You can see some of the sheer infectious fun of playing in a group in their performance of ecstatic anthem Burning Down The House:

Your work can be critically detached / ironic / conceptual and also ecstatic / surrendering. Do you find a creative tension between those two urges – wanting to surrender but also analyzing, detaching, thinking?

They’re not mutually exclusive- but they don’t happen simultaneously! One can have a completely immersive transporting experience and then later ask why did that happen. Knowing, or trying to know, why a thing works does not stop it from working or diminish the experience in any way- if anything it makes it even more marvelous.

When you have drawn on Christian evangelical ecstasy in your work (like in the song Once In A Lifetime and the video of it) it tends to be somewhat ironic and detached. But when you have explored Brazilian or African animist religion you seem to leave the irony and go with it. Why is that? Is it something about leaving the iron cage of the west and feeling one can finally ‘let go’ in other cultures? Is it harder for us to do that in Christian culture?

You hit the nail on the head there- one has to leave one’s home to be able to turn around and see it and appreciate it for the first time. (that’s a paraphrase of whom?) [TS Eliot]

Here’s a performance of Once In A Lifetime, in which Byrne performs an ironic version of an evangelical preacher, cut with anthropological footage of charismatic Christians (from the Channel 4 documentary):

If pop music became a kind of surrogate religion for many people (including me) – what would an ethnographer from Mars make of it? How successful a surrogate religion was / is it?

What religions do is codify and formalize existing experiences – they provide a safe context and support system for what could be frightening or uncontrolled experiences and thoughts, but at the same time they impose their own narratives and values onto what is a naturally occurring social/ neurological/physical phenomena. They tell a story about it, but it came before the story. The formalization can help it occur regularly, on demand, but the formalization doesn’t create it – or does it?

Now I’m wondering if at some level it’s like DNA-maybe the form, the structure, IS the thing itself. If the form and structure are present, then the phenomena has to happen? Certain musical structures reliably generate specific emotions. Now we’re back to the universe being musical – as harmonic (in the cosmic sense) structures come into being what follows is inevitable. The God behind the universe, in this view, is a song.

The ‘priests’ of pop music tended to be people in their teens or early 20s who were often quite unprepared for the mass Dionysiac adulation that gets projected onto them (as well as the commercial opportunism). in that sense, was it quite a dangerous sort of cult (for the priests and the followers?)

One is somewhat vulnerable in these states- as you mention, there is an opportunity for all sorts of exploitation. Commercial, religious, political.

I’m fascinated by how the sacred and secular have fed off each other in 20th century music – it’s been two way traffic. But a priest might say that rock and roll gave agnostic and atheist white kids a ‘taste’ of religious surrender but with none of the ethical or metaphysical commitments (including the belief in the afterlife and soul which has been a crucial part of ecstasy in most cultures). In that sense, is rock and roll selling ecstatic surrender on the cheap, as it were – as a no-strings weekend experience rather than a lifetime ethical commitment?

I don’t know about the afterlife or the soul- but this experience does give a sense that one can inhabit a larger body- the social body, something greater than oneself as an individual in a way that is visceral, not intellectual- – the Cartesian split heals and it’s wonderful.

Is there then an obligation to make ethical and metaphysical commitments? That sounds as if, after such pleasure, one is made to feel guilty and obliged to “pay” for one’s pleasure. I think, OK maybe in an ideal world, the social and moral inferences, at least some of then, happen organically- without need of an organization. I’m being very optimistic here, obviously a formal structure helps guide a realization. But maybe, just maybe, once one loses oneself, one is in some way forever bonded to that group. To everyone that was at a rave, or experiences the same thing in the same place. A tiny brotherhood emerges- unfortunately it isn’t made of all humanity, just the others in the room.

Do you think there is a ‘formula’ for ecstasy in musical performance? (I guess musicians are always searching for it, like alchemists.) Or does it depend on shifting cultural expectations and technological innovations?

Yeah, there are techniques – just like the Swedes know how to construct a pop song – but once you’ve seen the DJ drop the bass over and over it gets pretty tired – the effect doesn’t work any more. But it will work in the next town maybe.

You’ve spoken of how rock can become an mass ecstatic surrender to the band or the charismatic guru (or even Fuhrer!) of the front-man. That’s something some artists have explored and played with – David Bowie, for example, or Kanye West today. What do you think of that sort of exploration of the rockstar-cult? Is it a dangerous game?

