Trash, trinkets, and remembering Ian Curtis

Posted on February 11, 2014 by

Dr Jennifer Otter Bickerdike (University of East London) delivered the first of the Centre for the History of the Emotions lunchtime seminars earlier this year. Here, she tells us how she came to her PhD topic, which explored memory and mourning via the grave of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis.

For most tourists, a first trip to England includes the must-sees of Buckingham Palace and the Crown Jewels. For me, it was Salford Lads Club, the space where the Hacienda club used to stand (the club is now gone, replaced with upscale apartments attracting local footballers), and the grave of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.

I felt an unexplained draw to visit, repeatedly, the spaces and places that had played a part in the history of the music of Manchester – music that I, as an American, had only experienced through watching videos, reading books and fanzines, and dancing like a raving loon to the key records, both in the privacy of my own home and at local indie clubs where such anglophilism was encouraged, celebrated and promoted. I had never visited the graves of my own grandparents, people I knew and loved very deeply, yet felt compelled to walk the streets that my northern heroes had strode down and contemplate at their graves, my sonic pilgrimage always scored by the appropriate record.

When it came to choosing a topic to study for the three years of my PhD, it seemed natural to be introspective, looking to why I did this and what it meant. For one year, I went to the grave of Ian Curtis on the same day of the month every month, recording the trash, trinkets and tributes left at his memorial stone. Through this, I saw not only the devout, almost religious fervor of fans, but the cycles of life, decay and renewal. The Curtis legend becomes transformed through every visitor as their personal meaning is applied to the canvas of the singer, changing and evolving his ‘story’ a tiny bit at a time. A similar pattern of degradation and renewal occurred in the area surrounding the grave: items were left, items decayed, new items found their way in. The seasons changed, one to another, each with their own signs of time slowly but surely moving forward.

Throughout the process, I realized that I was but one of many loving and celebrating this exported notion of Britishness. It was not exclusive to my little circle of Californian friends with shaggy Ian Brown bowl cuts and denim flares; this was a communion not just of music, but of ideas, culture and history that had been telegraphed globally to take on a much greater meaning in this newly minted idea of ‘past’ than had ever actually existed in any present. It is this ‘past’, one based on – as Tony Wilson once said, a “fiction much more interesting than fact” – that is circulated, mourned and remembered. Visitors to the Ian Curtis memorial stone illustrated this: a longing for a person, moment and space which may never have truly existed, but that live on in a nostalgic ether of perceived greatness, soaring to meteoric heights in a shared cultural memory.

You can read more about Jennifer’s research in this area on her blog, Joy Devotion.

“But I do care about you….”, the immune system told the brain

Posted on February 11, 2014 by

This is a guest post by Dr Fulvio D’Acquisto and Samuel Brod, from the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry

“The mind most effectually works upon the body, producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations … cruel diseases and sometimes death itself.”

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, (1621/1893).

Browsing through the scientific research currently probing the depths of human thought and feeling, you are certain to find a surplus of information detailing regions of our brain that flash on in response to a variety of emotional stimuli like the lights on a switchboard.

Away from the impassive gaze of an MRI scanner however we doubt many of us experiences love, hate, stress or serenity as a sensation emanating any particular part of twists, folds, lobes and cortices that form the human brain.  Instead we experience the pounding of our heart, the butterflies in our stomach or the flush of our cheeks. Visceral and tangible emotions are felt, not thought.

Recent research by psychologists in Finland goes some way to support this body-centric perspective of emotion.  Over 700 hundred individuals were induced to feel a variety of emotional states and then asked to colour the bodily regions they felt were engaged by their feelings, the result of which are shown below.

This principle of a connection between physical and mental states is by no means a new idea. Almost two and a half thousand years ago the Greek physician Hippocrates was a firm follower of humorism, a concept suggesting that differing combinations bodily fluids have distinct effects on human temperament and behaviour. Blood (rather than the brain) seemed to be the bodily fluid carrying feeling and emotions. This is a rather interesting point to consider since many of the words we use today to describe our own personalities, such as sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy have their origins in this ancient medical theory. Similarly, we use the expression “It’s in my blood” when we talk about attitudes and associated emotions.

As is often the case with an incontrovertible dogma, this dominating view underwent a dramatic decline following a spate of discoveries that began to reveal the architecture of both our brain and body down to the cellular level. Most significantly the development of the aforementioned Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) by Nobel laureates Paul C Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield in 2003 has allowed us to examine the flashes and pulses of brain activity both in real time and exquisite detail. Accompanying this upsurge of knowledge about the brain and its physical machinations has come a tendency to regard this organ as the sole arbiter of human thought and feeling, processing events from our external environment into a set of defined emotional states which in turn activate a corresponding physical response.

While there is a wealth of scientific and epidemiological research supporting this top down perspective of emotional reaction there is a growing body of evidence suggesting the reverse: A bottom up response in which events internal to our body yet separate from the brain may have a substantial influence on our mood.

One of the best examples of this bottom up response is the recent flourishing of research on the role our gut bacteria play in regulating our emotions. Emotional state has been established as having an influence on the correct functioning of our digestive tract (a connection referred to as the brain-gut axis) it is for this reason that irritable bowel syndrome is often treated with anti-depressants. However it also seems the contrary may also be true. Germ-free mice (which have no intestinal micro flora) display a highly exaggerated response to stressful stimuli when compared to animals with a normal compliment of gut bacteria (for more information visit Prof. Graham A.W. Rook web page on the “Old Friends” mechanism). These mice also possess a substantially underdeveloped immune system, which brings us on to two recent studies carried out within our own lab, demonstrating how the presence or absence of specific types of immune cells within the body can greatly influence emotional behavior (Piras et al., 2013; Rattazzi et al., 2013).

Immune cells are our personal bodyguard against the “dangers” of the outside world and circulate through our body using the fascinating mix of water, salt, fat and proteins we call blood. Among this pantheon of microscopic workers one cell type is unique not just in its function but also in the way it communicates and interacts with the various tissues and organs it passes through as it patrols the body.  Named after the thymus, the butterfly shaped organ from which they originated helper T cells (often referred to as CD4+ T-cells) act as both mediators and moderators of the immune response. Constantly assessing their environment this ruling class of cell uses a series of chemical signals to direct a cellular plan of action tailored to resolving an insult to the immune system, be that injury, infection or otherwise.

Remarkably, these cellular commanders are able to store key information on the immunological events they experience allowing them – if met by the same problem again – to react faster and more efficiently to it. Adaptive, reactive and able to co-ordinate other immune cell’s actions based on priority or need it does not seem too much of a stretch to describe T cells as the ‘thinking’ part of the immune system, comparable (albeit in a more diffuse way) to the brain.

Clinical studies, experimental evidence and patient’s accounts often describe the damaging effect of transitory or prolonged absence of T cells on their emotional wellbeing. Cyclosporine, a drug widely used in organ transplantation functions by reducing the activity of the immune system by preventing the growth and action of T cells. This drug has been shown to induce a range of neuropsychological problems ranging from depression to anxiety both in human patients and experimental animals. Chemotherapy, a catchall term for a variety of drugs used to treat cancer is notorious for decimating the patient’s resident population of immune cells it also commonly causes acute psychological complications too severe to be considered a reaction to the treatments physical effects alone.

The reverse is also true. Adult patients suffering from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders present a significantly reduced numbers of helper T cells when compared to the healthy Individuals. In a recent study it has also been shown that there is an inverse relationship between CD4 lymphocyte count and hospital-associated anxiety and depression.

While it seems clear that these cells are having a tangible effect on our emotional state. The key question we are now trying to address is how? In attempting to answer this question we performed a battery a psychological tests on groups of mice that had been genetically engineered to either have no T cells at all or just T helper cells (several varieties of T cells circulate our body). We observed that with a complete absence of lymphocytes mice exist in a permanent state of high anxiety. With a strong tendency towards obsessive compulsive behaviour, as demonstrated using a marble burying experiment. Unable to cope with the aberrant presence of these glass balls in their enclosure these mice will bury them out of sight (and out of mind one can imagine) using whatever bedding or burrowing material that is available to them.

