The varieties of spiritual experience

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Jules Evans

I’ve just re-read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, which he gave as a series of lectures in 1902. It is a marvelous book, in which James attempts to take a pragmatic and empirical approach to religious experiences, remaining open to the question of where such experiences come from, and evaluating them by looking at their impact on people’s lives. In other words, he looks at the fruits, not the roots, of religious experience.

It’s a pivotal book for my own research. I’m trying to make sense of revelatory experiences, those strange moments when one feels communicated to by some Other, through voices, dreams, visions, intuitions etc. I want to know if we can hold such experiences to critical, rational account, because it seems to me that such experiences can sometimes lead to flourishing, while other times they clearly don’t.

At present, psychiatry more or less entirely pathologises such experiences as ‘psychosis-like symptoms’ and fails to see the positive in them. So it seems to me that western psychology and psychiatry need to return to William James to try to rehabilitate such ‘out-of-the-ordinary experiences’. This is already beginning to happen – this study by a team at KCL led by Emmanuelle Peters, for example, found that such ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ experiences are quite common, and that people who are hospitalised for admitting such experiences typically have a worse outcome than people who find a supportive community like the Hearing Voices Network to help them make sense of and integrate such experiences. Eleanor Longden also has a fascinating story to tell about how she recovered from psychosis by learning to talk calmly to her voices.

James’ work is not perfect by any means but it provides a brilliant platform for a new contemporary exploration of spiritual experience. Let me outline five aspects of his definition of religious experience – four problems with it, and one brilliant aspect of it – before seeing if we can find an updated definition of spirituality.

1) James rightly connects religious experience to the unconscious

This is what I think is really wonderful about James’ approach. It’s where he was a huge inspiration to Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and later religious innovators. He declares that the great revolution of psychology is the discovery of various levels of the self, including ‘whole systems of underground life’ beneath ‘consciousness of the ordinary field’. He says: ‘we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans-marginal or subliminal region.’ That is why so many religious leaders were subject to ‘automatisms’ like trances, visions, voices and hallucinations.

James brilliantly analyses conversion experiences with reference to these unconscious levels of the self. New emotions, new beliefs, new attitudes and habits may build up beneath our everyday consciousness, he says, and then suddenly break out into our consciousness in moments of hot excitement. A new self is born, as our personality coalesces around a new centre. What was merely thought before is now known and felt.

James, like Jung, thinks religious traditions are a useful guide to the underworld of our unconscious

Because such apparently sudden transformations come from the unconscious, it may feel to us as if they come from an external power, something separate and bigger than our conscious everyday self, which we call God. James leaves open the question of whether God is in that broader Self or not. He says: ‘IF THERE BE higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so MIGHT BE our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them.’ Some pioneering psychologists, like James, Jung, and Frederick Myers, believed in a higher power or spirit which communicates to us through the unconscious, while others, like Charcot and Freud, didn’t.

It’s interesting to think of conversions in charismatic church services as something akin to electro-shock therapy – they heat up the self, softening its rigid habits through intense emotional excitation, and then zapping it into a new configuration, new habits, a new centre in God. Drug experiences likewise involve a sudden dilation of the self and an opening up to new levels, and they can also involve sudden conversions or switches into new configurations (the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, was saved from alcoholism by a religious vision while on psychedelic drugs).

2) James mistakenly defines religious experience purely in terms of emotions, and disregards beliefs, dogma and daily practice

James defines religion as a series of passionate experiences. His book explores the most emotional moments in the religious life – moments of mystic expansion, dark nights of the soul, blissful moments of conversion and reconciliation to the Divine. He dismisses theology as utterly secondary to these hot moments of religious passion.

Beliefs, philosophy and theology are trellises around which the sapling of our spirituality can grow

The problem with this approach is that emotions always contain beliefs – even if the beliefs are as basic as ‘God loves me’ or ‘things will be OK’. After such moments have passed we are faced with the task of making sense of them, and turning them into a coherent daily practice, which probably involves turning to older authorities (including written authorities like scripture) to try to cobble together some sort of philosophy or theology as a trellis around which the sapling of our spirituality grows.

Defining religion by focusing entirely on peak (or trough) experiences is like defining marriage by focusing on the experience of falling in love. We should remember that James never himself joined a religion and remained a sort of dilettante in such matters – he’s more interested in religious experiences than the daily religious life. His approach is entirely modern, it seems to me: these days, many of us have occasional spiritual experiences (whether we interpret them as supernatural or natural), but we fail to integrate them into a coherent philosophy or daily practice.

3) James oddly defines religious experience as solitary

Religio means ‘to bind together’

His definition of religion as the experiences of ‘individual men in their solitude’ betrays ‘an almost comical Protestant bias’, as Wayne Proudfoot puts it. Religion comes from religio, meaning ‘to bind together’, and many of people’s religious experiences are collective experiences – praying for each other, healing each other, singing or dancing together, worshipping together, discussing scripture or philosophy together, and so on. James make the opposite mistake to Emile Durkheim, who focuses entirely on the communal aspects of religion and its function as the glue for social cohesion. Durkheim (and, recently, Jonathan Haidt) ignores the solitary, individualistic and socially disruptive aspect of religious experience, while James ignores the communal, cohesive aspects of religious experience. A better approach would take both aspects into account.

4) James problematically tries to evaluate religious experiences pragmatically, in terms of whether it leads to human flourishing

James tries to reconcile religion to empirical pragmatism, by looking at its impact on people’s lives. He tries to assess it, in other words, by asking if it leads to human flourishing or not. Does it make a person happy and healthy, does it lead to socially useful things like charitable activity, loving community or great art?

He decides that, basically, religious experience does lead to a lot of human flourishing. He highlights all the healing that religious experiences can cause, looking in particular at the Mind Cure moment, which was a big thing at the beginning of the 20th century. He looks at instances of conversion helping people to kick bad habits like addiction He looks at asceticism, how it has helped inspire people to endure hardships. And he looks at how revelatory experiences have inspired people to new heights of charity, expanding our sense of love for our fellow beings and helping to create a more humane world.

He also looks at some of the more poisonous fruit that religious experience can lead to: excesses of asceticism and self-mortification, or excesses of other-worldly devotion to God. He decides that we need, in an Aristotelian sense, to be moderate in our religious passions, and to use our practical discernment or ‘common sense’ to make sense of such experiences and to decide if a message from God / the subliminal Self should be followed or not.

I am broadly in agreement with this pragmatic approach to religious experience. Revelations need to be held to rational account and to social account. The pastor Pete Greig spoke recently of a friend of his who was in a terrible relationship, and then one day in the bath he heard a voice saying he should marry his girlfriend. His friends, including Pete Greig, thought this was clearly a terrible idea, but the guy decided this was a message from God and must be obeyed. The marriage lasted about a year. I have a friend who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, who hears voices that give him commands, including that he must always walk on the outside of parking meters. We need to be able to hold messages from the Other to account, as they may not be from God.

But there are two problems with this pragmatic approach. Firstly, James is too generous in his assessment of the fruits of religious experience – religious experience leads to much more poisonous fruits than merely excesses of asceticism, such as violence, demonization of people different to us, pogroms, even genocide. James dismisses this by focusing on individual experiences rather than collective or corporate experiences, and says blithely that evil things like pogroms are really evils of our tribal nature and shouldn’t be lain at the door of religion. But that’s letting religion off too easily. Such evils should be lain at the door of our unconscious – there are dragons down there, as well as treasures, and religions have a historical record of releasing the dragons. Atheist philosophies may also tap into such ‘religious emotions’, such as the millenarian hope for a perfect tomorrow, by the way, and may also ‘inspire’ people to kill others in pursuit of that utopia.

Secondly, while I broadly agree that we should hold revelations to rational account, it’s also the case that sometimes revelations fly in the face of common sense. For example, James says that one of the fruits of saintliness is a sort of reckless charity that seems stupid at the time but which is vindicated through its salutary effect on human history and culture. How would Jesus’ message hold up to the ‘common sense’ of the time? Or Socrates? The point about revelations is that they are often the eruption of something radically new and scandalous. They don’t necessarily fit with common sense – they may challenge it. As John Wimber, pioneer of the Vineyard church movement, put it: ‘If there is ever a choice between the smart thing to do and the move of the Holy Spirit, I will always land on the side of the Spirit.’

Was Abraham wrong to obey God’s command?

James’ pragmatic approach to religion needs to grapple with Kierkegaard, who pointed to the story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate the essential irrationality of religious faith. If God told us to kill someone, should we obey Him? I personally think that James is right and Kierkegaard is wrong: Abraham should not have obeyed God. This is not a purely theological question, by the way – people suffering from paranoid psychosis often hear voices telling them to kill other people. We need to find a way to reason with the commands that come from our unconscious self, and not be fundamentalist in our relationship to them.

5) James wrongly tries to separate religious experiences from similar but non-theistic experiences

James defines religious experiences as experiences of man in relation to ‘whatever they consider divine’, and further defines that as a belief in an unseen metaphysical order with which we can have a relationship. However, people have experiences very similar to those he describes – feelings of expansion, awe, wonder, surrender, ecstasy – without believing in an unseen moral order or Almighty Being.

To take five examples of such ‘non-supernatural spiritual experiences’:

The Rothko chapel

a) Art: Jesse Prinz has discussed how art makes him feel ‘wonder’, how he goes on ‘pilgrimages’ to cathedral-like galleries and feels expanded; likewise, Brian Eno has spoken of how music creates a feeling of surrender similar to religious ecstasy; the music journalist Peter Guralnick has brilliantly described soul music as ‘secular ecstasy’. I’ve written about dance music, and the experience of dancing together, as a spiritual experience. Clearly, as Roger Scruton has discussed, art gives us access to emotional experiences which people used to feel mainly through religion.

b) Sex: James tries to dismiss the Freudian suggestion that religious experiences are really sublimated sexual experiences. He counters that religious experiences ‘have nothing to do with’ sex. But that’s clearly not true – just this Sunday I heard a lady at church having an encounter with Jesus that sounded very much like an orgasm. Religious ecstasy is not the same as sexual ecstasy, but they are similar. Our love-lives likewise involve sudden conversions, sudden expansions into new worlds, and ecstatic surrender to the Other. DH Lawrence beautifully described this sort of sudden unfolding into new selves through sexual experience in books like The Rainbow, which for me was a very important book in my nascent spirituality.

Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog

c) Nature: James examines moments where people feel close to God in Nature, like Emerson or Thoreau in their forests feeling connected to the Over-Soul. But people can also have intense experiences of awe and wonder in nature without believing in God. Atheists might argue that watching a David Attenborough documentary, or Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, is a spiritual experience, or they might feel a sense of peace and awe while trekking or sailing. Epicureans would say that star-gazing is a sort of spiritual exercise for them, although they were materialists. A lot of the popularity of walking books like Ross MacFarlane’s The Old Ways come from people’s desire for spiritual experiences in nature – whether they believe in God or not.

d) Sport: In discussing the unconscious, James talks about those moments when a player switches from his conscious everyday self to a more unconscious level and ‘the game is played through him’. Modern psychologists would call that flow. It can feel wonderful and spiritual. A famous instance of such a moment is Liliam Thuram scoring two goals in the World Cup Semi-Final, a game he has no memory of playing. The coach of the French team says he was in ‘some mystical state’. More broadly, playing sport and supporting a team gives us a sense of collective endeavour in which we’re lifted out of the individual self and surrender to a collective identity. Playing together, we feel passionately connected to our team-mates. We also go through dark nights of the soul (i.e English football in the last 40 years) and moments of ecstatic deliverance (ie British tennis in the last year).

e) War: As Chris Hedges has written, war is a force that gives us meaning. It’s dark to admit it, but many people find war a spiritual experience – they’re lifted out of their individual self and surrender to a collective identity, they feel passionately fused to their comrades, even mystically connected to them like hunters in a pack. They get a deep sense of heroism and righteousness from their sacrifice. But, like drug experiences, war can also wound us at profound levels of our consciousness, and reset our personalities in new and darker configurations.

f) Drugs: As James explores in the Varieties, drugs take us beyond ordinary consciousness and open doors to deeper levels of consciousness. He says: ‘I know of more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation’, and if he’d lived longer he’d no doubt have written interestingly on psychedelic experiences, as Aldous Huxley would do. As Sam Harris has recently insisted, we may have very ‘spiritual’ experiences on LSD, MDMA, DMT or other drugs, without believing in a higher power or invisible moral order.