I think it is a little dangerous- performers who play these roles often seem to forget that it’s an act- they loose themselves alright, but in an unfortunate way – the character they are playing swallows them. Rather than loosing oneself in a communal moment, it is an enlargement of an individual.- and a made up one at that! One becomes the mask.

One way that rock and roll is different from traditional religion is that, like modernism, it’s obsessed with the new, so there’s a pressure for endless new styles and innovations – ever louder bass lines and drops. And music is also everywhere now, as background music and on our iPhones. Are we becoming numbed to it, and thereby slowly reducing its magical power over our bodies and souls?

Biologically it can never lose that power. Do we get over-saturated? Maybe. But I still hear from folks how some music they heard recently affected them deeply, so it can happen- but yes, a lot of music is wallpaper now. But occasionally something cuts through.

One final bonus question- I think my favourite Talking Heads lyric is ‘there’s a city in my mind, come along and take a ride…they can tell you what to do but they’ll make a fool of you’ – you sound like a utopian preacher who is very unsure of mass movements! Where does the beautiful image of ‘city in my mind’ come from?

That’s straight out of preaching…. The City on the Hill from the Sermon on the Mount. It’s been overused, but its familiarity also makes it a potent image and phrase.

Here’s Byrne performing Road to Nowhere with St Vincent in 2013. It’s a typically ambiguous song – it sounds uplifting and hopeful, yet the words suggest they are going ‘nowhere’ . Is nowhere somewhere good, a utopia (which literally means ‘no place’ in Greek), somewhere beyond our present imagining? Or is he leading them straight off a cliff? It’s that kind of tension between ecstatic hope and ironic ambiguity that is typical of Byrne’s work, and which makes it different to more corny rock ecstasy.

If you want to read more on this topic, here’s an interview I did with Brian Eno, who’s often worked with Byrne, about music, ecstasy and surrender. And Byrne is curating the Meltdown festival in London in August, which will no doubt feature some ecstatic moments!

“Ridiculous Excess”: The Emergence of Football Mania

Posted on May 3, 2015 by

KlugmanDr Matthew Klugman is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at Victoria University (Melbourne, Australia) where he researches and teaches on the intersections of sport, passions, bodies, gender, sexuality, religion, migration and race. He is currently studying the emergence of modern spectator sport cultures in Melbourne, Manchester and Boston, and in this post, published to coincide with the emotional climax of the 2015 English football season, he reflects on the first emergence of football mania well over a century ago…

Advent of football

A 1906 cartoon captures the way the new rowdy emotionalism of Association football was challenging the more genteel style of cricket spectatorship.

“No one who does not know the North of England”, noted Bristol’s Western Daily Press to its southern readership in 1893, “can have any idea of what the football mania is.” The Western Daily Press was reporting on a talk that the Archdeacon of Manchester, James Wilson, had given regarding “The Education of a Citizen.” The paired topics of football and education might seem surprising, but from 1859 to 1879 Wilson had been the Master of Maths and Science at Rugby – the public school most associated with the promotion of athletic endeavours as a means of turning boys into disciplined, healthy, courageous, and strong Christian men. In keeping with this, Wilson’s 1893 talk emphasised the need for children to undertake “athletic exercise” in order to create citizens with “strength, vigour, and health”, upon which the “wealth of the nation depended”. But for Wilson Association football was not building strong, upright citizens. Instead, it was facilitating a dangerous “rage” for “athletic spectacles” that left spectators weak and impoverished.

The mid-to-late 1800s saw the development of modern team-based spectator sports – like the football codes – which developed into institutions of considerable cultural, social and economic power. Historians have tended to view the development of these sports as allied to processes of industrialisation, puritanism and functionalism, with sports becoming another tool for controlling and regulating bodies. Association football, for example, can be seen as an emblematic Victorian sport. The wildness of violent village games was replaced by a codified contest played on a field with clear boundaries, in a manner described as “scientific”, while the expansion of the game depended on the developing railway network, and the spectators who flocked to it were partaking in an emerging culture of leisure. However, the fervour that marked these spectators has largely been passed over. Recurrent phrases such as “football mania” have been analysed as reactions to an evolving working-class culture around football, but the particular “emotional” culture that came to characterise football has been neglected. Yet this culture sheds light into other aspects of Victorian life – the interlinked fascination with, and suspicion of, emotions, the concern with the new diseases of modern life, and the way so-called pathologies might be celebrated as well as critiqued.