A key issue facing the thousands of individuals in the UK suffering from anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders is their diminished ability to perform day to day activities that might agitate their condition e.g. leaving the house, social situations, throwing things away etc. Our mice lacking T cells presented comparable problems, showing a significant reduction in their ability to effectively care for themselves, failing to groom properly and unable or unwilling to complete the construction of their own nests.

Each of these emotional maladies; the anxiety, OCD and lack of self-care was drastically decreased in the mice that possessed the helper T cell subset. This presented the exciting suggestion that these cells may play an important role not just in stabilising our immune response but our emotional state as well. Driven by these results we began investigating whether or not these cells were capable of exerting their influence directly upon the brain.

Using a powerful analytical tool referred to as a genetic micro-array we were able to sift the minds of our mice, pin-pointing the shifts and fluctuations of gene expression between the brains of different animals.  Of the 35,000 individual genes looked at we identified over 6000 to be differentially expressed between normal mice and those lacking T cells. Of these genes many have already been described as being directly involved in the progress or instigation of several mental disorders. Others have provided tantalising clues as to the origin of other less well-defined cognitive and emotional illnesses. Most strikingly for us, these differences in gene expression were strongly reduced or abolished completely in the brains of mice with T helper cells thus providing new and compelling evidence that these cells are both the arbiters of immunity and emotion.

And this is of course just the tip of the iceberg for this vast and interconnected field of research. Studies in other labs have demonstrated that T cells rapidly mobilize to the skin and lungs of individuals suffering the intense and acute anxiety. This might be one of the explanation why patients suffering panic and anxiety attack often feel “out of breath” or that problems get “under their skin” when there is something that they cannot be rid of.

Further work by Prof Michael Schwartz (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and Prof Jonathan Kipnis (University of Virginia, USA) has also suggested the possibility that T cells may play a vital part in the brains recovery from mental challenges such a stroke and physical trauma as well as serving an important role in the retention of memory and mental capacity as we grow older.

Recent estimates by the world health organization suggest that by 2030 depression and stress related disorders will be the most debilitating and widespread health disorders in the world, closely followed by auto-immune disease and allergy. With growing evidence that our emotional and immune state share a complex and bi-directional relationship with one another we believe the time is ripe to begin a serious cross field examination of the significance of the interdependent states. It is our hope for the future that greater credence may be given to both the physical and emotional state of a patient when trying give their prognosis. And that the collaboration of clinicians, psychologists and immunologists to understand and ameliorate disease of any kind, be it mental or physical becomes the norm. Because as everyone already knows,
Happiness and healthiness go hand in hand.

N.B: The images preceding several of the paragraphs are part of a project by graphic designer Orlagh O’Brien titled emotionally vague. Each represents the attempts of 250 individuals to draw how they feel emotions on their body overlaid on top of one another. The emotions displayed are anger, love, fear, sadness and joy respectively. It is interesting to note the resemblance these images show to those created in the ‘Body Maps of Emotions’ study. The figures “Have you lost your marbles?” and “Immunosuppression and the lack of self care” contain a photo of “Shape of Despair” by Stefano Costanzo and a photo of “Chernobyl/Pripyat Exclusion Zone (041.8112)” by Pedro Moura Pinheiror, respectively.
References
Piras G, Rattazzi L, McDermott A, Deacon R, D’Acquisto F. “Emotional change-associated T cell mobilization at the early stage of a mouse model of multiple sclerosis.” Front Immunol. 2013 Nov 21;4:400. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2013.00400.
Rattazzi L, Piras G, Ono M, Deacon R, Pariante CM, D’Acquisto F. “CD4⁺ but not CD8⁺ T cells revert the impaired emotional behavior of immunocompromised RAG-1-deficient mice.” Transl Psychiatry. 2013 Jul 9;3:e280. doi: 10.1038/tp.2013.54.

Are mental disorders physical or ethical?

Posted on January 2, 2014 by

One of the things that has happened in our culture, over the last 300 years, is the shift from theology to morality to psychiatry. Conditions that were once deemed vices are now considered diseases. Gluttony has become obesity. Despair has become depression. Lust has become sex addiction.

A few ornery voices on the right, like Theodore Dalrymple, Peter Hitchens and Frank Furedi (he’s on the right, isn’t he?), complain about the rise of the discourse of disease and therapy, and the gradual disappearance of the idea of moral responsibility. Recently, Dalrymple and Hitchens fulminated against Russell Brand’s contention that drug addiction is a disease, insisting instead that it’s a vice, and a crime.

Most of us probably sympathised more with Brand, just as most of us probably agreed with that cartoon doing the rounds a few weeks ago, ‘what if physical illnesses were treated like mental illnesses’. Labeling things like depression or alcoholism ‘vices’ seems medievaly cruel and heartless. Many people are now genuinely offended by the idea of the individual as an autonomous free agent, which they see as an invention of neo-liberalism.

This fundamental cultural shift comes from the rise of materialism since the Scientific Revolution, and the growing popularity of the idea that, as Julian Offray de La Mettrie put it, man is a machine. If the machine starts doing strange things like gorging on chocolate or killing people, that is a mechanical malfunction rather than a moral choice, and should be treated accordingly, with drugs or behavioural modification.

So which view is right? Are mental disorders physical, or ethical?

I think that, paradoxically, both views are right. Humans are machines, determined by our genes, our neural chemistry and our environment. But we also have the capacity to make moral choices, and should be held accountable for our moral errors. Ignore either side of this polarity, and you fall into error – either the error of thinking man is entirely a machine without any free will, or thinking man is a completely free agent without any limits on his rationality and choice.

The paradox of humanity is that we are both caused physical objects, and also moral subjects with a limited capacity for transcendence. That small capacity for transcendence means that, unlike every other animal, we can re-programme ourselves. Our personalities are not set in stone. We can use our rational consciousness to choose a direction in life. And that rational consciousness means we can also be held accountable for our actions, rather than treated like helpless children or dogs.

With regard to mental disorders, this means they are best understood as both causally determined, but also involving ethical errors – about what is the best way to flourish. The gambler, the drug addict, the food-gorger, the social phobic, even the depressive, are not simply the victims of physical malfunctions. They are the makers of ethical errors. They may have inherited these ethical errors from their parents, their genes or their culture, but they have the sovereign human capacity to change these errors.

The Greek philosophers understood that bio-psychology and ethics are not two separate departments. They understood that mental disorders like anxiety are both diseases and vices or moral errors. They are diseases of our reason, diseases of our moral capacity to choose a wise course in life. And the cure for this disease is philosophy, by which they meant psychotherapy + ethics + economics + politics + theology.

Today, amid the triumph of the materialist worldview, we are beginning to return to the ancients’ wisdom that humans do have self-control and the capacity for moral reasoning, and that these things are important for helping us escape problems like obesity or addiction.

The most scientifically credible treatments for depression, anxiety and many other mental disorders is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which was inspired by Greek philosophy, and 12 Step programmes like Alcoholics Anonymous, which grew out of Protestant Christianity. Neither CBT nor AA use the old language of sin or vice or moral blame, but they both insist our ability to recover from mental disorders depends on our reasoning and moral choice.

Neither CBT or AA are glibly optimistic about our ability to change ourselves. Both recognise the terrifying power of mental disorders to wrap themselves around us like a parasite, to lie to us and utterly transform our personality. They also recognise that, in some cases like dementia or schizophrenia, our biology may destroy our capacity to reason. But they also recognise our stubborn human capacity for transcendence.