So we need to broaden the investigation of such experiences and recognise that one can have spiritual experiences without believing in ‘the Divine’.

6) Towards a better definition of spiritual experience

Here’s my attempt towards a better and more comprehensive definition of spiritual experience, which can incorporate both materialist and animist conceptions.

a) Spiritual experience involves an expansion beyond the confines of ordinary consciousness, into a broader Self, a dilated Self, in which the walls between deeper levels of consciousness become porous.

b) Spirituality typically involves an optimism that, although there are dragons in the unconscious, there are also treasures. The treasures of the unconscious include healing power, imagination, and moral sentiments like wonder, awe and ecstasy. If you’re materialist, you can understand the healing power as being the power of suggestion and hypnosis.

c) Our encounters with these deeper levels of the Self are mediated and shaped by beliefs and culture. Religious traditions, and religious beliefs, practices, art and institutions, are storehouses for explorations of this broader Self, and they shape our experiences in different ways. There are toxic aspects to just about every religious tradition, moments when the dragons of the unconscious take charge and lead to intolerance and violence. Nonetheless, religious traditions can also lead us to the treasures of the unconscious. These traditions are there to be used, like Virgil in the Divine Comedy, as guides to the underworld. But they have to be used skillfully.

d) Our broader Selves are connected to one another, and in moments of spiritual dilation we have a deeper sense of this interconnection with others. You can interpret this connection naturalistically – as a intuitive sympathy that can arise between people (between musicians when improvising or team-mates playing sport for example) – and put forward an evolutionary explanation for it as an adaptation that improved hunting and social bonding. Or you can interpret it in animist terms, as William James or Rupert Sheldrake do: we are connected to one another through non-material networks of sympathetic consciousness, which is why prayer works, and why a prophetic word for one person can come to another person.

Theists would then go one further and say

e) Our broader Selves are connected to God, and draw their power from God, and within our broader Selves is an immortal soul.

At which point of course materialists and animists part company. But there are still many steps on which I hope materialists and animists can agree.

In the meantime, here is a song I wrote a few years back, exploring some of these same questions of the difficulty of knowing if a message from ‘beyond’ is from God, the Devil, aliens, the Unconscious or what-have-you. It’s called Messengers.

Depression: A Public Feeling

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Sarah Crook

Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: a Public Feeling. (Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2012).

Reviewed by Sarah Crook.

Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: a Public Feeling forms a part of a broader project under way in the United States around the rubric of ‘Public Feelings’. The Public Feelings project, which developed in the early 2000s, has sought to navigate and understand the emotional dynamics of contemporary life within the political and power structures from which they emerge. Public Feelings configures emotions as both a subject of analysis and as a methodological tool. Within this intellectual context, Cvetkovich seeks to explore ways of writing about depression that move away from medical conceptualisations towards a model of depression as a cultural and political phenomenon – a mode of disillusionment and discontent that reflects, and is produced by, the shape and textures of contemporary society and late capitalism. Rather than a disease that plagues the individual, this positions depression as a political and social feeling.

Depression: a Public Feeling takes the form of a combination of memoir and critical essay. Cvetkovich articulates the problems wrought by combining these two forms of writing, and in particular the shift required for an academic to contribute to the memoir genre (Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.) She reflects that she committed to the memoir as a way of ‘figuring out what memoir can do for public discourse’, rather than participating in its deconstruction and critique. The decision was wise: the memoir section of the text is rich in its sensibilities, and is ultimately uplifting without being trite. In particular, her account of her depression offers the neat example of how small acts of self-care, such as visiting the dentist, can counteract the condition’s paralyzing effects. Such acts of self-preservation allowed Cvetkovich to take some ownership – even whilst surrendering control – of her life and wellbeing. Unlike other contributions to the field, her memoir is not (primarily) an account of the effects of pharmacological treatment. Although Cvetkovich does write about her experiences of taking medication (and attempting therapy, although she concludes that ‘the dentist was ultimately of more use to me than the therapists’), she is more interested in how forces outside the cultural and medical mainstream can destabilize our understanding of the condition.

How depression as a public feeling might be shaped and challenged by cultural forces is the subject of the second half the text. Here, Cvetkovich draws on queer theory, and explores how histories of oppression have shaped the experience of emotional distress. There was, perhaps, a missed opportunity here to discuss how the recent economic depression has impacted the articulation of emotional depression, and how economic structures exacerbate affective experiences. However, the section on the legacies of colonialism, genocide and oppression is fruitful. Cvetkovich claims in the introduction that ‘Depression, or alternative accounts of what gets called depression, is thus a way to describe neoliberalism or globalization, or the current state of political economy, in affective terms’, and the chapter on racism goes some way towards offering a vision of how this might be carried out. This chapter sees Cvetkovich draw on a critical reading and reinterpretation of a number of books that explore the legacies of racial discrimination. However, a fuller analysis of how racial and structural inequalities impact on the emotional lives of the white population would have been welcome here, given Cvetkovich’s own racial and socio-economic profile and the privileges made apparent in the text’s memoir section.

In the final section of the text this problem of privilege is made clear. Cvetkovich finds respite from her depression in spiritual practice, ‘a version of the utopia of ordinary habits’, which transforms rituals into forms of embodiment or through creative enterprise. This, she acknowledges, may be problematic for those sceptical of spiritual or quasi-religious language, and indeed I remained unconvinced. Her detailed excursion into the emotional and cultural potentialities of crafting, whilst allowing the text itself to be enhanced with some fascinating and lovely images of installation art, fell a little short of proposing the radical alternative model of cultural engagement with depression that the text seemed to demand. Despite this, however, the text successfully formulates a new way of writing about depression and should prompt some introspection from those within academia about the value of combining critical literature with personal accounts of emotional experiences. Certainly there should be alternatives to the medical model of depression: Cvetkovich’s contribution is to be warmly welcomed and discussed.

Sarah Crook is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London within the Centre for the History of the Emotions. Her research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, explores maternal distress from the mid to late twentieth century in Britain. She is co-convener of the History of Feminism Network and tweets at @SarahRoseCrook.

Bernd Bösel on the history and philosophy of enthusiasm

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Jules Evans

Bernd Bösel is a philosopher and scholar with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who has explored the idea of enthusiasm in the history of ideas, in his book Philosophie und Enthusiasmus. I met Bernd for an enthusiastic caffeine-fueled conversation to find out why philosophers are so anti-enthusiasm. Was the experience of ecstasy marginalized and pathologized during the Enlightenment? What forms does enthusiasm take today?

How did you become interested in enthusiasm?

I was missing in philosophy elaborate references to ecstasy and enthusiasm and to positive emotions and high feeling states. It seemed to me that phenomenology and existentialism were more concerned with negative states, like fear, anxiety, angst and nausea.

Kierkegaard, for example, spoke a little about passion and enthusiasm, but he insists that real philosophical inspiration comes from being distressed and in despair, from those moments when you feel separated from society and everything worldly. When you’re that depressed, you only have one chance left, which is the leap of faith – a sort of enthusiastic state.

But he never really talks about the ecstatic joy of union with God.

No, because then you’d be expecting or hoping for that joy, which would be inauthentic. He’s more interested in the absence than the presence of God, like a lot of continental philosophers.

How about Heidegger – isn’t there a more positive sense of the possibility of unity with Being in his philosophy?

Karl Jaspers – somewhat enthusiastic

He also says you have to be melancholic to be philosophical. I criticized him for this in my writing, because it’s not even consistent with his more general remarks on what he calls “basic moods”. It’s rather a repetition of the traditional linkage between deep thinking and feeling despondent. But there are some other more enthusiastic voices in modern philosophy, even within existentialism. Karl Jaspers, for example, has a chapter on the enthusiastic attitude in his Psychology of World-Views. That’s a very influential book.

So modern philosophy is on the whole silent, or negative, on the idea of enthusiasm. But you can find more positive references to enthusiasm in ancient philosophy?

Yes. It’s there in Plato and indirectly also in Aristotle. In Plato’s Ion, he discusses the inspiration of rhapsodists. Socrates mocks rhapsodists [poets] for not knowing what they’re doing, for being lost in enthusiasm, which Socrates compares unfavourably to episteme, knowledge, and techne, or technique, both of which can be consciously taught and learned.

Then in Phaedrus Plato discusses enthusiasmos at length. The word comes from entheos, meaning ‘the god within’. In that dialogue, Socrates suggests there are four types of enthusiasm or ‘holy madness’ – from Apollo, prophecy; from Dionysus, the mystic rites; from the Muses, poetry and science; and from Eros and Aphrodite, the madness of love. In that dialogue, Socrates goes into a sort of enthusiasm himself, and delivers this visionary speech in which he defends the experience, but he says that afterwards you need to get sober.

So Plato doesn’t talk about the idea of enthusiasm in politics?

Not in that dialogue, although Aristotle and his students thought about it. Aristotelians positioned enthusiasm within the theory of the humours, connecting it to melancholy, as the flipside of melancholy. It is all a matter of black bile, basically. Melancholics have an excess of it. But it the black bile is in the right condition – not too warm, not too cold – then they get into creative states that enable them to do extraordinary things. One of Aristotle’s students, probably Theophrastus, famously asks in the book Problemata why so many great philosophers, artists, poets and politicians are melancholics – so there’s an idea that great statesmen are also melancholic-enthusiastic.

So the ancients had some positive conceptions of enthusiasm. What about in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages?

There are very few positive references to ecstatic states in medieval medical theories. The connection between melancholy and enthusiasm is lost, and for a long time, a whole millenium basically, melancholy is just a problem, especially for Christian monks who are looking for God but often ended up with depression.

The ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila

But perhaps it survived in popular religion? Think of St Francis, preaching to the birds or stripping his clothes off in the marketplace.

Roman Catholicism had a great problem with the idea of enthusiasm – it’s the suggestion you can make direct contact with God, unmediated by the Church.

Yes. And when ecstatic figures and movements arise, it goes one of two ways – either the Church canonizes them, or burns them.

There are some scholars who have explored witchcraft in the late Middle Ages, and have suggested they knew how to achieve ecstatic states with hallucinogenic drugs, which are sometimes called entheogens, or ‘that which connects to the God within’. And then there are also various mystical traditions in the Middle Ages, like Meister Eckhart and the Beguines, which I haven’t really explored.

OK, and then the Renaissance rediscovers ecstasy in a positive sense.

Yes. Marsilio Ficino rediscovers Plato, and tries to build a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle’s conceptions of enthusiasm. He’s really decisive in the concept of the melancholy genius, which was very influential in Renaissance art, for figures like Michelangelo and Durer, and then again in Romanticism. You start to get the idea of the god-like artist, who doesn’t obey the same rules as us, whose errant behaviour might actually be proof of their divine genius.

That’s interesting. Charismatic or crazy behaviour becomes a way of claiming creative authority, in aesthetics as in politics.

The Renaissance idea of enthusiasm went on until Giordano Bruno, who wrote a great book on the heroic passions.

Michael Heyd’s ‘Be Sober and Reasonable: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the 17th and early 18th Centuries’.

And then, as the historian Michael Heyd has explored, there starts to be a backlash against the idea of enthusiasm in the Reformation. Martin Luther and his followers criticize enthusiastic Protestant sects like the Anabaptists, who claim a direct prophetic connection to the Holy Spirit.

Yes. Luther calls them “Schwärmer”, which means buzzing enthusiasts, like a swarm of bees.

A mob.

Exactly.

So the Protestant critique of enthusiasm was that these ecstatic movements like the Anabaptists – who claimed a direct connection to the Holy Spirit – were either mad, faking it for political reasons, or they were possessed by the Devil. The orthodox position in Protestantism becomes the idea that the Holy Spirit doesn’t ‘do’ miraculous gifts like prophecy or healing or speaking in tongues anymore, because now we have the Bible so we don’t need such gifts. The doctrine was known as ‘cessationism‘, as in the Holy Spirit has ceased to give humanity the miraculous gifts that St Paul discusses in Corinthians.