The evolution of the phrase “football mania”, for instance, reveals a growing interest and concern with those who began to follow football games. After emerging in Britain in the mid-1870s as shorthand for those playing football – either with great enthusiasm, or in a way that created a public nuisance – the phrase was quickly extended to include spectators as well as players. In 1878, for example, a lengthy report in London’s Morning Post, noted with Victorian reticence that “in the Midlands and Northern counties the interest taken in representative contests is little short of enthusiasm” while “North of the Tweed, the football mania, as it may almost be termed, is still more dominant.”

By 1887 the focus was turning more to the spectator culture, and there was no “almost” in the critique that the Reverend Joseph Parker of the Congregational City Temple in London, gave to a group of Glasgow Clergyman when he visited Scotland. Parker had looked for religion in the daily papers only to finds columns regarding football. “He asked if all the world was mad, and all the men and women football players”, before going on to note that “he had had seen great excitement manifested at a railway station on Saturday. He asked if the Queen was dead or St Paul’s burned to the ground? No, it was a whole community gone out after football.”

While Parker seemed primarily concerned with the way football was coming to mean so much, others were more specific in noting the aspects of this culture that they disliked. Towards the end of the year the Lancet published a review that was highly concerned with the physical dangers of football. In response, the Edinburgh Evening News praised the physicality and courage needed to play the game, arguing instead that the main problem was the way “a manly game” was being “turned into a nuisance by excessive devotion”, with the consequent “football mania” having a deleterious effect on the character of public lectures and the support of Mechanics institutes and related bodies.

There is an implicit opposition here between the manly deeds being performed on the pitch and the significantly less manly behaviour of those watching the courageous players. Spectator sports (and especially the football codes) have long been critiqued for upholding what has become a hegemonic version of aggressive masculinity – celebrating strong men willing to put their bodies at risk and to bruise and batter their opponents. Yet there is a hint here that the emerging spectator culture could also foster a more heterodox masculinity, one that involved not being courageous and manly themself, but rather becoming excited by, and devoted to, those men who performed bravely for their entertainment. And this raises questions then as toward the gaze of these male spectators who could become so excited by watching these (other) men play.

Football advice

Another early 20th-century take on gender, masculinity and football spectators.

The defenses of football culture could be as revealing as the critiques. After the first game of the 1889-90 football season the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette felt compelled to admonish the growing critics of the so-called football mania who were apparently prophesying that the madness for football would never last:

… we already hear the sneerers talking about the ‘football mania’. At the close of the last season these critics indulged in predictions that the ‘madness’ had about run its course, and that in all probability it would suffer from reaction in 1889-90, and then die out, leaving a sense of self-astonishment in the men, women and children who had lost their heads over the ‘absurd pastime’. At the first summons of the season about twelve thousand people declared last night that they were quite as mad as they were last season. And we shall probably find as the months pass, as we found last year, that the sneerers will gradually become mad themselves. We know of several very steady-headed critics of the ‘mania’ who bethought themselves that they would just go and see how utterly foolish the whole thing was, They went, and gradually became afflicted with that lesion of the intellect which they had predicated of others.
One of these sneerers – a well known gentleman – had to offer many apologies in the course of an hour and a half for kicking the shins of spectators near him, the lesion of intellect having progressed so far on a first inspection of the game as to lead him to imagine that he was somehow engaged in the match. Another of the same class, being carried away by the prevailing and very contagious enthusiasm, and having dropped his hat, so forgot himself as to seize the hat of another person in order to wave something when the local team had scored a difficult goal.

Yet while the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette admitted “a certain degree of madness, if British enthusiasm for physical prowess be it nevertheless defended the “popular pastime” of attending games as actually “a powerful auxiliary to the temperance reformer” that limited the amount of drinking those attending games would otherwise indulge in on a Saturday afternoon. The conclusion was that the notional madness had rational benefits:

when one sees ten thousand people with glistening faces at a football match, one feels that such excitements are worthy of praise rather than condemnation. Moreover, the infection of the manly game, spreading to the rising generation, has a beneficial result in the promoting of that physical development which ought to be part of the education of British youth.