Our capacity for transcendence is just a capacity, and Aristotle insisted it can be ruined by our environment, by a particularly poor or abusive childhood for example (although the Stoics would have argued that even abused slaves like Epictetus can show extraordinary moral courage). And our moral capacity is also bounded by the power of habits. Decisions harden into habits, habits harden into personality traits, personality traits harden into biographies. Character, as Heraclitus put it, is destiny.

I know from personal experience how poor life-decisions gather momentum until they become over-powering and chronic mental disorders. When I was a teenager, I did lots of drugs, and ended up traumatizing myself. Poor life-choice. The trauma hit me at university, and led to me becoming increasingly socially phobic. Bit by bit, what started as a free choice not to go to a party hardened into an involuntary compulsion – I would be terrified at the thought of going to a party.

At that time, I was addicted to the I-Ching, the ancient Taoist book of divination. I constantly asked it questions to try and work out what was happening to me. I often got hexagram number 29 – K’An, The Abysmal – as a reply. The second line of it tells us:

Repetition of the Abysmal.
In the abyss one falls into a pit.
Misfortune.

Which the commentary explains as:

By growing used to what is dangerous, a man can easily allow it to become part of him. He is familiar with it and grows used to evil. With this he has lost the right way, and misfortune is the natural result.

Things get away from us. The state of vice or sin can be compared to the episode of The Simpsons, when Homer is standing on a skateboard at the top of a hill, overlooking a canyon. All it takes is a small push at the beginning – one bad life-choice or life-event – and things quickly gather momentum, until you are hurtling towards the abyss and it’s very difficult to get off the skateboard.

We always have the choice to get off the skateboard, but it gets harder and harder, partly because it takes humility to admit we are heading in the wrong direction and we need help to change. Our egos love to delude ourselves that everything is alright, like the optimist who jumps off a building and says, as he passes each floor, ‘so far so good’.

The unfortunate consequence of our nature as moral subjects, is that people have to choose to get off the skateboard. Loved ones can’t make them do it. As the joke puts it, ‘how many psychotherapists does it take to change a light-bulb? One, but the light-bulb must want to change.’

Often, when I do philosophy talks, I meet mothers whose teenage or young adult children are deeply depressed, but who won’t do anything to get better. They are heading for the abyss. The poor mothers often wear brave smiles, but you can see how destroyed they are inside. And they don’t know what they should do, they say that their boy (it’s usually a boy) just won’t try anything to get better and gets furious with them if they try to make them.

It makes me think that fundamental to recovery from mental illness is some survival mechanism kicking in. People need a moment of epiphany, when they wake up from the automatic cycle of self-destruction, and think ‘my God, I’m killing myself’. They need to stop blaming their mother or father or genes or God for their shitty life, and think, ‘I’ve got to do something’. And when that self-preservation kicks in and they take responsibility for their beliefs and habits, they might have a chance of getting better. But they need that moment of insight: ‘I have become unwell, I need help, or I’ll destroy myself’.

Drugs may well be a part of that recovery. But a lot of the therapeutic power of pharmaceuticals may well be placebo (just as an addict praying to a Higher Power may be placebo, or a person being exorcised by a shaman). What is really helping us recover is the realisation ‘shit, here comes the abyss, it’s time to change direction’. It may not be your fault you’re heading for the abyss, it might have been your shitty childhood that gave you the first push down the hill, but ultimately it’s your choice whether to get off the skateboard or not.

Russell Brand realizes, I think, this paradox. He says addiction is a disease, but a spiritual disease. We make bad life-choices or suffer traumatic life-events, and then things get their own momentum. The treatment for such diseases involves lots of love, sympathy, and perhaps pharmacology. But Peter Hitchens is right too – it also involves individuals making better moral choices.

Love, Pain, Ecstasy, and Murder: An Emotional Christmas

Posted on December 23, 2013 by

As 2013 draws to a close, here is a festive offering from the History of Emotions Blog – our twelve most read new posts of 2013 . We wish our readers a happy and restful holiday season, filled with love, enthusiasm, and perhaps even some ecstatic experiences.

Brian Eno on Surrender in Art and Religion
An interview with Jules Evans

Inside Broadmoor
By Jade Shepherd

Five years of Improving Access for Psychological Therapies  (IAPT)
By Jules Evans

Confessions of a Boy Murderer
By Eleanor Betts

Bernd Bösel on the History and Philosophy of Enthusiasm
An interview with Jules Evans

The Many Faces of Emotion
By Stephanie Downes and Stephanie Trigg

Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as Pathology
James Kennaway in conversation with Jules Evans.

Psychological Pain and Suicidality – Some Historical Considerations
By Åsa Jansson

The Carnival of Lost Emotions
By Chris Millard
(And you can watch a video of the event too)

Everyday Love and Emotions in the Twentieth Century
By Claire Langhamer

Ann Taves on Religious and Ecstatic Experiences
An interview with Jules Evans

Marry Me, Bosie!
By Thomas Dixon

 

Can you revive Stoicism in modern life?

Posted on December 15, 2013 by

This panel was part of an event in November called Stoicism for Everyday Life, which was funded by the AHRC. The videoing of this event was funded by the Centre for the History of the Emotions. I love the philosophical expressions assumed by me and the other participants when we’re not speaking. Very pensive!

Emotional Objects: Conference Report

Posted on November 23, 2013 by

Dr Sally Holloway recently completed her PhD on the material culture of romantic love in eighteenth-century England at Royal Holloway, University of London. She was one of the organisers of a recent conference about emotional objects, on which she reports here. 

Emotional Objects: Touching Emotions in Europe 1600-1900
Institute of Historical Research, 11th-12th October 2013

The Emotional Objects conference aimed to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to discuss what historians can learn about emotions in history using material culture. Many of our speakers were curators, joining us from the V&A and Museum of Freemasonry in London, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, National Museums Scotland, Den Gamle By in Denmark, and the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen. We were thrilled to be able to unite scholars from across the world, who travelled from America, Australia, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands and Russia to participate in the conference.

This report is based on my reflections from one strand of panels, as my co-organiser Alice Dolan had to depart for America to undertake a fellowship at the Winterthur Museum shortly after the conference. Most papers from both strands will soon be available to listen to on the History Spot website.

The conference opened with a keynote by John Styles, who began our discussion of emotional objects using Proust’s evocative description of the madeleine in Á La Recherche du Temps Perdu:

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake…this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.[1]

Styles described how the taste of the madeleine has been the main focus of scholarship, rather than its emotional properties. The ‘new sensation’ aroused by the madeleine demonstrates how the emotional meanings of objects change significantly over time, as they can emote at one point and not at another. Styles noted that the history of emotions has largely been based in text not objects, chiefly focusing on how people wrote about their feelings and how such descriptions changed over time.

One of the most deeply emotional collections of objects to survive are stored in the Foundling Hospital billet books at the London Metropolitan Archives, recently brought to life by the exhibition Threads of Feeling at the London Foundling Museum. While such hospitals operated across Europe, there was significant variation in the tokens selected by mothers to identify their infants and encapsulate their emotions. Surviving tokens in France possessed a more explicitly religious character, with depictions of the flaming sacred heart granting them an extra protective power.

Styles argued that textiles provided the most emotional material available to mothers, as their infants had touched, worn and soiled the fabric. Ribbons were also frequently left with infants, which provided the very currency of love and romance. The notion of textiles as particularly emotional objects provided a recurring theme over the next two days. As Claire Lerpiniere argued in her paper on identity and materiality, textiles are historical documents created at particular stages in people’s lives; we are swaddled within the folds of textiles right from birth, and we are eventually buried in them. As noted by Michèle Plott in her study of arranged marriages in France 1860-1885, textiles such as fur coats and cashmere shawls provided the central sign that a woman’s life was about to change.