Right. Then in the 17th and 18th century, what happens is the theological critique of enthusiasm gradually becomes replaced by a medical critique of enthusiasm. The idea of enthusiasm becomes incorporated into the medical pathology of melancholy. Then Enlightenment thinkers could say ‘enthusiasm is not an experience of the supernatural, it’s perfectly natural, we can define what these people are suffering from, and we can cure it’.

The Enlightenment tried to contain ecstatic experiences like those of the Cumaen sibyl, of whom Petronius wrote: ‘I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”’

So that becomes a way for the Enlightenment to contain enthusiasm, which was seen to be an important project after the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. Religious enthusiasm would be replaced by polite commerce. What were the cures for enthusiasm?

One cure was to stop reading so much! Another was to use distraction. Another was the tonic of human company and sociability. And another was critical thinking – Adam Smith wrote that ‘Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.’ Although there’s also an interesting critique of the new science of empiricism as itself a manifestation of enthusiasm.

Do you agree with JGA Pocock that enthusiasm was the ‘anti-self’ of the Enlightenment?

I’m not sure it’s that black-and-white. The Encylopedists were very into high feeling states, like happiness. La Mettrie, in Man and Machine, talks about how the power of thinking is great because it makes you enthusiastic.

So you’ve looked particularly at the work of Shaftesbury as an Enlightenment defender of enthusiasm.

The Earl of Shaftesbury tried to rehabilitate enthusiasm

Yes, Shaftesbury tries to rehabilitate enthusiasm. He says that you have to be critical of ecstatic French prophets, meaning the Camisards, who stirred up English society in the 1700s. Groups like this one were the reason why John Locke criticized the enthusiasm of sects in the 4th edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Shaftesbury was a pupil of Locke’s, but he’s not convinced that enthusiasm is a bad thing. He makes a distinction between ‘noble and vulgar enthusiasm’.

That’s interesting, because in some ways it’s a class distinction. Often the critique of enthusiasm and ecstasy is that it’s an outbreak of popular emotionalism among the unlettered, but sometimes the upper classes try to categorise some forms of ecstasy as more learned or polite.

Right, but it’s more than that. Shaftesbury is arguing that enthusiasm is basically a good thing, and he tries to promote it for the good of humanity. He suggests you only get high wit and high cognitive abilities in this feeling state – he’s clear about the connection between thinking and feeling. He suggests there is a faculty in every person to expand their feeling of love, from the love of self to the love of the whole of mankind.

In which of his works is this?

His main work on enthusiasm is a ‘philosophical rhapsody’ called The Moralists. There are three characters in it – a skeptic, a melancholic, and an enthusiast. The melancholic is depressed, and the skeptic tries to cheer him up by telling him about an enthusiast he met recently. The enthusiast lives in the countryside, but he’s very social, and often meets his friends – Shaftesbury is trying to counter the Enlightenment idea that enthusiasm is anti-social and divisive. The enthusiast has a strong therapeutic ability, and he realizes that the skeptic is also suffering from melancholy. So he takes him for a walk, cares for him, befriends him, points out the magnificence of the cosmos. His enthusiasm helps him understand others’ emotional states, and how to best intervene to help them. It’s really a theory of intervention.

We should sketch out some more of the landscape of enthusiasm. For one thing, we should mention the idea of enthusiastic politics in Rousseau and then in Tom Paine.

So in the second half of the 18th century, enthusiasm becomes more and more a political term; the former religious connotations are secularized and used to directly address political and social problems and also to promote revolutionary solutions. Tom Paine says enthusiasm is an important emotion for political change. Helvetius also discusses the idea of how to create enthusiasm in the people by an appropriate education. Then in the 19th century, after the period of Restoration, popular enthusiasm starts to become part of theories of the psychology of crowds, mob frenzies.

Revolutionary enthusiasm in France

That’s interesting. And I suppose then people start thinking about creating outlets for popular enthusiasm, so they can safely ‘let off steam’ without causing revolutions. Sport, for example. I’m thinking of the work of Norbert Elias on sport as an outlet for all the passions that threaten the order of civilisation. And we should also mention, of course, Romanticism and its defence of enthusiasm and ecstatic states.

Yes, there’s Nietzsche, of course, and his idea of the Dionysiac. Jill Marsden recently wrote a book called After Nietzsche: Notes Towards A Philosophy of Ecstasy. I really like Nietzsche as a philosopher of psychology. Holderlin is also a very important thinker on ecstasy and enthusiasm, and a big influence on Heidegger. Of course, the idea of political enthusiasm in Romanticism is controversial because of its use and misuse in Nazism – enthusiasm is never entirely apolitical.

And then, today, one thing that strikes me is how the idea of enthusiasm and ecstasy has been not just secularized, but it’s even become part of the capitalist or corporate sphere. People these days talk a lot about finding your ‘passion’ in the workplace, or your ‘vocation’ – this religious idea of hearing an inner voice telling you what job to do.

Yes. The most challenging thing about modern ecstasy is that it’s been co-opted by capitalism and integrated into the system. And it works there very well. People talk about the entrepreneurial self and their ability to invoke enthusiasm in others.

Which reminds me a bit of Tony Robbins and that sort of corporate ecstasy in his motivational seminars. Or Steve Ballmer going mental at the Microsoft annual conference (shown below). It’s a bastardisation of the Pentecostal ecstasy in Acts – you go to a meeting, get all fired up and filled with ecstasy, then go out and spread the word, or, in this case, make the sale.

Yes. I’ve been thinking recently about cultures of enthusiasm. There’s corporate ecstasy, political ecstasy, religious ecstasy, artistic ecstasy…and there’s also perhaps the ecstasy of nerds and hackers.

Yes, how interesting. One of the definitions of a nerd or a geek is they’re not ashamed of their passion and enthusiasm for, say, science fiction, or technology.

Exactly. And I think social and cultural sciences would do well to explore this hacker enthusiasm more thoroughly, because that’s actually where the big changes in history are coming from right now.

Bernd is working on a project called ‘The Art of Producing Emotions. Philosophy as Critical Psychotechnology’.

Brian Eno on surrender in art and religion

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Jules Evans

I’m sitting in the West London studio of Brian Eno, one of the all-time great pioneers of sound recording, and my dictaphone has broken. Right at the beginning of our interview. ‘It’s…er…saying it’s full’, I say. ‘How do I delete files?’ ‘Let me have a look’, says Eno. ‘Hmmm. I think you need to delete them on a computer’. ‘OK, don’t worry’, I say, glancing at the clock in the knowledge I only have an hour for our interview. ‘I’ll just scribble while you talk.’ Then my pen runs out.

Eno starts to get the giggles and I have to sigh and shrug. My moment of rock glam has quickly descended into farce. Never mind – we are here, after all, to talk about learning to let go and surrender to the flow. Eno has been thinking about the concept of surrender in art for decades, and in the last few years he’s started to articulate his ideas. As someone researching (and searching for) ecstasy, I’m fascinated by his thinking on the subject. So, scribbling furiously with a pen he has kindly leant me, I ask him to explain what he means by surrender.

Eno: I started noting that I liked certain kinds of experience, different from rock & roll experiences – more contemplative, calm and reflective. When I started making ambient music [he invented the genre ‘ambient’ in the mid-1970s after leaving Roxy Music], all the critics could see was what’s missing – a beat, lyrics, chord changes, everything they considered music. And it’s true, I had stripped out a lot of what constitutes music. I didn’t want it to be stimulating, I wanted the opposite. But I didn’t yet have the word surrender. I just knew I wanted something that induced calm, which put me out of the loop in terms of pop in the late-1970s.

Here’s an Eno ambient song called Going Unconscious. The words are ‘Going Unconscious / Trembling / With eyes open / I see you / Surrender’.

Over the years, I carried on refining the idea and refining the music, and wondering what class of experience this belongs to. I noticed people seemed to experience it through my art. People would write in the visitors books for my light works, things like ‘I wish this was what church was like’ or ‘I’ve never felt so calm’.

But the thing that really got me thinking about surrender was when I saw an art critic bustle in to the gallery [he gets up and imitates the critic bustling in], and staring at the art impatiently, looking like he was about to leave, and then the lights changed very slightly, and he stood there, then moved closer to a chair, then sat down on the chair, and eventually he was totally absorbed in the art work. And I thought, this person is surrendering. He’s letting something happen and stopping being in control.

So that made me think about not being in control. We usually think that humans’ success comes from being in control, from science, craft, technology. Learning to control and master our environment is an important part of what we are. But if you think of the evolutionary history of humans, until very recently, we weren’t much in control of anything. Humans were at the mercy of forces that were completely beyond our control – the elements, wild animals, plagues, floods and so forth. Life was unpredictable, basically. In that sort of environment, control was useless as a response. So, for a lot of human history, there’s an acknowledgement that you have to go with the flow, not fight it. The best strategy is to navigate and position yourself within the flux of circumstances.

Here’s a clip of Eno talking about surrender in art and religion:

And we’ve learnt not just to accept being out of control, but to enjoy it.

Yes, and to be good at it. I think surrender should be an active verb. We think of it as passive. I’m interested in the words active and passive – what if you think of it as action and passion. In other words, surrender is an active choice.

Right. The musicologist James Kennaway makes a similar point about Beatlemania – people were very worried about teenage girls screaming away and losing control, but, as he suggests, really those girls were making a choice to surrender, to go with it and have fun losing control.

I find the metaphor of surfing useful. Surfers take control of the wave, then they’re carried by it, then they take control, then they’re carried. That’s what you’re doing in life all the time.

Here’s a clip of MGMT’s song, Brian Eno, from their album ‘Congratulations’, which conveniently has a cartoon surfer on the album-cover.

[This surfing metaphor reminds me of Greek philosophers’ metaphor of the kybernet or steersman, which is the origin of ‘cybernetics’. Heraclitus and the Stoics thought of the cosmos as constantly flowing and changing – ‘Everything flows’, as Heraclitus put it -, which can be distressing if you’re too attached or averse to externals. But you can learn to skillfully steer your soul and to trust in the Logos, so that you navigate the cosmic flow and have a ‘good flow of life’, in Zeno’s phrase.]

So you’ve talked about surrender as an umbrella term that encompasses four core spheres of human activity: sex, drugs or intoxicants, religion and art. All of which involve surrender.

Yes. Religion is interesting because it comes with a superstructure of belief, which I wish I could jettison.

[We didn’t have time to talk about Eno’s Catholic roots on this occasion, but, in brief, he has an interesting relationship with faith, in that he grew up in a Catholic family, went to a Catholic school and got his first experience of music from singing in the choir. But clearly he found the emphasis on sin and damnation a turn-off, and he now describes himself as an ‘evangelical atheist’.]

I belonged to a gospel choir in Brooklyn. I was the only white person in the choir and the only atheist. But the rest of the choir made me feel very welcome, and they didn’t try too hard to convert me. I think I was having the same experience as them when we were singing, but without the same structure of belief. I hope that’s what the artist does – create rich experiences of surrender, without the superstructure of beliefs.

One of Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, to help move artists past blocks.

You’ve clearly thought a lot and worked a lot around artistic inspiration, and ways of getting the ego out of the way to surrender to something deeper. Your use of the random Oblique Strategies cards is one way of getting the ego out of the way, for example, likewise cut-up lyrics or randomisation machines.

Yes. It’s like the surfing analogy again. What I think you’re trying to do is not forever be out of control, but to push into new territories by temporarily surrendering. The surfer catches a huge wave, and then takes control. You can use surrendering to be moved somewhere else. Humans have sought this experience throughout history. Every culture that we know has erected big fences around these experiences.

Yes, they become sacred, and taboo.

Some societies revere one sort of surrender and outlaw another. For example, the Victorians revered the arts, and thought of music as the closest thing to the divine, but they could never talk about sex. Other societies, like Hinduism, are better at marrying together art, sex and religion. Then in some parts of South America, religion is still married together with drugs. Every society makes its choices. But the concept of blasphemy – you don’t find that outside of religion.

John Cage used the I-Ching as a way of surrendering control in composition

I want to explore this idea of surrendering, letting go of your ego to create. It seems to me that’s a spiritual or religious idea. So take John Cage using the I-Ching to create – the idea behind it is that when you get your conscious ego out of the way, the Tao will give rise to something meaningful and beautiful. Or Terry Riley using group improvisation – again there’s the idea something beautiful and spiritual will emerge from the spontaneity. And you’ve spoken about the idea of surrendering to the universe. You once said about gospel music:

The big message of gospel is that you don’t have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.