This piece is a useful source partly because of the rich way it chronicles the physical culture of spectating – the kicking of others because one identifies so much with the players it feels one is on the field, the need to wave hats in the air to express the great Martin coverjoy of seeing a goal scored by your team, and the thousands of glistening faces. But the relative sophistication of the playful use of medical terms is also revealing, and there is a need to locate this within the broader culture of deploying medical terms, especially but not only, the very popular Victorian term ‘mania’. Recent histories of mania by Emily Martin  and David Healy have traced the connections that many people made between states of manic euphoria and stupefying melancholia – connections that laid the foundation for later understandings of manic depression.Yet there no such links are made in these popular accounts of football mania. The focus lies solely with the intense enthusiasm, excitement, joy and obsession, not the considerable sadness and mourning of defeats that was already a part of football culture.

FA Cup 1902

This Umpire cartoon after the 1902 FA Cup final, for example, contrasts the excessive exuberance of a winning Sheffield supporter with the grumpy demeanour of two well-to-do Southampton followers. The caricatures speak to presumed class differences, but it is also notable that while the celebrations of the “Sheffielder” are depicted as manic as he celebrates a victory that should not be forgotten by drinking and dancing himself into oblivion, the displeasure of the men from Southampton is rendered reasonable and contained by stiff upper lips. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the match the president of the Southampton Club had stated that “We are bitterly disappointed at not getting the Cup”; an intense and seemingly absurd expression of dismay at the failure to win what was still just a game.

Despite the Victorian fascination with mania, it was much rarer for the other popular sports of this time – such as cricket, horse-racing, pedestrianism and lacrosse – to be associated with mania by ministers of religion or journalists. Moreover, the intimations and even claims that there was something pathological about following football were made by some medical experts as well as lay figures. In 1906, for example, the famed British doctor Sir James Crichton-Browne wrote that:

The inordinate addiction to football watching becomes a kind of psychical intoxication. Those who habitually indulge in it are apt to become stupid and sodden, or silly and frenzied. A little of it is exhilarating, too much of it, to the exclusion of other interests, must weaken the brain. A variety of impressions is necessary to cerebral vigour. The incessant repetition of one small round of ideas debilitates – and so football may become almost a monomania.

For some Christian ministers the pathology continued to be one of misplaced meaning. In 1892 the Scottish evangelical preacher John McNeill noted that ministers he met were “groaning and lamenting at the ‘eternal fitba’” because not only did whole communities seem to go to the game:

they had to talk it over again, and if it had ended there it would not so much matter. But it did not. On Sunday they were as much possessed as ever; they stood at street corners and took a walk in the country and talked the whole match over – every kick being kicked again, and every man’s merits being canvassed.

A year later, and Bristol’s Western Daily Press used James Wilson’s talk to expound on the lamentable way those in the north of England carried “their love of sport to the point of ridiculous excess”:

Everyone, as it seems to a visitor to a northern town, above the age of a schoolboy thinks more of football than of anything else. Professional players, generally artisans hired for the season by the club that can pay them best, are the heroes of the day. Their play and their physical condition are gravely discussed by thousands of people, and affairs of State are of no importance at all in many people’s eye compared with the probability of their club winning its cup tie… one wonders however [how] the class of people there could afford the money [to attend games]. But they do, and they can find money also for the newspapers that live on football.

Perhaps one of the reasons that such critiques of “football mania” have been passed over is our familiarity with the culture of apparently absurd meaning being attributed to cup ties and other football contests. Another aspect that seems familiar is the deployment of religious terms such as devotion and possessed which hint at the metaphor of spectator sport as religion that was soon to take hold. This metaphor was used directly by the Sunderland Gazette and Shipping News in a note below their report of Wilson’s critique. While their headline for the report of Wilson’s lecture was “Plain Words from a Parson”, right below it was the headline “Football a Religious Rite” with the humorous column observing how appropriate it was that a public lecture about the 1893 FA Cup was held in a Manchester church.

If the excessive fascination with football contests was a modern disease, then it seemed to be a pathology that also threatened the place of religion in the lives of football devotees. And while it is important to be aware of the dangers of “presentism”, it is nonetheless of interest that metaphors of mental illness and religion continue to shape contemporary descriptions of spectator sport cultures. The challenge now is to research and write back in the multifarious, often difficult and yet also seductive pleasures that these sports provoked in spectators – pleasures that provoked accusations, and celebrations, of mania, and which drove the development of these sports into such powerful cultural, social and economic institutions.

 

 Follow Matthew Klugman on Twitter: @Raw_Toast

This research project is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship (project number: DE 130100121).