A range of sources were used by speakers to access emotional ties to objects, including court records, diaries, novels and paintings. Hanna Kietäväinen-Siren explored the ‘language game’ of emotions (Bourke) using the words spoken by lovers in court in early modern Finland. Tara MacDonald drew upon Victorian sensation fiction such as Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) to approach hair as a loaded symbolic object revealing how humans can become ‘things.’ Tove Engelhardt Mathiassenanalysed protective strategies hidden in Danish Christening garments by combining close analysis of the construction of textiles with a study of colours such as red used to depict infants in art.  The red christening cap below was made for an infant boy in the late eighteenth century, and had added symbolic protection from gold lace covering all of the seams.


Silk christening cap with gold lace and yellow silk ribbons, photograph © Thomas Kaare Lindblad and Den Gamle By, Aarhus, Denmark.

Various methodologies were proposed by speakers as a means of accessing the emotional properties of objects in history. Antonia Brodie presented an in-depth history of a single sheet donated to the V&A in 2006 using dates and initials embroidered in cross-stitch over a 130-year period. Emily Taylor traced the history of gowns including the ‘Fraser Wedding Dress’– a red tartan dress which has been used as a bridal gown by a single Scottish family since 1785, and was last worn in 2005. Geoffrey Cantor explored the history of the term ‘wonder’, specifically in reactions to the Great Exhibition in 1851. Sarah Ann Robin utilised a five-pronged methodology for interpreting surviving love tokens in museums and private collections (Material, Function, Design, Known Provenance and Quantitative Analysis) allowing her to approach each object she encountered in the same way.

                The ‘Fraser Wedding Dress’ © Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, INVMG.00.164

Robin noted that she had tried to physically handle every item studied within her thesis. The idea of touching and handling objects both by historians and individuals in history provided a recurrent conference theme. In my own paper I combined letters, diaries, objects and prints to explore the ritualised process of touching, smelling, kissing and gazing at love tokens in eighteenth-century England, arguing that this provided a key means of conceptualising and processing a person’s emotions. Victoria Kelley analysed narratives surrounding the cleaning of surfaces in Victorian and Edwardian homes; the fanaticism of cleaning routines, anxiety over germs, and delight over gleaming surfaces. It was possible to clean a surface too much, as over-polishing could be a terrible faux pas in making a surface slick and tacky. Delegates discussed at length the dichotomy between handling andnot handling objects. In the discussion following the Keeping Textiles panel, it was suggested that the value of certain items in museums is created through a kind of public stasis, as the object not doing anything creates a new kind of meaning through its preservation.

The way in which objects were depicted in history also reveals how they were constructed and valued emotionally. Niall Atkinson and Susanna Caviglia described how touching stones in paintings of eighteenth-century Rome anchored artist and viewer, with painting landscapes providing a way of unlocking the past. Johanna Ilkmannus presented handiwork as part of aristocratic sociability for elites in eighteenth-century Europe, as demonstrated by François-Hubert Drouais’ portrait of Madame de Pompadour at her tambour frame in 1763-4. Anna Schram Vejlby argued that the Danish bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century used depictions of women knitting as a symbol of their success, exemplified by portraits such as Familien Waagepetersen by Wilhelm Marstrand (1836).Joanna Crosby described how orchard motifs evoked the pre-Industrial world in Victorian art, such as Henry Herbert La Thangue’s oil painting Cider Apples from 1899.

Carbolic soap

The pungent carbolic soap handed around by Juan Manuel Zaragoza Bernal

Space provided a recurring theme of the conference. Joelle Del Rose outlined how William Beckford (1760-1844) meticulously purchased and arranged material goods to create a ‘fairy world’ for sexual liaisons at home. By hiring decorators to transform his domestic space, Beckford created a seductive delirium where monotony of any kind was banished. Juan Manuel Zaragoza Bernal investigated Victorian objects such as carbolic soap and slipper bedpans to argue that new mass produced objects of care created particular material conditions when caring for someone. In a similar vein, Mark Dennis presented freemasonry as a ‘dramatic theatrical space’ created through objects such as stone from King Solomon’s Temple, which remains a feature of every Master’s Badge. Objects could also provide emotional spaces in their own right, with Bridget Millmore describing eighteenth-century coins as portable sites which people could go to when thinking of others.

The conference was characterised by a supportive atmosphere, with each panel ending with at least half an hour of open discussion between speakers and delegates. One such discussion concerned the emotional process of donating objects to museums, which certain people use as a way to memorialise deceased relatives. However every institution operates fixed criteria for the objects they collect, meaning that many items unfortunately have to be sent back to families. Curators described the people left in tears as their family heirlooms were rejected by a museum, wounded by the idea that ‘your value is not value enough.’ Others told of individuals donating valuable objects to museums to keep them away from certain relatives, driven by resentment of their families.

An ‘Ex Axe’ from Berlin donated to the Museum of Broken Relationships in 1995. Image courtesy of MBR by Ana Opalić.

An intriguing collection of ‘broken’ objects can be viewed at the touring Museum of Broken Relationships, which anonymously displays the material ‘ruins’ of unhappy love. One such item is an axe used by a spurned lover in Berlin to chop the furniture of an ex-girlfriend into small fragments of wood. Delegates also described the ‘curse of the boyfriend jumper’, which holds that women should avoid investing time and effort in knitting for boyfriends before marriage, as the ‘sweater curse’ will lead to an untimely break up.

Our closing discussion saw delegates discussing what exactly an emotion is, as the subtleties and ambiguities of emotions can often be difficult to categorise. As William Reddy notes in his Navigation of Feeling, ‘Disagreements persist, uncertainties abound.’[2] It was recognised that certain objects in history were used to ‘fix’ or stir particular emotions, such as using romantic gifts to inspire love, or objects to apologise and avoid anger. In many cases the withholding of an object could be just as significant as bestowing it, with women in early modern Finland who had sex before marriage not permitted to wear bridal crowns. Delegates questioned whether the ability of objects to be personalised could be the key to their emotional capacity.

Certain objects were conspicuous in their absence, including monuments, drones, ships, railways and cars, in part due to conference papers ending c. 1900. The conference concluded with a discussion of the possibilities offered by digital humanities scholarship, as museums are increasingly putting huge volumes of their collections online.

To aid subsequent research, we have created a collaborative reading list of key texts on objects and emotions for future scholars. Podcasts of papers will soon be added to the Emotional Objects blog, where we are also creating an ‘archive’ of emotional objects in history.

Thank you to Den Gamle By, Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, Juan Manuel Zaragoza Bernal and the Museum of Broken Relationships for permission to reproduce the images in this post (which first appeared on the Emotional Objects blog).

Follow Sally on Twitter @sally_holloway

[1] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. I, trans. CK Scott Moncrieff (Ware; Wordsworth Editions, 2006), p. 61.

[2] William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions

(Cambridge, 2001), p. ix.

Can governments cultivate love in their citizens?

Posted on November 23, 2013 by

Should liberal governments try to cultivate certain emotional states in their citizens? This is the interesting contention of the latest book from Martha C. Nussbaum, the leading philosopher of the emotions. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Nussbaum argues that liberal political philosophers, from John Locke to John Rawls, have dangerously ignored ‘the political cultivation of emotion’, failing to explore how governments can encourage pro-social emotions like love, patriotism and tolerance, while curbing anti-social emotions like envy, shame and excessive fear.

There have been exceptions to this emotional illiteracy in liberal philosophers. Rousseau imagined a ‘civil religion’, which would fuse the people together in ecstatic worship of the state (his ideas bore fruit during the French Revolution in the bizarre Cult of Reason.) The social scientist Auguste Comte also developed his own eccentric ‘Positivist religion’ which he planned to impose on the citizenry in his ideal state.

But Nussbaum thinks any sort of imposed religion – theistic, civil or positivistic – is illiberal and probably doomed to failure. The state should not impose any ‘comprehensive theory of the good’ onto its populace. Nonetheless, she thinks it proper for a liberal state to encourage certain prosocial emotions as a foundation for political stability. Rational utilitarianism isn’t enough – we need a full-blooded ‘enthusiastic liberalism’.