It seems to me that your idea of surrendering to the benign universe is not Freudian or Darwinian, where the cosmos is hostile or indifferent, and the unconscious is ‘red in tooth and claw’. It’s more Platonic or pantheist or Taoist or Judeo-Christian – it’s the idea that if you surrender to the universe, the universe will be good to you. Something meaningful and beautiful will emerge when you surrender control. That’s an expression of cosmic optimism.

I’m not a cosmic optimist. I’m an optimist, just not a cosmic optimist. f you take the ego out of the way, you start seeing the world differently, and valuing the difference. You acquire alertness, you know you’re not in control anymore and that makes you more alert.

You’re shaken out of the sleep of stultifying habit.

Yes. I don’t think you can invoke a benign cosmos. It just makes you a more effective person. It’s like if the surfer catches a big wave, they’re paying a lot of attention.

[This is interesting, although I think the state Eno is talking about is more akin to scanning your environment for threats, which seems to me a different experience to the oceanic feeling one can get in communal singing and dancing – the latter is more a wonderful feeling of love, trust and opening up, I would suggest.]

I don’t think it has to be generalized up [to God] to be anything to do with synchronicity. Synchronicity is a charming idea, and entirely unmystical.

Well…it was quite a mystical idea for Jung.

In technology and art, you see synchronicity all the time. Given certain conditions, things will inevitably happen.

The 18th century debate over whether music is mechanistic or spiritual lives on in electronic music today (photo shows a Kraftwerk concert).

That’s interesting. It reminds me of a debate in the 18th and 19th centuries about why music has the effect on us that it does. One theory was mechanistic – music works on our nervous machines, therefore one could theoretically work out the formula or programme to achieve a particular effect on our mechanisms. The other theory was more transcendent or animist – music is a daemonic bridge between humans and the divine, or what Kant called the noumenal. Which theory do you agree with?

I think there’s a third description of what’s going on, which is that it’s cultural. When you listen to a piece of music, you don’t just hear it, you hear it with reference to your whole history of listening. You hear the differences and the similarities to what you’ve heard before. If aliens listened to two string quartets, they’d probably sound exactly the same to them – like this patch of carpet and that patch of carpet. But we might hear something new and think that’s exciting.

Right – and if it’s too different, it will offend us.

It will be outside the conversation, like if speak you i to this like, you wouldn’t understand it.And likewise, if I’m saying stuff to you that you’ve heard a million times before, it will be a bit boring. Maybe I am [laughs]. We’re very attuned to differences. When I give lectures about art, I try to explain it to my students by talking about haircuts. A haircut is an art work.

Sure – think of all the different haircuts David Bowie has had.

Haircuts are artistic statements

We make stylistic decisions, and those decisions are made in reference to our knowledge of previous haircuts, and cultural experience of what haircuts can signify. But to an alien, they probably wouldn’t see the differences between your hairstyle and…well…not mine [smoothing his pate] but someone else’s.

So the third way between the spiritual and the mechanist explanations of music’s emotional power is the cultural.

Yes. Some things may be universal, like when music gets louder it’s usually exciting. Likewise, the colour red usually evokes anger or alarm. But most things are probably culturally learned.

OK. I’d like to discuss the idea of surrender and musical performance. You must have had the experience of playing music live, in the studio or in a concert, and something magical happens. People talk about ‘magic takes’, when something stunning and somewhat mysterious happens in a take. Like, for example, when Aretha Franklin recorded ‘I Never Loved A Man’ in the Stax studio, in her very first recording session there. And something amazing happened, everyone felt it. You talk about a similar experience of recording ‘Moment of Surrender’ with U2, a song which came together in a very short period of time, and which felt (as you put it) like it was ‘channeled’ rather than made.

Yes. Sports people have a similar experience. They talk about being ‘in the zone’, moments when they can’t do anything wrong. You see it with improvisation. Musicians will do outrageous things, and you think, where have they gone, and how will they get out of that one, and somehow they do.

[The most famous example of this sort of unconscious genius in sport, by the by, is Lilliam Thuram scoring two goals in the 1998 World Cup semi-final. He doesn’t remember the game and calls it his ‘Miles Davis moment‘. The coach, Andre Jacquet, says Thuram was in ‘some mystical state’.]

But that’s nothing to do with the ‘Spirit’ descending?

I’m anti-mystical. Mysticism isn’t an explanation. It’s a way of getting rid of a problem. You don’t know what’s happening, so you call it God. I’m interested in the mechanism. What’s it mean when you talk about ‘the zone’. It’s a combination of confidence and alertness. The confidence to really go there [outside of your comfort zone], and the alertness to re-position yourself so you don’t wipe out.

I see. That’s interesting about confidence – I guess it’s also to do with confidence in technique. When Plato famously discusses the rhapsody of artistic creation, in his dialogue Ion, he says that ecstasy is inferior to technique, because poets don’t know what they’re doing when they’re in ecstatic rapture. Technique is better than rhapsody, he says, because it can be learnt and taught. But that’s always struck me as wrong – you need to master the technique before you can have the confidence to surrender, to let go, to ‘snatch a grace beyond the reach of art’ as Pope put it.

Yes. Mastering the technique can include mastering the technology. Think of Lee Perry in his studio. He gets in the zone in the most unlikely way, by doing this [mimes Lee Perry fiddling with the Studio knobs and dials]. Technique is understanding what this thing can do, and what that would mean in terms of the history of your culture.

As a producer yourself, you’ve produced some of the most uplifting and ecstatic songs of the last fifty years – David Bowie’s Heroes, Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime, U2’s Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. It seems to me that, like gospel, these songs share a certain quality or belief: a belief in the possibility of a better world and a better way of relating to one another. David Byrne has written about the ecstatic experience of playing Once In A Lifetime live. He wrote in his book How Music Works:

the more integral everyone was, the more everyone gave up some individuality and surrendered to the music. It was a living, breathing model of a more ideal society, an ephemeral utopia that everyone, even the audience, felt was being manifested in front of them.

There’s a similar hope and yearning for a better world in one of your favourite songs, State of Independence by Vangelis and Donna Summer. Well, it seems to me that this idea comes from the sacred. It’s the yearning for the Kingdom, for an end to exile and suffering. That’s what Bono sings in Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For: ‘I believe in the Kingdom Come, when all the colours bleed into one’. I guess I’m saying that some of the most uplifting songs you’ve worked on do still have a sacred belief structure to them – the yearning for Another World, for the Kingdom – despite your desire to jettison this belief.

I think you’ve got it the wrong way round. You see surrender as part of the subset of religion, when I think religion is a subset of the broader experience of surrender. In the past, the only places where one was enabled to attach hope and optimism and a desire to surrender, have been religious places. That was the only area where one was allowed and encouraged to have that experience. It was what we evolved to cope with that need. But it doesn’t have to be religion that gives us that experience. It doesn’t have to be the case that religion lasts forever. Religion has in fact mutated a lot.

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Primitive Societies, where he discusses his years among Pacific Islanders and their religious beliefs. Basically, Abrahamic religion belongs to the Middle Ages, and we’re moving beyond that now. We’re moving beyond wanting religion to do things it used to do. It used to have an explanatory role, but science has taken that place. It used to be the main source of beauty and awe, but art has taken that role. It used to be the main source of sanctions, but law has taken that role. What remains is what primitive people use it for – consolation and community-building. It is still very important in community-building. You see in South America that religion is becoming more and more local.

Then, alas, our hour is over. Attendees of Eno’s regular Tuesday evening acapella singing session are arriving, and Eno takes out the song books, filled with songs like Amazing Grace and Hallelujah. He explains: ‘Acapella singing involves surrender. Sometimes one of my famous lead-singer friends comes along, and I have to explain that they can’t be a lead-singer here. We have one coming this evening – I’ve produced four of his albums so hopefully he won’t mind me telling him what to do’. I wonder who that is…Bono? David Byrne?

Sadly, I have to depart so I don’t find out. Eno kindly offers to meet another time, once I have worked out how to use my recording machine. Next time hopefully we will get to explore his ideas on art and health (he thinks communal singing is very good for our health and well-being, and he’s also started doing art works in hospitals), and I want to challenge him about his idea that you can engineer powerful moments of surrender without also invoking beliefs. I’m not so sure that emotions can be separated from beliefs – you’re always surrendering to something or someone, aren’t you? And I’d suggest his music is still haunted by the ghost of the old religious belief-system. The spirit is there, just as it’s there in that other great synth-pioneer, Vangelis. Wittingly or unwittingly, they are Evangelions – their music seems to me to connect us to the divine. Or maybe that’s just my experience!

A brief history of IAPT: the mass provision of CBT in the NHS

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Jules Evans

I’ve a long article in Aeon magazine this week, looking at Improving Access for Psychological Therapy (IAPT), which is the first ever provision of talking therapy on a mass scale by a government. Before IAPT, the NHS spent just 3% of its mental health budget on talking therapy. IAPT has tripled that budget, and aims to train 6,000 new therapists in CBT by 2014, who will treat 900,000 people for depression and anxiety annually in England and Wales. It is, as one therapist put it, ‘the biggest expansion of mental health services anywhere in the world, ever’. Quite a feat.

You can hear me reading my Aeon essay here.

In the piece, I tell the story of how IAPT occurred because of a chance meeting at a British Academy tea party:

In 2003, Lord Richard Layard was made a fellow of the British Academy. He’d made his reputation as an unemployment economist at the London School of Economics, but he’d always had an interest in depression and happiness. He inherited this interest, perhaps, from his father, the anthropologist John Layard, who suffered from depression, shot himself in the head, survived, was analysed by Carl Jung, and then re-trained as a Jungian psychologist. Layard junior was more interested in hard data than the collective unconscious, but he’d become interested in a new field in economics that tried to measure individuals’ happiness, and use the data to guide public policy. Layard wondered: what if governments started to take happiness data as seriously as they took unemployment or inflation? He tells me: ‘The most obvious policy implication was for mental health services.’

At the British Academy tea party, Layard struck up a conversation with the man standing next to him, who was called David Clark. ‘It was a fortuitous meeting’, Layard tells me. Synchronicity, his father might have said. Layard asked Clark if he happened to know anything about mental health. Clark replied that he did. He was, in fact, the leading British practitioner of CBT. He had helped to set up a trauma centre in Omagh after the Provisional IRA bombing of that town in 1998. The centre treated Omagh citizens for post-traumatic stress disorder, and kept careful measurements of the outcomes. The data showed that front-line provision of CBT in the field showed comparable recovery results as in clinical trials: roughly 50% of people recovered. Clark explained to Layard that trials of CBT showed similar results for depression, anxiety and other emotional disorders. He also explained that there was very little CBT (or any other talking therapy) available on the NHS for common problems like depression. Layard, who is nothing if not a doer, decided he wanted to ‘get something done about mental health’. So, at the age of 70, that is what he did.

With Clark’s help, Layard assembled a powerful argument for the British government to increase its spending on CBT. Depression and anxiety affect one in six of the population. Besides causing a lot of human suffering, this costs the economy around £4 billion a year in lost productivity and incapacity benefits. This problem has a solution, Layard argued: CBT. The government’s own National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which evaluates evidence to guide NHS spending, recommended CBT for depression and anxiety in 2004. Yet for some reason, the NHS just £80 million a year on talking therapies, out of a total NHS annual budget of £100 billion. Layard and Clark recommended doubling the budget, so that 15% of adults with depression and anxiety would get access to psychological therapy. Some of them would get off incapacity benefits in the process, it was argued, so the service would pay for itself.

Layard and Clark presented their recommendations at a seminar at 10 Downing Street in January 2005. They managed to get IAPT into New Labour’s manifesto for the 2005 election, and were then faced with the task of turning it into a reality following Labour’s election victory. Clark designed the service. Firstly, and radically for the NHS, it allowed for self-referrals. Secondly, the service would have a ‘stepped-care’ approach: for mild cases of depression and anxiety, people would be treated by ‘Psychological Well-Being Practitioners’, who had a year’s training in CBT, and who provide ‘psycho-education’ and guided self-help, often over the phone. If that wasn’t adequate, people were encouraged to ‘step up’ to more intensive face-to-face therapy for a longer period of time, with a fully-trained therapist. Thirdly, IAPT would only offer NICE-recommended evidence-based therapies, which meant mainly CBT. Finally, IAPT centres would measure outcomes at every therapy session, and make this data available online, so both patients and politicians could see the results.