Nussbaum is not alone in this desire for a more emotional politics. There has been a revival in the last two decades of Aristotle’s contention that it is the proper role of the state to encourage eudaimonia, or flourishing, in the citizenry. One finds this idea in a spate of books and articles on the politics of happiness, well-being and virtue over the last 20 years, by the likes of Richard Layard, Geoff Mulgan, Jeffrey Sachs, Derek Bok, Robert and Ed Skidelsky and others.

The Cult of Reason during the French Revolution

There has also been a growing interest in ‘political theology’, or the role of religion (whether theist or atheist) as an important cultivator of political emotions, in thinkers as diverse as Ronald Dworkin, Roberto Unger, Alasdair MacIntyre, Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Haidt, John Gray and Simon Critchley. The philosopher Alain de Botton has even started his own ‘religion for atheists’, while Lord Layard has launched a grassroots movement called Action for Happiness. There is a growing sense that liberal societies need more than rational skepticism, that we either need to return to religion (see the current popularity of the Pope and Archbishop Welby among political reformers) or to find some secular alternative.

Let’s say we accept the proposition that liberal societies are failing to promote the proper emotions, and this is threatening their long-term survival (this is a big claim, and Nussbaum does not do enough to back it up). Let’s say we accept her list of ‘good’ emotions and ‘bad emotions’ (are shame and envy necessarily bad for the polis? Protagoras and Adam Smith might disagree). The question remains: how can governments promote emotions in their citizens, without becoming cultish and totalitarian? What policy levers are available to the budding political psychologist, keen to promote certain emotional states in the citizenry?

Nussbaum rightly recognizes that if politicians really want to reach into the souls of their citizens and stir their emotions, they need the arts and humanities: symbols, metaphor, gesture, rhetoric, poetry, music, dance, monuments, architecture, festivals, pageantry, all the cultural apparatus that the Church wielded so expertly before the Reformation and Enlightenment tore it down as so much superfluous bunting.

With her usual critical acuity, she provides close readings of various works of art – the patriotic poetry of Whitman, the songs and dances of Rabindranath Tagore, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro – to show how deftly they cultivate pro-social emotions in the audience while never becoming fanatical. However, none of these works of art were ‘ordered’ by politicians. They arose spontaneously from the genius of their authors. Artistic genius is unpredictable, the muses tend to resist clumsy advances by politicians. So how can policy-makers directly work with the arts to try and cultivate political emotions? Don’t they have to leave artists alone to experiment?

Politicians can at least recognise that the arts play an important role – not just in earning money for the ‘creative economy’, but more profoundly in making us who we are, in shaping our emotions and national identity. Politicians can create conditions in which artistic talent is more likely to arise, and help to educate a populace to a level where it’s capable of responding to great art.

They can do this by encouraging the teaching of arts and humanities in schools and adult education, and by supporting artistic institutions and allowing them to take risks. Nussbaum looks to John Stuart Mill’s inaugural address to the University of St Andrews, in 1867, in which Mill highlights the importance of ‘aesthetic education’ in schools and universities as the foundation for a sympathetic, liberal ‘religion of humanity’. Nussbaum would also include dance classes in her ideal education, as they were in the Tagore school where her friend Amartya Sen grew up. I completely agree – Plato argued that dance has a central role in our emotional education, and it’s sad that schools give no little space to dance (or indeed, to sport).

A second policy tool available to the budding political psychologist is rhetoric. Nussbaum analyses the speeches of Martin Luther King, Churchill, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt to show how cleverly they cultivated the political emotions appropriate to the crises their countries faced. Today, by contrast, politicians speak in tweet-like soundbites. Should we send our leaders on creative writing courses? Or does the presidency of Barack Obama show that rhetorical prowess is no guarantee of successful government?

A third policy lever available to the political psychologist is urban planning (as another new book, Happy City, explores). Nussbaum provides clever readings of emotionally literate public spaces, such as Chicago’s Millennium Park and the Lincoln Memorial. However, the rising cost of living space (in London, particularly) arguably has a much bigger impact on people’s well-being than any park or monument.

Despite these examples, my abiding impression of Nussbaum’s book is of the disconnect between academic philosophy and the emotional lives of ordinary people, even with an unusually ‘public’ philosopher like Nussbaum. Her close readings of the Marriage of Figaro or the tragedies of Sophocles are interesting, but alas our citizenry is not as culturally sophisticated as the citizenry of fifth century Athens (we don’t have the luxury of a large slave population to support our leisure). Today, the main aesthetic influences on the public’s emotions are pop music, cinema and television. Yet these are strangely absent from Nussbaum’s cultural analysis (she doesn’t listen to pop and probably doesn’t watch television).

Robbie Williams performing at the Diamond Jubilee concert

Some philosophers have considered the cultural and emotional impact of pop culture – Roger Scruton in Modern Culture (2007), Carson Colloway in All Shook Up: Music, Passion and Politics (2001), Allan Bloom in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. But these philosophers cast the most cursory of glances at pop culture before dismissing it with a Platonic sneer as barbaric and infantile. This is a pity. The two most successful recent examples of art shaping our political emotions in this country were the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert in 2012 and the Olympic Opening Ceremony the same year. In both of them, pop music played a key role. For good or ill, TV has also profoundly shaped our national psyche, far more than any opera or monument.

Another strange absence from her book is any discussion of psychotherapy and psychiatry – two policy levers by which governments can influence their citizens’ emotions. Aldous Huxley imagined a state where the citizens were pacified through soma. Today, the NHS spends $2 billion annually on mood-altering chemicals, including 50 million prescriptions for anti-depressants. The government has also spent over half a billion pounds on talking therapy, particularly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, to try and reduce levels of depression and anxiety disorders in the population. CBT, as I’ve explored, was directly inspired by the Hellenistic philosophies that Nussbaum has done so much to revive, and is a way for many ordinary people to discover ancient philosophy.

Strangely, Nussbaum has never discussed CBT in her books, and has been very dismissive of Positive Psychology. She has made valid criticisms of Positive Psychology, which is overly fixated on optimism, and which some politicians have rather recklessly sought to impose on their populace. And yet for all their flaws, CBT and Positive Psychology have brought the ideas of Socratic philosophy to millions of people, which is more than can be said for any academic philosopher.

Nussbaum neglects to consider at any length the importance of religions to political emotions (again, for good and ill). She is rightly wary of governments imposing any particular religion onto its citizenry. Yet policy makers can still try to work with faith groups, as say the anti-slavery campaign and the Jubilee debt campaign did so successfully. As Jonathan Haidt has explored, if you really want to generate ‘enthusiasm’ in the populace, you will probably need to tap into areas of the mind usually reached by religion. It’s notable how many of the figures she celebrates are, in one way or another, religious: Whitman, Tagore, Gandhi, Luther King. We are moved by the sacred, which is a tricky thing for a secular liberal philosopher like Nussbaum.

Political Emotions is an important contribution to an already impressive body of work. Nussbaum has transformed modern philosophy, helping to re-connect it to the emotions, to psychology, to the arts, and to public policy. She has been a defining influence in the rise of the Neo-Aristotelian idea that philosophy, including political philosophy, can and should transform our emotions.

And yet Political Emotions is curiously unemotional, dense, and unlikely to get the pulse racing. It opens the way for ‘further research’ (that phrase beloved of academics) and for no doubt interesting papers, seminars, conferences and books by other academics on the political emotions. But can philosophers not merely discuss the public emotions, but actually affect them? Maybe so – but to do so, they will need to venture further beyond the safety of the Ivory Tower and into politics and popular culture.

Confessions of a Boy Murderer

Posted on November 4, 2013 by

Eleanor Betts is a PhD candidate at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, researching the history of children who killed in Victorian Britain. 

In 1892 a sixteen-year-old boy named John Wise joined his friends on an excursion to Weymouth. On reaching the chosen destination, a stone’s throw from Portland Prison positioned high on a rocky peak, the boy spun round and pushed Lawrence Salter off the cliff. At the coroner’s inquest into the boy’s death Wise explained his reason for committing murder. He simply said, ‘I did it to be hanged.’

When we are told that a person has committed murder we are quick to imagine reasons and motives in order to understand the crime. Perhaps the murder was committed out of revenge; we see that daily on television and in cinemas. Perhaps jealousy was the main cause, or maybe the killer was mad? A similar need to explain away violent crime could also be seen in Victorian England. The Manchester Times was quick to rationalise the murder committed by Wise, ‘the boy is either a shocking example of human depravity or he is insane.’ The article concluded that, ‘a boy murderer is such an awful creature that one is glad to be able to attribute the Weymouth tragedy to mental aberration.’

But how do killers rationalise their own crimes? What language do they use to understand and explain why they committed murder?

Much to my surprise I uncovered a number of written confessions by children who were charged with murder in nineteenth-century England. These sources were unexpected on a number of grounds, not least because every historian of childhood knows how rare it is to find testimonies actually written by a child, but also because the confessions were written in pencil on very flimsy paper. Quite how they survived I do not know, but thank goodness they did. I now have in my hand word-for-word explanations written by children who committed murder. So why did they do it?

From the few written confessions I have found there are a number of reasons children used to explain their crimes; employing the language of insanity, of passion, and of provocation. But perhaps the first explanation provided was no explanation at all, but rather a denial.

It was widely recognised in nineteenth-century England that children had a natural propensity to lie. Moral and educational literature designed for children promoted the motto that, ‘honesty is the best policy’ (E. Buttery, Advice to Boys, With a Poem Entitled Come to God (London, 1887), p. 2) and numerous works associated with the Child Study Movement of the 1890s recognised lying to be a natural characteristic of childhood. The fact that children lied in their confessions is not surprising, criminals deny their guilt all the time. It is the detail in the lies and the narratives that the children drew upon to validate their excuses that are notable. For example, in 1896 fifteen-year-old apprentice Christopher Hindle, charged with murdering the wife of his master, wrote as his confession, ‘I am innocent, that man did it.’ He contrived a story where a strange, ragged man broke into the house to commit the murder, but not before Hindle tried to stop him receiving wounds for his bravery. The boy was careful to use the knife he had killed the lady with to cut his own arm, leaving behind a trail of blood that made him look as innocent as he claimed. So why invent the ragged man? This is a story that appears in numerous confessions by children charged with murder. These children were drawing on the popular image of the ‘murderer’ that existed in the Victorian imagination; murderers were adult, male, ragged, and strangers to the victim. It was this image that lay behind the numerous press representation of Jack the Ripper in 1888.

The explanations provided in the written confessions of children who killed can therefore tell us a lot about the popular notions surrounding murder that existed in nineteenth-century England. In addition to the wandering, ragged, male monster, murderers were also assumed to be insane. Their monstrosity did not necessarily make them inhuman, it made them abnormal. As can be seen in the confession by John Wise, the boy drew heavily on narratives of insanity to understand his crime and to explain his actions to the coroner’s jury. He wrote, ‘I tried to grasp him but it was too late. I was then seized with a fit of laughing and putting my hands on my knees I laughed like an imbecile. Groom came up and said where is Salter and what have you done. A mad feeling came over me I tried to speak to Groom fire danced before my eyes and I fell down.’ Whether Wise knew it or not he employed notions of imbecility and fiery passion to explain his reasoning for pushing the boy off the cliff, if there was any reasoning involved in the crime at all. The jury were convinced by the confession and Wise was found to be guilty of the murder but insane. He spent the early years of his adult life in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Another explanation for murder that existed in the Victorian imagination was provocation. When two brothers were found guilty of murdering their father in 1890 the Victorian public flocked to their defence. Richard Davies, the older brother, explained in his confession that they committed the murder to save their mother and younger siblings from their abusive father. He wrote, ‘the cause we had for it was because he was such a bad father not to me exactly but to George and the rest, and a bad husband to mother, for mother and them have been very nearly starved sometimes, for he would neither but them coal for the fire or meat to eat when he was in a foul temper.’ The abuse suffered by the Davies family at the hands of the victim reduced the seriousness and monstrosity of the crime in the eyes of the Victorian public. They flocked to the boy’s defence, local and national newspapers filled with appeals to the Home Secretary to show mercy. The same compassion was not to be found in the Law. Although certain types of provocation were permissible in court, reducing a charge of murder to one of manslaughter, the Judge ruled that abuse was not one of them. In his summary to the jury he maintained that, ‘the counsel’s claims that the father drove the boys to it was no excuse for a crime such a murder’, and the two boys were sentenced to death. Richard was hanged.

So why have I shared these sources with you? Partly because I was so excited to find them that I thought they needed to be shared. It is not every day an historian of childhood finds themselves holding a piece of paper containing the scribbled scrawl of a child, let alone a child who was sitting in a condemned cell when he wrote it. But these written confessions are also interesting because they show how the Victorian public approached murder, how they sought to explain and understand why one human being could kill another. Children understand the world through what they see and hear; they parrot the adults around them. In analysing how children found the words to explain why they committed murder we are able to understand the place of murder in the Victorian popular imagination.

Follow Eleanor on Twitter: @BettsEleanor

 

What does psychedelic research tell us about the unconscious?

Posted on November 1, 2013 by

<When Dr Robin Carhart-Harris finished his masters in psychoanalysis in 2005, he decided he wanted to do a brain- imaging study of LSD to see if he could locate the ego and the unconscious. That might have seemed an impossible dream, considering he had no neuroscientific experience and there had been no scientific research into psychedelics in the UK for over three decades. And yet that’s precisely what Robin has done. We went to Imperial College’s experimental psychology department to meet the 33-year-old whizzkid of psychedelic research.

How did you get into psychedelic research?

It all started when I was studying psychoanalysis at Brunel University. I was in a seminar where the seminar leader raised the different methods for accessing the unconscious mind. It seemed as though the methods used by psychoanalysis were very limited – free association, dreaming, hypnosis, bungled actions, slips of the tongue. They never really convinced everyone.

So I thought if the unconscious is real, could drugs reveal it? I must have had psychedelics in mind. Then I found that there was a book by Stanislav Grof called Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, it was a light-bulb moment really. I realized there is all this literature from the 1950s and the 1960s, and the rationale was the drug lowered ego defences such that you could gain privileged access to the unconscious mind. Especially in the early days, that was the idea – that people on LSD might get spontaneous insights into memories or relationships that are causal of whatever symptoms they have. So that’s how my interest started.

What did that first phase of psychedelic research establish?

Unfortunately, I’d say it established nothing. To establish something, you need a robustly designed study, with outcomes that are valid and replicable. A lot of those ingredients were missing. It was certainly highlighting the unique potential of psychedelics.

How long did that phase of research last for, and why did it stop?

Was Timothy Leary responsible for the 30-year hiatus in psychedelic research?

The first English language paper on LSD was in 1950, that was by a couple of Americans. Then the 50s was a busy time, by 54, 55, there were a significant number of papers in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. It peaks around the late 50s. By the time we hit the 1960s, the drug has crossed over and is being used recreationally. So that’s the period of controversy, with negative media reports on LSD, and individuals like Timothy Leary becoming a kind of figurehead, and saying arguably irresponsible things.

I suppose it did have a huge cultural impact.

Yes. One way to look at it is that Timothy Leary’s loud mouth turned a lot of people on to LSD. However, it also turned off the legitimate scientific research.

Can you blame Leary alone?

It would be easy and unfair to blame one individual. People do. But it’s probably unfair. He was stoking the flames. People were saying ‘tread carefully, don’t spoil the party’. And his vision became something other than scientific research, it was about a social and psychological revolution. People were taking LSD without sufficient knowledge of its effects or sufficient caution. So LSD became illegal in 1967, and the illegality made it so much harder to do research.