The reason Layard and Clark convinced politicians to put serious money into talking therapies is that CBT had built up a big evidence base to show it worked. I look at the origins of this evidence – the invention of the ‘Beck Depression Inventory’:

Beck developed Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in the early 1960s. He tells me: “I was also influenced by the Stoics, who stated that it was the meaning of events rather than the events themselves that affected people. When this was articulated by Ellis, everything clicked into place.” While Ellis was content to be a free-wheeling rebel, Beck was more of an institution man. He wanted to transform clinical psychotherapy from within, by building up an empirical evidence base for cognitive therapy.

Before Beck, evidence for psychotherapy mainly consisted of therapists’ case studies. The reputation of psychoanalysis, for example, was built on a handful of canonical case studies written by Sigmund Freud, like ‘the Wolf-man’, ‘Dora’, and ‘Anna O’. The problem with that approach was the evidence was anecdotal, non-replicable, and relied strongly on the therapist’s own account of a patient’s progress. The therapist might exaggerate the success of a treatment, as Freud arguably did in the foundational case of Anna O.

Beck’s radical innovation was to develop a questionnaire which asked patients how they felt on a four-point scale. In 1961, he created the Beck Depression Inventory, a 21-question survey which measured a person’s beliefs and emotional state through questions like:

0 I do not feel like a failure.
1 I feel I have failed more than the average person.
2 As I look back on my life, all I can see is a lot of failures.
3 I feel I am a complete failure as a person.

By measuring the intensity of a person’s negative beliefs and feelings, Beck discovered a way to quantify emotions and turn them into data. Using the BDI, he could quantify how a person felt before a course of CBT, and after it. According to the BDI, after 10-20 weeks of CBT, around 50% of people with depression no longer met the diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder. And, crucially, this result was replicable in randomised controlled trials by other therapists. CBT showed similar recovery rates for anxiety disorders like social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Beck launched the era of ‘evidence-based therapy’. In doing so, however, he made some drastic alterations to the ancient philosophy that inspired him. He pruned out anything that was not scientifically measurable – including any mention of God or the Logos, virtue or vice, the good society, or our ethical obligations to other people. I once asked Beck if he agreed with Plato that certain forms of society encouraged particular emotional disorders. He replied: ‘I am loath to toss out an opinion that is not based on empirical evidence.’ There is much about which CBT is silent. It teaches you how to steer the self, but does not tell you where you should steer it to, nor what form of society might encourage us to flourish.

I wax lyrical about the place of IAPT in the history of ideas:

IAPT is an interesting moment not just in the history of psychotherapy, but in the history of philosophy. It is an attempt to teach Stoic – or ‘Stoic-lite’ – self-governance techniques to millions of people, an exercise in adult education as much as healthcare. The scale of it is beyond the dreams of the ancient Stoics, teaching on the street corners of Athens. Although the early Stoics wrote political works, they were all lost in antiquity, and later Roman Stoics viewed Stoicism more as a sort of individual self-help for the elite. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor of Rome, was in a position to spread Stoicism to the entire empire if he so wished, but he had a pessimistic sense of the limit of politics. ‘I must not expect Plato’s commonwealth’, he told himself. ‘[For] who can hope to alter men’s convictions, and without change of conviction what can there be but grudging subjection and feigned assent’.

Stoicism’s therapy of the emotions remained popular with intellectuals, but few believed it could be taught by the state to the masses. David Hume wrote that the majority of humanity is ‘effectually excluded from all pretensions of philosophy, and the medicine of the mind, so much boasted…The empire of philosophy extends over a few, and with regard to these, too, her authority is very weak and limited.’

The early results of IAPT have been better than Hume might have predicted, with recovery rates of 44.4%. IAPT is now being rolled out into child services, into the treatment of chronic physical conditions which have an emotional toll, and into the treatment of unexplained conditions like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. An IAPT-style programme is also being piloted in Norway.

And finally I consider whether the state has any business providing therapy for our emotions. My position is basically that I’m all for the provision of CBT because it doesn’t try to tell people what ‘flourishing’ or the meaning of life is. But I’m wary of state support for Positive Psychology precisely because it does try to tell people what flourishing ‘is’. In place of Positive Psychology, I’d like to see something else – call it Positive Philosophy – which is more open-ended and Socratic when it comes to discussing the good life.

You can read the full transcript of my interview with Professor David M. Clark here.

And my interview with Lord Richard Layard is here.

Emotion, affect and sentiment in Switzerland

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Mary Flannery

From 19 to 21 April 2013, the University of Lausanne in Switzerland hosted an international conference on the subject of ‘Emotion, Affect, and Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling’. Agnieszka Soltysik, Andreas Langlotz, and Juliette Vuille organised the conference on behalf of the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE). Here, Mary Flannery and Juliette Vuille reflect on three days of intensive discussion spanning medieval and modern periods.

At first glance, a scenic lakeshore in Switzerland might seem a somewhat arbitrary setting for a major interdisciplinary conference on the subject of emotion, but first impressions can be deceptive. Switzerland’s linguistic situation, cultural demographics, and borders with multiple countries render it a place where different languages, religions, and heritages bump up against one another. Apart from the fact that this can make things get a bit ’emotional’ from time to time, it also establishes Switzerland as a location where communicating across (and about) borders and boundaries is a necessity.

This backdrop seemed to shape much of the discussion at this year’s SAUTE conference, which also proved that the study of ‘Emotion, Affect, and Sentiment’ is thriving in the Confédération Helvétique. As well as drawing scholars from around the world, with representatives hailing from Australian, Northern American, British, and European universities, the three-day conference attracted presentations from multiple disciplines, including medieval studies, film studies, American literature, and linguistics. From the lexis of anger in Old English and Old Norse literature to the emotional responses provoked by James Cameron’s Avatar, the subjects explored in the sessions made clear just how profoundly emotion can affect literature, art, and everyday life.

The conference opened with a plenary by Nancy Armstrong (Duke University) on moments in contemporary novels when sympathy fails to operate. Armstrong identified these moments as part of a recent, disconcerting sea-change in which ‘unhuman’ protagonists (or ‘extremophiles’, a term she borrows from the field of biology) expose the affective limitations of so-called ‘normal’ people, and leave us as readers with a sense of lacking an appropriate response. Linking the protagonists of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go (whose 2010 film adaptation Armstrong also discussed) with those of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, she argued that such protagonists produce a ‘failure of sympathy’ among other characters.

Armstrong’s initial foray into the intricate interweaving of liminality with emotionality was aptly developed by the second plenary speaker, who brought the first day of the conference to a close. Paul Stenner, professor of social psychology at the Open University, reflected on the inherently liminal nature of affectivity. He opened with some reflections on the triple spiral carved inside Newgrange, a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland. Stenner used the image as a visual aid to discussing liminality, which he showed has the potential to ‘shed light on the social nature of emotion’. Stenner paired

Brian Massumi’s conception of affect and the affective turn with Victor Turner’s theory of liminality in order to posit a distinction between affect, an unstructured, ‘pre-phatic’, and unqualified event, and emotion, a containable and knowable structuring of affect. The rest of the first day was divided into parallel sessions which further developed themes broached by the two plenary speakers. Armstrong’s brief discussion of the film adaptation of Never Let Me Go proved a fortuitous prelude to an afternoon panel on visual art, in which Agnieszka Soltysik, Lorraine Dumenil, and Nidesh Lawtoo presented on films and photography. Multiple sessions were also dedicated to the much earlier media and literature of the Middle Ages. Marcel Elias’ discussion of violence in the romance Richard Coeur de Lion, as well as James Wade‘s paper on ‘Romance, Affect, and Ethical Thinking’, strongly resonated with Armstrong’s exposition of how emotions could be used in a literary work to influence our sympathy or antipathy for protagonists (in this case, in the context of the medieval romance genre). Other papers, such as that delivered by Tamàs Karath, considered the question of when the experience and/or display of emotion is acceptable. Karath spoke about the taming of affect in late Middle English translations of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio Vitæ. Similarly, Sarah McNamer discussed the possibility of discerning radical doubt in the Second Shepherds’ Play, a provocative position considering that extreme doubt is often considered a post-medieval phenomenon.

Other emotions were at the forefront of the afternoon sessions: Daniel McCann showed how fear could be conceived as a tool to reform and purify one’s soul in the Scale of Perfection, and Mary Flannery articulated the ways in which Thomas Hoccleve played with notions of shame and shamefastness in his petitionary poem La Male Regle. Sarah Baccianti, in her discussion of anger in Old Norse and Old English (where interestingly emotions are not felt but taken as though they were acts of volition), broached the anchoring of emotions in the body. In pointing out how these protagonists are filled with anger to the point of bruising or bursting, Baccianti touched on themes of physicality and bodiliness that resurfaced throughout the conference. Baccianti, Karath, McCann, and Stenner also addressed a crucial and often overlooked aspect of feeling: its inexpressibility. Indeed, be it the apophatic affect felt toward God, or the ways in which protagonists from the Old Norse Njal’s saga cannot speak for shame or anger, the transformation of unspeakable affect to expressible emotion by way of language, song (the canor of Richard Rolle), or the body, was a central topic throughout the day.

Applicability was also a key issue raised on the first day of the conference. As literary scholars and linguists, how might we bring the tools of our various disciplines and subjects to bear on the rapidly growing field of the history of emotions? Conversely, how might the history of emotions enrich our respective fields of study? A number of papers sought to move the field of inquiry and application beyond scholarship. Arguably the most ambitious attempts to do so were the linguistics presentations. In one linguistics session, for example, two papers dealt with the intersection of emotion and language learning: Irina Dumitrescu considered how early English textbooks modelled both ‘affective repertoires’ and ‘the use of affect for intellectual purposes’, while Sarah Chevalier reported on Swiss students’ attitudes towards native and non-native speakers of English. The third paper in the session was a study by Miriam Locher and Regula König that examined the challenge that medical students face when confronting the emotions of their patients. These and other presentations made clear that our work has real-world implications and applicability.

Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University) launched the second day’s sessions with the third plenary of the conference: a lively introduction to his linguistic work on impoliteness in a cross-cultural perspective. Culpeper treated his listeners to a range of examples of ‘impoliteness’, ranging from backchatting bartenders to Alec Baldwin’s infamous answering machine rant to his 11-year-old daughter:

This presentation led to lively debates that spilled over into the coffee break, with both presenter and audience members pointing out the many factors that can determine emotional responses to impoliteness (as well as assessment of behaviour as impolite). Context, culture, power relations, and normative expectations—among many other things—all play a key role. The concept of the genuineness of emotions was also problematized: to what extent can one speak of ‘un-staged’ emotions in a societal context? Is it possible to separate and/or draw connections between the day-to-day performance of emotions and the staged, dramatic performance of feelings in literature and theatre?

The final plenary of the conference, delivered by Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne), considered the emotional reception of medieval literary works by later authors. Trigg, one of the chief investigators at the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, reflected on what the study of literature can bring to the history of emotions. Focusing on Coleridge’s characterization of Chaucer as an ‘especially delicious’ and ‘exquisitely tender’ poet, Trigg suggested that reception studies might function as an important source for the history of emotions.

Although the second day of the conference was considerably shorter than the first, its sessions were no less thought-provoking. Kristine Steenbergh‘s paper effected a rapprochement of diverse lines of thinking about emotions developed throughout the conference by exploring the history of emotion, the morality/immorality of emotions, and affect as performance. Steenbergh argued that one can discern a shift in the first half of the seventeenth century whereby greed becomes acceptable in drama due to the rise of capitalism. Greed, she ventured, became moral as a sort of counter-measure against other, more violent, emotions. In the same session, Evan LaBuzetta showed how the ‘emotion-driven print culture’ of Civil War England ‘helped shape contemporary perspectives on evil’, arguing that this phenomenon also had important implications for today’s media.