But there was still some research in the 70s and 80s?

Not really. It’s just barren, in terms of high-end research. In the US and UK it entirely dried up.

When did it restart?

The first modern human study was I think in the mid 1990s, by an American researcher, Rick Strassman. He had a simple study where he gave people DMT (from ayahuasca) intravenously, and he reported on the effects. He had a larger grand theory, that DMT occurs spontaneously in the brain and is responsible for religious experiences. But the study was quite simple. What was odd was he didn’t really do many more studies after this.

But then Franz Vollenweider, who is a Swiss psychiatrist and pharmacologist, started doing research with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), and he did some interesting brain-imaging studies of the effects. People started to consider the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics again – there was an early study looking at the impact of psilocybin in OCD. And since then there’s been a psilocybin study for reducing anxiety in terminally ill patients.

Was that Roland Griffiths’ team at Johns Hopkins?

Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins Medical School

No that was Charles Grob at UCLA, although Roland is doing this too now. However, Roland Griffiths’ big papercame out in 2006, and he reported on giving high doses of psilocybin to healthy, psychedelically naive people, who’d never tripped before, and lo-and-behold, they had the experience of their lives. It was a very clever study, because it communicated to the man in the street, who doesn’t know anything about psychedelics, that these are drugs that can produce experiences that are among the most meaningful in your life, comparable to things like childbirth for example.

Has there been research on using psychedelics to treat alcoholism?

Yes, there is American research on using psilocybin to treat alcoholism. Some people have argued that perhaps the strongest evidence base for psychedelics is for LSD to treat alcohol dependence. There were a number of studies in the 60s, and some of their design wasn’t that bad. Outcome measures were improving. And with alcoholism, you have a more concrete measurement. A meta-analysis of the old research was carried out quite recently, and they looked at those studies which had the most rigorous methodology, and they found that the better-designed studies were showing good efficacy, comparable to the leading treatments today.

When did research start again in the UK?

I went to see David Nutt [former UK government drugs advisor] in 2004 / 2005. I was finishing my masters in psychoanalysis at Brunel, and wanted to do a PhD. I found a flyer on consciousness research, and contacted somebody who told me about David Nutt and Amanda Fielding at the Beckley Foundation. So I went to see both, and told them that my dream was to do a brain imaging study of LSD, and my hypothesis was that the psychedelic experience is like a REM experience, so you’re dreaming while awake. David said you have to walk before you can run – I didn’t have any experience in neuroscience at that stage – and I ended up doing a PhD on something vaguely related: MDMA, sleep and serotonin.

I still had these ambitions to do a brain imaging study about LSD. Amanda Fielding shared them – she runs a charity that does drug policy work and consciousness research, and after I’d finished my PhD, David said she had money to pay for a brain imaging study of psychedelics. At that point I designed the study of the effects of psilocybin.

Was that the first psychedelic research in the UK for a long time?

Yes it was. I don’t think there had ever been a published study on psilocybin in the UK.

How strange that no one else did a study in all that time.

Yes, it’s tricky to do.

Professor David Nutt of Imperial College

Why were you able to do it?

Because a number of critical ingredients came together, like David Nutt, an established pharmacologist at the top of the tree; and an independent philanthropist funder, because mainstream funders wouldn’t fund it; and then I guess a young researcher who had the energy.

Tell me about the study.

We gave psilocybin intravenously to people, so the effects are almost instantaneous and will last 45 minutes, rather than five hours. Rick Strassman referred to such trips as a ‘businessman’s trip’. Then we did an fMRI scan of their brains. And that’s when we saw a decrease in blood flow to certain parts of the brain. That was a bit of a revelation, as no one had ever shown that before. Some people had shown the opposite. So it was a bit of a head scratcher. We spent a good duration of time checking our results. But then we replicated what we found using a different modality – again an fMRI measure – and we again found drops in the fMRI signal after we infused the drug, in a particular area.

The decreases were in regions of the brain that have very dense connections – they’re like hubs in the network, centres of high interconnectivity. It was these regions that were showing the largest decreases. That got us thinking, when you have decreases in centres of information-integration, what happens to the system. The natural inference was, you’d have a more chaotic system that operates in a less organized and constrained way.

Do you see similar kind of activity during REM sleep?

Make room for the mushrooms

You see decreased blood-flow in association cortices at least posteriorly, so yes, you seem some correlation. So it’s possible that if these association regions have a constraining influence on other regions in the brain, that you may take the lid off the system and cause some dis-inhibition in other areas. In fact, that’s one of our most recent findings – there are regions that show elevated or at least more erratic activity after psilocybin. And the regions that show the increase in signal amplitude are particular subcortical regions like the hippocampus. And in REM sleep, brain imaging has also found increased activity in the hippocampus and the limbic region.

Which are more associated with memory and emotion?

Yes, exactly.

What’s your hypothesis of what’s happening?

It brings me back full circle to the Freudian model. It’s no coincidence that one of the most common descriptions you associate with psychedelic experience is ego disintegration. When people talk about ego disintegration, it isn’t cliquey Freudians smoking their cigars, it’s psychonaut kids.

The brain-scans from Robin’s study

So what does that mean at a physical and biological level? The networks that are the strongest candidates for the sense of self and the personality are precisely those that are ‘knocked out’, for want of a better word, under psychedelics. The puzzle is starting to fit quite neatly in my mind. If you’re decreasing the function in this particular network, then I offer the explanation that it’s a correlate of ego disintegration. In a further study using MEG – which measures brain waves – when we looked in one of the regions that showed the marked decrease in oscillatory power, its magnitude correlated positively with a subjective rating scale of ego disintegration (people were asked ‘Did you experience ego disintegration?’ and people answered on a scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘very much’.) Those who rated that very highly also had the biggest decreases in oscillatory power in this region which is part of the self network – the posterior cingulate cortex.

The unconscious that people seem to discover through psychedelic experience – is it closer to the Jungian unconscious than the Freudian model? People don’t seem to go into a savage Freudian jungle where they have sex with their mother and kill their father. It seems more like the Jungian wonderland – a more positive model of the unconscious, where people encounter not just dissolution and monsters, but some bigger cosmic Self.

Is the unconscious revealed by psychedelics more Freudian or Jungian?

I agree. Freud’s great merit was his mechanistic approach, he talks about systems – the ego system and the unconscious or id system. However, when he came to describe the quality of what the unconscious is, what you see under psychedelics isn’t really that, as you say it’s more consistent with Jung’s description of the unconscious. It’s tricky, because potentially at low doses, it may be more subtle, interpersonal insights and one’s self and relationships, whereas when the dose is higher, things might start becoming more archetypal, and be more about the history of the human animal.

What are the effects of psychedelics on memory? Freud suggested (like Wordsworth or De Quincey) that we never fully forget anything, experiences are always there in the unconscious. Do psychedelics unlock those memories?

You’ll find this in the literature – there are reports of vivid recollection. You sometimes see age regressions, people go back to being a child. Or they go back to what Stanislav Grof called ‘systems of condensed experience’ – experiences of particular salience and personal importance that the mind will go back to, and which you can sometimes re-live. This tends to happen spontaneously. It may happen when the drug is given orally rather than intravenously. A tricky issue is that when you give psychedelics, people seem to become hyper-suggestible. So there’s the question of whether this spontaneously occurs or if it’s being suggested to them.

Can psychedelic experiences be healing for people, and if so how?

Psychedelic experiences may be able to loosen very fixed negative schemas, or world-views

Yes. There are a couple of different models. There is an idea that psychedelics can allow personal insights – if one has a disorder or some symptoms of depression or anxiety, you might experience facilitated insight into the causes of these symptoms. That’s the classic idea of psychedelics to assist psychoanalytic therapy. Other models are more pragmatic – if, under the drugs, you induce a plastic state where people are hyper-suggestible, you might have a window of opportunity where you can address fixed behaviours which probably rest on fixed connections in the brain. For instance, with depression you might have a patient who is stubbornly pessimistic. What if you give them a psychedelic drug where all of a sudden you allow them to think differently and more fluidly. You might be able to start working with their cognitive biases and to get them to question their fixed schema about who they are.