The final round of afternoon sessions focused on topics related to poetics, religious devotion, and the sublime. Denis Renevey and Ayoush Lazikani both engaged with the ways in which devotional texts and particular devotions created affective responses in the onlooker/reader. Whereas Renevey’s paper focused on the emotions generated by devotion to the name of Jesus in medieval spiritual writing, Lazikani explored how works such as the medieval ‘Wooing Group’ aim to produce ‘co-feeling’ between their readers and the suffering figure of Christ on the cross. While drawing extensively on the published work of such historians of emotion as McNamer and Barbara Rosenwein, these papers also raised important questions concerning readership and reception which, if pursued, may revise previous interpretations of such works as ‘scripts’ intended for particular ‘emotional communities’.

The day after the conference was set aside as a ‘Doctoral Research Day’ organized under the auspices of CUSO (Conférence Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale). Doctoral students from all over Switzerland followed a series of workshops run by the plenary speakers, which enabled them to continue discussion developed during the conference in a more informal context. After the morning workshops, they were offered the opportunity to present their own research to Armstrong, Culpeper, and Trigg, and to receive feedback on their projects.

We have only been able to touch briefly on a selection of the papers presented in Lausanne, but one of the most persistent comments voiced by conference participants at all of the sessions was the wish for even more discussion time—conversations and debates spilled out of every session and plenary talk, and continued over coffee, drinks, and fondue. It became clear to us that, in participating in the ever-evolving field of the history of emotions, we were engaged in inherently complex work, and–one cannot stress it enough–deeply social work. Emotions history addresses itself to the core of what makes us human (or what we believe makes us human), as well as to our morals and ethics and our sense of time and place.

Dr. Mary C. Flannery is Maître Assistante (Lecturer) in English at the University of Lausanne. She is also one of the three principal investigators associated with The Good of Literature: Ethics, Affect, and Critical Practice.

Juliette Vuille is a final-year PhD student in Medieval English at the University of Lausanne.

Psychological Pain and Suicidality – Some Historical Considerations

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Åsa Jansson

Pain is a sensation – and a topic – that has recently attracted much attention among historians , particularly those working in the field of the history of emotions. This post interrogates perceptions of mental pain that link this feeling to suicidality, by tracing some of the historical roots of an assumption that is often taken for granted in the present.

‘What hurts more? Physical or mental pain?’ According to a 2008 study investigating the difference between the two, subjects found mental pain more difficult to cope with, mainly because of its lingering quality. Physical pain, once gone, could be forgotten, the study concluded, whereas humans are more likely to relive experiences of psychological pain, and find such memories to be more vivid and more painful.

The same question was asked in an online forum the following year, with respondents overwhelmingly declaring mental pain to be the worst of the two. One contributor succinctly explained: ‘Physical u can get over… Mental sticks with u for forever and ever…. Breaks ups, deaths, abuse stuff tht will stick with u until u die….’. Others agreed, with one poster asserting that ‘I have been beat by cops and prison goon squads but nothing hurt as bad as being used and having my heart broke.’ The same question was posed again, in the same forum, two years later, with much the same result. ‘I had a fair shot of mental pain back a while back with a fair few things’, wrote one participant, ‘and i would of rather been fighting Mike Tyson than thinking that way’. Response upon response reaffirmed this view. Most people, it seemed, would far rather endure physical than psychological pain. Why? As one of the respondents, Dagon, explained, ‘Physical pain comes in many forms and can be fixed, Mental pain comes from the imagination and it can affect ones health, create depression, drive one to suicide, cause abberrations in ones thinking, and cause insanity.’

The belief that mental pain can be a sign of madness, and that it causes individuals to become suicidal has long been a focus of psychiatric inquiries into the emotional life of humans. In the early 1990s, British psychiatrist Edwin Schneidman claimed that suicide was caused by ‘psychache’, a term he used to describe ‘intolerable psychological pain.’ His work has since formed the basis for further research into this topic. Apparently unbeknownst to Schneidman, however, his words echoed those of a nineteenth-century German psychiatrist who suggested in 1874 that melancholia, a form of affective insanity, was characterised by a mental pain that often led sufferers to become suicidal. Richard von Krafft-Ebing described this psychic pain as analogous to the neuralgia of the spinal cord and lower brain – a ‘psychic neuralgia’, or ‘psychalgia’.

In Krafft-Ebing’s view, severe emotional pain was pathological when it arose internally, without adequate cause and as the result of a morbid physiological reaction, usually brought about through repeated ‘irritation’ of the brain. For sufferers it would appear as if the world around them had changed, they would feel trapped in this painful emotional state, powerless to resist the despair that engulfed them. Eventually, a single solution would appear as the only possible escape: suicide. The pain was often so unbearable, Krafft-Ebing argued, that melancholics must be watched over at all times in order to prevent such individuals from taking their own life. ‘The shrewdness and persistence of such sick people in the pursuit of their suicidal intentions are often extraordinary’, he warned, so much so that even ‘[t]he straitjacket is thus no guarantee against suicide.’

Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902)

The view that melancholics were prone to suicidal tendencies due the unbearable mental pain that characterised the condition was pervasive also among British physicians in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, only a few decades earlier medical literature on melancholia contained few references to ‘suicidal’ tendencies, and even fewer to ‘mental pain’. The latter was a relatively late addition to the vocabulary of nineteenth-century psychiatry (or psychological medicine, as it was usually referred to in Britain at the time). Its usage as an analogy to physical pain emerged in part through the appropriation of language from experimental physiology to speak about mental phenomena. Within a new scientific framework where emotions were explained as automated physiological reactions, mental pain was a sensation caused by disordered brain activity. However, the term has a longer and multifaceted history – in the early modern period, before it gained popularity in internal medicine, ‘mental pain’ had strong religious connotations, expressing a suffering experienced in response to having sinned against God. This was primarily the way nineteenth-century melancholic patients themselves explained their emotional suffering – as a torturous pain divinely inflicted in response to having committed ‘the unpardonable sin’. This spiritual early modern conception of mental pain was translated by Victorian physicians onto the pages of asylum casebooks as ‘religious delusions’ brought on by the cerebral disorder of melancholia.

‘Suicidal’, conversely, was born into medical language as a practical term with legal implications. As a result of early nineteenth-century lunacy law reform culminating in the 1845 Lunacy Acts, when patients arrived into the Victorian asylum they did so accompanied by a medical certificate of insanity and a reception order, which asked the certifying authority to state (largely for reasons of safety) whether the lunatic was ‘epileptic’, ‘suicidal’, or ‘dangerous to others’. This information was transferred to the asylum casebook, where a diagnosis would be entered alongside it. Such information would then be brought together into neat tables, tallied up, and reported to the Lunacy Commission on an annual basis. Year after year, such statistical tables indicated that of all suicidal lunatics, the vast majority were melancholics, and of all melancholics, the majority were suicidal.

Template for a medical certificate of insanity, provided as an appendix to the 1845 Care and Treatment of Lunatics Act.

Historians have concluded that due to the way it was deployed, ‘suicidal’ was semantically ambivalent, a conundrum also noted by Victorian physicians themselves. The term was believed to be applied to a range of different acts and expressions, and while statistical reports suggested that a large number of asylums patients were suicidal, remarkably few suicides occurred in the asylum. Thus, both nineteenth-century physicians and twentieth- and twenty-first century historians have suggested that the term ‘suicidal’ was misleading, arguing that only a small number of those who received the label upon certification were in fact ‘actively’ suicidal.

However, the practices that created the medical concept ‘suicidal’ and wedded it to melancholia and mental pain did not generate incorrect information, they produced context-specific knowledge that had, just like other kinds of medico-scientific knowledge, an internal logic. The creation of ‘suicidal’ as a category on medical certificates generated numerical data on the suicidality of asylum patients, data that was recorded together with a diagnosis. Such information was merged into statistical tables and supplied to the Lunacy Commission on a yearly basis, and enabled physicians to argue that melancholics were by far the most ‘suicidal’ of all lunatics. At the same time, melancholic patients expressed a profound spiritual pain and suffering, translated by their doctors as an intolerable mental pain that was a psychological manifestation of a disordered neurological process. This pain was assigned as the chief cause of the overwhelming suicidality that asylum statistics suggested to be a typical feature of melancholia.The relationship between melancholia, mental pain, and suicidality eventually became self-perpetuating and circular, as illustrated by the following warning issued by a famous Victorian physician: ‘Suicidal feelings and attempts are common in melancholia, so much so that one suspects their actual or possible existence even when they have not been openly manifested.’

In twenty-first century psy-literature, the close relationship between mental pain and suicidality is equally taken for granted – intolerable mental pain produces suicidal thoughts and gestures, which sometimes lead to suicide. While such similarities across time and space could be perceived as speaking to a universal, timeless nature of this assumption, a closer look at its roots suggests a more complex picture. The belief that profound mental pain leads human beings to become suicidal is neither self-evident nor inevitable – it emerged as medical knowledge through the intersecting of spiritual beliefs, physiological language, and statistical practices.

The Age of Love: acid house as a charismatic religious uprising

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Jules Evans

At the moment I’m researching the cultural practices of ecstasy in the 20th century, which has given me the excuse to read some fine books on the history of pop music. The latest is Matthew Collin’s Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, first published way back in 1997 and since updated. It’s a bravura piece of historical journalism.

Collin begins by tracing the history of MDMA, from its first patenting by Merck in 1912 as a blood-clotting pharmaceutical, to its rediscovery by Russian emigre chemist Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin synthesised various psychedelic drugs in his home laboratory in California and tried them out with his friends. He tried MDMA in 1967, and introduced it to an elderly psychologist friend, Leo Zoff, a decade later. Zoff in turn introduced the drug to thousands of his fellow therapists over the course of the late 70s and 80s.

Collin writes: ‘The therapeutic community is estimated to have distributed in the region of half a million doses of the drug in a decade. Therapists would give their patients MDMA during their sessions to break down mental barriers and enhance communication and intimacy.’ It was initially known as Adam, a name ‘with subtle religious overtones’ (yes, very subtle), and then became known as Empathy or, sometimes, XTC.

Alexander Shulgin in his home laboratory

The fledgling E community tried to avoid the mistakes made with LSD in the 1960s, and to heed Aldous Huxley’s advice to keep it among the intelligentsia and away from the masses. Timothy Leary, who famously ignored Huxley’s advice in the 60s, was in agreement this time: ‘Let’s face it, we’re talking about an elitist experience [for] sophisticated people…We’re talking about dedicated searchers who are entitled, who’ve earned a bit of XTC.’ But something as fun as E was always going to be hard to keep a secret. Evangelical pill-heads started to distribute the drug more widely, complete with flight manuals explaining how to take it (‘this is a toll for reaching out and touching others in soul and spirit’). And then the more business-minded started to flog it across the US.

It proved particularly popular in gay discos, like the Paradise Garage in New York, where DJ Larry Levan created a heady mixture of the spiritual and the profane: ‘Under the spell of Levan’s narcotic mix, people seemed to transcend human limits’ wrote journalist Frank Own. ‘Men crawled around on their hands and knees howling like dogs, while others gyrated and leapt as if they could fly.’ In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles created a similarly euphoric vibe at the Warehouse. It was a church for the unchurched: ‘It was very soulful, very spiritual”, Knuckles tells Collin. ‘For most of the people that went there it was church for them.’

Knuckles helped to develop the mechanics of acid house ecstasy: he bought a Roland TR-909 drum computer, to create layers of pounding drum and piano. A trio calling themselves Phuture used another machine, the Roland TB-303, originally intended to generate basslines for guitarists to practice with, to create alien-sounding electronic squelches that would come to typify acid house. Meanwhile, in Detroit, three musicians inspired by Kraftwerk and Alvin Toffler’s futurology – Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson – developed a more robotic, emotionally-sparse electronic music, which they called techno. If house music incorporated some of the soulful and uplifting vibe of gospel, techno was more transhumanist, imagining a dystopian future of man-as-machine. Here’s what is often considered the first ‘acid techno’ track: Phuture’s Acid Tracks.

The tension between house and techno is a fissure running through ecstasy culture. Is it transcendent spiritual music re-connecting us to some childlike golden age, or machine noise pounding us into an emotionless robot future? Is the high we feel an intimation of the divine, or merely a chemical rush? There weren’t always clear battle-lines between these two philosophies – at a club, you could find yourself dancing with a robot-man on one side and a Goa trance elf on the other.

The Summer of Love as a charismatic revival

E was criminalised in the US in 1985, but by that point the drug had already gone international, in large part thanks to the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho, the controversial multi-millionaire Indian guru. Many of his followers took the drug, and one devotee, Hugh Milne, wrote in his book, Bhagwan – The God That Failed – that ‘the euphoric mood-altering drug Ecstasy was discreetly slipped into rich sannyassins’ drinks just before fund-raising interviews’. By the mid-1980s, according to Arno Adellars, ‘the Dutch followers of Bhagwan were taking so much ecstasy that several supply lines were necessary to meet the demand’. E had come to Europe.

The early days of E in the UK, from 1987 to 1989, have some of the hallmarks of a charismatic religious revival, akin to, say, the Toronto Airport Blessing that would occur in Canada in 1994. In both movements, airport hangars full of devotees found themselves twitching, jerking, even barking with ecstasy. In both, there was an apocalyptic sense that the world was changing forever, that a new age of love was dawning. In both, the inhibitions and self-control of adulthood were thrown off and the innocence of infancy embraced: charismatic Christians spoke in tongues (babbling like babies in a pre-verbal Eden), while raver culture embraced teddy bears, lollipops, dummies, romper-suits, and danced to remixes of themes from kids TV shows.

Here’s some footage of the Toronto Blessing:

And here’s a Sunrise warehouse rave from the Summer of Love:

Certain clubs inspired particular religious fervour, like the Hacienda in Manchester, or Danny Rampling’s Shoom in Southwark. Collin writes: ‘One Shoomer gave away all his possessions and the following weekend was seen running naked down the Portobello Road. Others came to believe that there were supernatural forces of Good and Evil battling for the soul of the city…A few, lost in Shoom, convinced themselves that Danny Rampling was some kind of messiah: the master of the dance, the orchestrator of emotions.’

But there was one big difference between the Summer of Love and the charismatic Christian Revival. When people come down from the emotional high of the Charismatic revival, those who needed something more intellectually sound could find some support in the Bible, or social support in community groups, or a sense of civic purpose in social action. There was precious little philosophy beneath the Summer of Love, except for the music, and the chemicals. The Sixties counter-culture was constituted in movies, literature, art, poetry. Where was the non-musical counter-culture of the ‘chemical generation’, besides Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (more of a paean to smack) and Damien Hirst’s hilarious pharmacy cabinets? The movies that tried to capture E culture were dire (The Beach, Human Traffic, It’s All Gone Pete Tong) perhaps because there was very little to capture.

And, as Alexander Shulgin noted, E follows the law of diminishing returns. The first times are incredible, the intensest surge of dopamine your nervous system has ever felt. The next few times are also great, but the body soon becomes accustomed to the drug. So clubbers searched for a way to get back to that peak experience, with cocktails of LSD, amphetamine, ketamine, cocaine, mushrooms, freebase. The collective euphoria of the dancefloor turned darker, uglier. People lost it, ended up in mental homes. Others ‘found solace in religion, joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Hare Krishnas, getting involved with Bahgwan Shree Rajneesh or other New Age cults.’

Many found solace in entrepreneurialism, making money from the business of secular collective ecstasy. In this, perhaps, rave culture is also akin to the mega-churches of the charismatic Christian revival. Except that, in the club scene, the business was rapidly taken over by criminal gangs, including some of the old football firms who’d by now come down from their initial high and realised they didn’t love everyone. From Sunrise raves in London to the Hacienda in Manchester, criminal gangs moved in, brandishing shotguns and machetes, giving club entrepreneurs the stark choice of either cutting them in, or being cut out. The country’s seemingly limitless demand for E and other drugs made fortunes for criminal networks, and it was this, Collin suggests, that inevitably provoked the Establishment into trying to control acid house.

The Jilted Generation

The Thatcher and Major governments’ various attempts at controlling and legislating the movement were clumsy, none more so than the Criminal Justice Bill of 1994, which outlawed ‘the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’ in outdoor ‘raves’. Collin notes: ‘Although other youth movements had inspired legal changes, never before, despite years of post-war moral panics about the activities of teddy boys, mods, hippies and punks, had a government considered young people’s music so subversive as to attempt to prohibit it.’

Playing Al-Qaeda to the Major government’s neo-cons were a techno-anarchist collective called Spiral Tribe, who travelled across England with their sound-system in the summer of 1991. For the members of Spiral Tribe, acid techno was not a weekend thrill, it was a hardcore lifestyle. The members showed their complete devotion to it by shaving their heads like monks or military recruits, and wearing black military fatigues. The Tribe’s charismatic spokesperson, Mark Harrison, says: ‘The unspoken rule or initiation with Spiral Tribe was that you had to live it, twenty-four hours a day.’

Spiral Tribe attempt to put the voodoo on Canary Wharf

Collin writes: ‘Spiral Tribe began to believe that techno was the new folk music…and for it to take proper physical and psychological effect it must be played as loud and for as long as possible; they started to imagine that the Spiral Tribe was in some way connected to prehistoric tribes of nomads…that free parties were shamanic rites which…could reconnect urban youth to the earth…thus averting imminent ecological crisis.’ Harrison would sound positively Pythagorean in his vision: ‘As legend would have it, there’s a musical note that will free the people..’ Their techno-pagan antics culminated in an abortive attempt to ‘zap’ Canary Wharf with techno, thereby stripping the evil pyramid of its dark power. ‘Even though it only lasted one hour, we had to do it’, explains Harrison. ‘It was a victory for us because that pyramid doesn’t work any more, it doesn’t have that power’.

Predictably, Spiral Tribe were soon closed down, although the techno-crustie resistance continues and elements of it survived into the Occupy movement, another somewhat millenarial uprising. Meanwhile, the Criminal Justice Bill did nothing to end the popularity of electronic music. While the illegal rave scene declined, clubs became professionalised, and a new breed of superclub rose up – Gatecrasher, Cream, Renaissance, Ministry of Sound. Dance music became like disco – a brief chemical holiday from the ennui of 9 to 5 office capitalism. The sounds and visuals of dance music became ubiquitous, heard and seen in every movie or advert. It became part of the establishment, with DJ Tiesto playing the 2004 Olympic opening ceremony, and Underworld playing the 2012 Ceremony. The nation’s drug-taking has not gone down, however, so criminal gangs must presumably still be making a killing…but the trade seems to have become more organised.

Now, in the last two or three years, dance music has suddenly gone mainstream in the US. In the late noughties, people were amazed that top DJs like Paul Oakenfold could earn £750,000 a year. Now, thanks to the enormous US dance scene, DJ Tiesto earns a reported $250,000 a night, and an incredible $22 million a year. ‘Rave culture’, writes Rolling Stone this month, ‘has taken over this generation full bore’. Next month sees one of the biggest ever electronic dance festivals – the Electronic Daisy Chain in Las Vegas. To British retired ravers in their 30s and 40s, the new revival may seem garish and commercial. But to the kids on the dancefloor, on their first pill, it must seem like the Age of Love is finally dawning.

Now We Are Two

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Thomas Dixon

Today marks the second birthday of the History of Emotions blog. Happy birthday to us – and thanks to all our contributors and readers over the past two years! Fifty different people have written for the blog, and it currently receives about 5,000 page views per month.

This time last year we ran a series of posts on ‘What is the History of Emotions?‘ to mark our first birthday, and also listed our ten most read posts for the year.

Since then we have published 75 more posts, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to focus on some of the highlights and most read articles of the last twelve months. Several of these were written by Jules Evans, our Policy Director and blog editor.

Many of you will already know Jules, who is a researcher, philosopher and author who was named this week as one of the AHRC and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers for 2013. He has been working with us at the Centre for the History of the Emotions since 2011. Last year, Jules won AHRC funding for a ‘Connected Communities’ project on grassroots philosophy and its roles in building communities, past and present.

So, the following highlights from the last twelve months include our most read posts and also a few selected by me as personal favourites. With difficulty I’ve whittled it down to the top eighteen! They are listed here in order of publication, starting a year ago:

James O’Shaughnessy on how the Tories got the well-being bug
by Jules Evans

The uses of anger in medieval and early modern medicine
by Elena Carrera

Does novel-reading enhance empathy?
by Roman Krznaric

What is the relationship between philosophy and comedy?
by Jules Evans

Sensibilité and information processing: Historical approaches to “Striving to Feel”
by William M. Reddy

Spinoza: Defender of the Passions?
by Matthew Kisner

On English melancholy
by Jules Evans

“Sisu”: The Finnish for “Stiff Upper Lip”?
by Tuomas Tepora

The Theatre of Pain
by Rob Boddice

Moving Pictures
by Stephanie Downes

An Interview with Martha Nussbaum on Neo-Stoicism
by Jules Evans

Sick of sickness! Recovering a Happier History
by Hannah Newton

Making Love with Constance Maynard
by Thomas Dixon

New AHRC Report on Grassroots Philosophy
by Jules Evans

The Politics of Empathy
by Mark Honigsbaum

The Many Faces of Emotion
by Stephanie Downes and Stephanie Trigg

The Carnival of Lost Emotions
by Chris Millard

Bad Vibrations: the history of the idea of music as pathology
An Interview with James Kennaway by Jules Evans

You can browse all of Jules Evans’s pieces for the History of Emotions blog here (and all of mine here). If you would like to write for the History of Emotions blog then do please get in touch with Jules or me.

Bad Vibrations: the history of the idea of music as pathology

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Jules Evans

Last year, I was asked to chair a panel on music and emotions at the Society for the Social History of Medicine’s annual conference. I knew next to nothing about the topic, but enjoyed hearing the talks. Since then, I’ve become fascinated by the social history of music, its emotional power over individuals and crowds, and the attempt by authorities to control that power. I recently contacted and interviewed one of the panelists from that session, Dr James Kennaway from Oxford University (pictured right), who’s written an excellent book called Bad Vibrations: the history of the idea of music as a cause of disease. Here’s our conversation.

JE: The idea of music as something dangerous, something that potentially undermines our rationality and rouses our passions, begins in Plato and Pythagoras. We see it re-appear somewhat through the Middle Ages. But the idea of ‘nervous music’ as a cause of pathology really begins in the 18th century, is that right?

JK: Yes, at the beginning of the 18th century, we see the appearance of the idea of music as stimulation. A discourse that had previously been philosophical or religious becomes medical. Previously, as you say, music theory had been more influenced by Pythagoras and Plato’s idea that music can connect us to cosmic harmony and the music of the spheres. During the Scientific Revolution, people started to take a more empirical approach, doing experiments with acoustics for example. Then, at the beginning of the 18th Century, when the Cult of Sensibility starts to dominate, people began thinking of music calming the nerves. By the end of the 18th Century, music gets incorporated into a medical critique of stimulation, a critique one particularly finds in the work of George Cheyne.

JE: Cheyne wrote The English Malady, claiming that modern temperaments were over-stimulated by luxurious living and stimulants like coffee.

JK: Right. He didn’t discuss music, but through other writers, music gradually came to be thought of as a nerve-stimulant, like coffee or snuff. The French Revolution increased anxiety about over-stimulation. Then, suddenly, within a generation, you find thousands of examples of people expressing anxiety about music over-stimulating people’s nerves and causing nervous exhaustion, fainting or even death.

A Regency cartoon of a dandy fainting at the opera

JE: Tell me about ‘Brunonianism’.

Ah, John Brown, one of my favourite figures – I have a framed portrait of him in my office. He was a physician, who started off in Edinburgh as assistant to William Cullen, one of the most distinguished physicians of his day. The Edinburgh Medical School was the centre of the ‘nervous stimulation’ school of medicine. Brown took this approach to an extreme, arguing that all illness was a result of either over-stimulation or under-stimulation of the nerves. He became famous for prescribing vast quantities of whisky and opium for his patients and himself. Despite calling himself the ‘Newton of medicine’, his fame was brief, but his theory of nerve-stimulation as the cause of illness – known as ‘Brunonianism’ – influenced the idea of music causing illness by over-stimulating the nerves. For example, Richard Eastcott in his 1793 Sketches of the Origin, Progress and Effects of Music gives several examples of music causing fits. We hear of how at a premiere of Handel’s oratorio Esther, a ‘celebrated chorus singer’ became ‘violently agitated’ to such an extent that he died. Another writer, Michael Wagner, wrote in 1794 of a sick music lover who died from playing the triangle.

JE: The glass harmonica was thought to be especially dangerous to the nerves.