Can you do that sort of CBT approach while someone is tripping?

I don’t think you could do it while someone is in the throes of a profound hallucinogenic experience. But it does loosen people up. What Roland Griffiths says is that often the most important work happens after the experience – it increases openness to new associations.

To what extent do people have spiritual experiences on psychedelics?

The literature is rich in reports of spiritual experiences. In our own work with psilocybin, we haven’t seen it to an impressive extent, maybe because the experience is short-lived, maybe because it’s not our participants’ first time tripping, so it perhaps is less new and revelatory.

You get people like Terrence McKenna who suggest you’re not encountering something within, but also something ‘out there’ – spirits, God etc. I’m interested if people are encountering similar things out there.

Alien visions could be a memory of the mother from infancy

Well, there is the collective unconscious, so if they experience similar entities, it might be appealing to a collective aspect of the unconscious which is about entity. Maybe it has a maternal presence. Also the wide eyes that people report around extra-terrestrials – Jung wrote about this, and suggested it might be related to memories of the mother looking down with big eyes. I find that appealing. For a materialist scientist, I don’t believe the theory that people gain access to a metaphysical or spiritual realm, I think what they have access to is the vastness of the human mind, which includes their entire history – which isn’t just human. It’s very easy to become less than objective, to believe that things are really happening, that the walls are breathing…but they’re not.

Still, I wonder if the beauty and healing of those experiences change one’s view of the unconscious – if you open up and let go of control, it can be a positive experience.

That’s probably true. My view of human nature has been changed not just through my limited research but through reading the psychedelic literature. But one thing I would say – when Freud wrote about the unconscious, one thing he emphasized is there’s no right and wrong in the unconscious. That’s why people get the ability to experience contradictory things simultaneously, like heaven and hell.

Have there been any studies of people tripping together?

Yes, I think so, in the fifties. I’d be skeptical of that sort of work, way too many confounds.

Usually people do it collectively – I’m just thinking of the setting of studies now, people on their own in hospitals.

It’s an interesting thought, it’s difficult to know what you’d infer. I recall a study where people are not talking, they’re looking each other, trying to communicate telepathically. And post-experience, they compared notes, and found they weren’t thinking about the same thing at all.

Yes, exactly, it would be interesting to test out whether people’s feeling that their minds somehow get entangled or extended is really true. But I guess mixing psychedelic research with paranormal research might be a step too far for most funders!

There are a lot of people interested in psychedelics within the research realm who are interested in that. They’ll tell you they’re skeptics, but I know they’d be very happy to find evidence of that. Of course, it would be a momentous discovery. My concern is that there’s a very strong potential for a bias around the fact that we get excited by the prospect of a complete paradigm shift. It’s a very seductive possibility, and it can cloud reason.

So it’s still difficult to get government approval for psychedelic research. What would you like to see changed?

It would be nice if they based their policy decisions on scientific evidence, and if they gave that primary consideration rather than secondary. Now they try and fit scientific data into their policies. Also it seems as though it’s relatively unproblematic to have these drugs as Schedule 1 – the idea is that shouldn’t affect research. You need a Home Office license to store and administer these drugs. The reality is these licenses are very expensive. Funders aren’t willing to pay for it. And they take a long time to set up – over a year. And there are more and more controls on the license. Things that should be relatively easy, like transferring a drug from one centre that has a license to another centre that has a license, are incredibly difficult. It’s harming the research. If this is a particularly exciting area of research, with huge potential, then these bureaucratic burdens will hold us back and handicap us.

And what, in a nutshell, is the potential?

To discover exciting things about consciousness and the brain, and to explore a truly novel therapeutic approach.

So do you think there could be psychedelic treatments of things like depression and alcoholism?

If the evidence supports it, it would be unethical not to pursue them.

There was a recent meta-study suggesting there are no harmful impacts from psychedelics. Do you really think that’s true? It doesn’t seem to be in my experience and among my friends.

I’d have to read the paper. I think it’s the same team that did the meta-analysis on LSD and alcoholism. Other meta-analysis which have looked at the potential for harm, and also surveys we’ve run, and also meta-analysis of modern research, suggests that these drugs are certainly not without potential risks. However, the risks of adverse effects are relatively small, especially compared with other drugs. It’s a tricky one, which is difficult to summarise. There are certainly potential harms.

If we think they are dissolving the ego…

You have to ask why the ego is there at all.

And if people resist that dissolution, that might freak people out.

Exactly. That may be what ‘freaking out’ is – if people hold on to their ego while it’s dissolving, that could feel like dying.

Lunchtime seminars in 2013

Posted on October 29, 2013 by

We are delighted to announce details of our lunchtime seminars this term. Both seminars start at 1.00pm; speakers will present on their research for 25-30 minutes with time afterwards for informal discussion. Lunch is provided. The seminars are free to attend, but please email Jennifer Wallis to reserve your place. Seminars are held in the Senior Common Room on the 4th floor of Arts Two (building 35 on this map).

Thursday 21st November. Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores University), ‘Convict Tattoos: An Intimate Reading’.

On arrival in the penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land, convict exiles were grilled about their offending histories, occupations and family ties while their bodies were inspected for distinguishing characteristics. The resulting convict indents thus preserved the penal state’s biographical record on each offender with snatches of their responses to interrogation. Unwittingly, however, the authorities also captured an alternative form of personal testimony by transcribing the tattoos with which many convicts had adorned their bodies. This paper proposes a method of ‘intimate reading’ using multiple record linkage to decode the symbolic and emotional worlds of the convicted via their tattoos. Immersive reading of this kind can help us reconstruct the agency and sensibility of those who have left few traces of personal testimony but whose behaviour was captured in abstract information garnered by officialdom. The paper focuses on convict men sentenced at Great Yarmouth in the 1830s and 1840s, and argues their elaborate tattoos spectacularly depicted the men they felt themselves to be. As in the sign of the Hope and Anchor that many convicts wore, tattoos anchored the Yarmouth men in the life they had known – their loved ones, trade, sports and passions – as they entered an unknown land.

Thursday 5th December. Carolyn Pedwell (Newcastle University; AHRC Visiting Fellow at QMUL), ‘Circuits of Feeling in The Age of Empathy’.

With the rise of the ‘science of empathy’ in the wake of the discovery of mirror neurons, we have seen a veritable return to biology, ethology, neuroscience, genetics and various evolutionary theories to explain not only empathic circuits of feeling within the human body, but also the emotional politics of contemporary societies internationally. This paper grapples with the implications of the multiple layers of translation involved in politicising the science of empathy. Through a critical reading of the leading primatologist Frans de Waal’s bestselling book, The Age of Empathy (2010), I explore how the translation of scholarly scientific research on empathy into the language of popular science often involves establishing links between the biological workings of the individual organism and the health of the body politic. While authors like de Waal aim to keep biology separate from ideology, culture and politics, their own scientific claims work to support a political vision premised on a version of empathy that correlates with neoliberal capitalism’s demand for an enterprising and emotionally adaptable citizenry animated by self-interest and self-responsibility. As the paper argues, however, this is not the only possible or plausible translation of science of empathy. I explore how the circuits of feeling de Waal describes might be interpreted in ways that contest, rather than uphold, biological essentialism and disrupt, instead of solidify, the oppressive logics of contemporary forms of neoliberal governmentality. Indeed, when read against the grain, particular strands of contemporary neuroscience and ethology might productively complement critical cultural, political and psychoanalytic analyses of emotion and affect, contributing to a framework for conceptualising affective translation that is critically attuned to the links between empathy, materiality and power transnationally.