JK: Yes, there were many reports of people dropping dead from playing the glass harmonica, an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin in the early 1760s. It was considered particularly dangerous for women’s nerves. In 1786, for example, the musician Karl Leopold Rollig suggested the instrument could ‘make women faint; send a dog into convulsions, make a sleeping girl wake screaming through a chord of diminished seventh, and even cause the death of one very young.’ It was also associated with Mesmerism – Mesmer first introduced the instrument to Mozart. It was thought to stimulate the nerves via vibrations through the fingers, so people even invented gloves infused with chemicals to protect women as they played.

JE: You write in the book about how this new materialist theory of ‘nervous music’ replaced an older spiritual understanding of music, and you position this within a broader ‘disenchantment of the world’. There’s a nice quote from Max Weber’s Rational and Social Foundations of Music about a shift from ‘music as incantation to music as calculation’. Is it fair to say that ecstatic responses to music that may have been previously accepted became pathologised in the 18th Century?

Well, it’s complex. There are counter-currents too, in Shaftesbury for example, who helped to rehabilitate the idea of ‘enthusiasm’. But certainly, the idea of individual self-control becomes much, much more self-important in the bourgeois era, as compared to the feudalist era. Loss of self-control becomes the central idea in the new science of psychiatry in the early 19th century. All the old questions of self-control which used to be a part of moral philosophy or theology become medicalised and classified under names like ‘kleptomania’ [first described in 1816]. That process is ongoing in the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

JE: Although one could also say that the moral and the medical have always been a bit blurred – Socrates says the philosopher is like a doctor, Cicero says philosophy is ‘a medical art for the soul’, Plato says that ethical errors lead to sicknesses of the soul. It’s always been a bit mixed up.

JK: Yes, and a lot of the medical anxieties from the 18th century on are really moral condemnations.

JE: So music gets reduced in the 18th century from Pythagoras’ cosmic conductor to a nervous stimulant like coffee or snuff.

JK: Yes. The rise of this mechanistic, medicalised model of music as pathology is a disaster for music’s status. Kant says music is like cooking or perfume, not really an art at all. Music suffers a spectacular decline in status. And yet, somehow in the early 19th century, Kant’s philosophy is taken up by German Romantic thinkers, who use it to make music more important than ever.

JE: How did that happen?

Beethoven: serious, Kantian, masculine music

JK: It happens particularly through the writings of Wilheim Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, two Romantic thinkers who both emphasised the idea of music inspiring religious awe. And then Schopenhauer put forward the idea that music was the purest of all the arts. In some ways, the cult of feeling and the idea of the extreme nervous effect of music was perfect for the Romantics. ETA Hoffmann, for example, wrote about a mad musician called Johannes Kreisler, and also about a singer who dies because of her voice. On the other hand, Romantics also thought of music in very Kantian terms, as something completely removed from the body, completely removed from this world. You also find that idea in Hoffmann’s writing on Beethoven, for example. So the Romantics divide music into two categories – serious, transcendental music for men, like Beethoven, and unserious, unhealthy, mechanical music for hysterical women, typified for German Romantics by Rossini.

JK: In the Romantic era’s cult of genius, there seems to be a return to Plato’s idea of the musician / poet as someone divinely mad.

JK: Yes, the idea of the mad genius really gets going in music in the 1840s and 1850s. It receives scientific approval with the work of Jacques-Joseph Moreau. He was an eccentric psychiatrist who took a bunch of his lunatic patients to the Middle East, got them all hooked on hashish, and then came back and introduced hash to Paris and to figures like Baudelaire.

JE: Wow!

JK: He also wrote a book on genius as a neurological condition, which influenced later theorists of degeneration like Lambroso.

JE: And then the Romantic cult of the genius culminates in Wagner. Your book, which has a cartoon of Wagner attacking someone’s ear-drum on the cover, explores how Wagner came to be a focus for all these anxieties about the pathological influence of music.

Wagner attacking a listener’s ear-drums

JK: Yes, he aroused more panic than anybody before or since. That was because he was so obnoxious, and he offended so many people with his utterances and his womanizing. Particularly after he published his anti-Semitic essay on Judaism, you notice that a lot of the people who attack Wagner’s music are Jewish liberals. And there was also something inherently disturbing about the music he made. Particularly Tristan und Isolde. You’d think Die Walkure would cause the most fuss, with its on-stage incest, but Tristan really freaks people out, because the music is so self-consciously erotic. It delays the resolution of the first chord for four and a half hours.

JE: Critics worried that Wagner’s music could exhaust your nerves, or even kill you, as it is supposed to have killed some of the musicians who performed it. Mark Twain wrote of Tristan: ‘I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away.’ Some worried it could even turn listeners gay.

JK: Indeed.

JE: And it’s notable that critics condemned it for having an immoral lack of rhythm. I find that interesting considering all the 20th century condemnations of pop music precisely for being too rhythmic or repetitive.

JK: The lesson is that people identify music they don’t like, and then they find a reason to condemn it. But there is something disconcerting in the way Wagner’s music speeds up, slows down, shifts, never rests in a particular chord.

JE: The idea that Wagner is bad for our health and morality is still very much with us – the London Review of Books published a piece recently, ‘Is Wagner bad for us?’ A new production of Tannhauser was cancelled this month after audience members had to be medically treated. And Lars Von Trier used the Tristan prelude for the apocalyptic opening to his film, Melancholia.

JK: Yes. I was at Bayreuth recently, and they had ambulances waiting outside the concert hall.

JE: Your book then explores how, in the 20th century, the discourse of music as pathological became racialized.

JK: Yes, people barely mention race until the 1890s. In fact, the discourse of music as pathology is used as a defence against anti-Semitism in Wagner. Then that same discourse ends up being used by the Nazis against jazz music, which they portrayed as something degenerate and primitive.

JE: Was there a similar moral panic against jazz in the United States?

JK: There was a big moral panic against jazz in 1922. It was associated with single white women – flappers – and young black men. It was associated with sex. It was regarded as primitive, but also hyper-modern. So on the one hand it could supposedly lead to atavism, but also to modern nerve illnesses like neurasthenia. Then jazz becomes fairly mainstream in the late 1920s, partly through Jewish musicians like Gershwin, partly through white big-band leaders like Paul Whiteman, and partly through Duke Ellington making it more like classical music.

JE: Then all the same anxieties come out even stronger with rock and roll in the 1950s. I suppose by then it was more associated with the new teenage consumer class, with their radios, cars and dances – the independence of teenagers exacerbated the panic. I particularly liked, in your book, the 1960s paranoia that rock and roll might be a Communist Pavlovian plot.

JK: Ah yes, David Noebel, the gift that keeps on giving. So, after World War II, behaviourism was very influential in psychology, along with the idea that internal mental states were irrelevant and easily manipulable by outside agents. After the Korean War, when US POWs denounced America on Korean TV, there was a general panic about brainwashing and mind control, whipped up by a CIA agent and journalist called Edward Hunter, who was the first person to use the term ‘brainwashing’. This paranoia about brain-washing fitted very nicely with the culture wars in the 1960s. So in 1965, David Noebel, this cultural conservative on the Religious Right, wrote a pamphlet in 1965 called ‘Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles’. He thought the Beatles were a communist conspiracy invented in the basement of the Kremlin by Pavlov. It was widely quoted.

JE: Then in the 1980s, the panic about rock and roll abruptly turns into a Satanic panic.

JK: Yes, it was amazing how quickly it shifted. Suddenly, even before the end of the Cold War, people forgot about the Communists and got very worked up about Satanic influences in pop music. The Commies in the Cold War were only filling in for Evil anyway. Satan’s the purest version of it.

JE: And people got very worried about ‘back-masking’ – the idea that if you played certain records backwards, like Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, you’d find hidden Satanic messages. One evangelist even claimed the theme tune to Mr Ed played backwards said ‘someone heard this song for Satan’.

JK: It’s interesting to look back now that all these rock stars are amiable pensioners like Ozzy Osbourne or Sir Mick Jagger, and think how much panic they caused.

JE: And yet you didn’t need to play their music backwards to find Satanic messages – a lot of rock musicians were very explicitly dabbling in the occult and the Satanic. Jimmy Page really did buy Aleister Crowley’s cottage, he also worked on the soundtrack for a film called Lucifer Rising.

JK: I think a lot of this is more about a cult of masculinity for teenage boys trying to shock their parents with the most provocative thing they can find, ie Satan.

JE: Yes, and I suppose it’s often a complete hodge-podge of ideas in heavy metal – Satan, Dionysus, Celtic myth, Lord of the Rings, whatever.

JK: The amazing thing is that some grown ups ever took it seriously.

JE: Right at the end of the book, you suggest that today these sorts of moral / medical panics are focused on technology, on the internet for example, or smart phones. I agree. I wonder if that’s a sad indictment of the state of modern pop music – it’s so bad, no one even bothers condemning it anymore.

JK: Well, in some ways they’re the same thing. New technology leads to new types of music, and new anxieties. Like the gramophone, or ‘i-dosing’ through binaural beats, which recently provoked a lot of concern. We’re in a golden age of moral panics.

Edison’s gramophone was marketed as a ‘mood machine’ capable of giving you ‘pep’ or ‘soothing the nerves’ as needed.

JE: Yes, but the panics are not really about music anymore.

JK: Well, certainly pop music is dying on its feet.

JE: OK, finally, I’d like to know your position on the power of music. Your book focuses mainly on the accounts of establishment figures (politicians, scientists, religious leaders) and their anxiety about the power of music. You suggest that their discourse on the pathology of music is ‘almost entirely nonsense’. Does that mean you don’t think music has any power over us? Because if you talk to musicians, or to fans, many of them would actually agree that music has tremendous power over us. Musicians want to stir up the audience’s emotions, to bring their audience to an almost orgasmic ecstasy, to cause uproar, to transform society. And sometimes they succeed. So is the idea that music has tremendous power over us necessarily nonsense?

JK: Well, there are some rare medical conditions which can be provoked by music, like musical epilepsy. And dancing or playing music can cause heart attacks in people with weak hearts. But in those instances it’s not the case that the music killed them.

Of course, music has enormous power over our bodies, over group dynamics. That’s why people sing in church or in armies. Where people go wrong, in the ‘music as pathology’ discourse, is they get the mechanism wrong. They suggest there is a direct neurological effect, and humans are entirely passive. That’s not the case. Music only has power over us when we go with it. Take ‘Beatlemania’. It’s not that the music has some magical power and the screaming teenage girls are passive neurological machines being worked upon. If that was the case the music would provoke the same reactions now. The girls are making a choice to go with it.

JE: You mention some of the new books on the neurology of music that have come out in the last decade. Do those books in some ways mark a return of the mechanistic nerve-vibrating theory of music?

JK: What do you mean?

JE: Well, for example, Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music explores the different frequencies of different chords, and how they make us feel. This reminds me of Pythagorean theories of musical vibrations.

JK: Although the neuroscientists are not talking about music as cosmic harmony, they’re only interested in its effect on individuals’ brains. The Kantian, transcendental model of music is in serious trouble at the moment.

JE: That’s a pity.

JK: It is. Some of my own private ideas about music are Kantian, but I wouldn’t defend them in the academic field.

I haven’t yet read the neuroscientists that James refers to, but Levitin’s work, at least, isn’t entirely mechanistic. He talks about how music causes emotions in us by establishing and then violating expectations – and how our expectations are developed from birth onwards by our culture. That really interests me, the idea of how we get pleasure from artists establishing and then violating cultural expectations.

Levitin also talks about those mysterious moments when an artist suddenly transcends mere technical mastery, when they really start to feel it, and the audience feels it too. Those moments when the spirit of ecstasy descends, unexpectedly and joyously, and the technical rote-playing comes alive – like this moment, from the Blur Hyde Park gig. The band had broken up in 2001, partly because of Graham Coxon’s alcoholism. A decade later, they reunite for two gigs in Hyde Park. They play Beetlebum as the sun sets, and at the end of the song, in Coxon’s guitar solo, the spirit descends on him, and everyone recognises it. That’s part of the joy of music: the unpredictability, not knowing if the spirit will descend or not, and the joy when suddenly it’s there, in artists where perhaps you no longer expected it.

PS Also on music and the emotions, you might enjoy this interview I did with Sister Bliss, from Faithless, about dance music as secular collective ecstasy.

The History of Emotions Blog

Conversations about the history of feeling from www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions