Feelings, Health, and Cruelty in 19th-Century Divorce Cases

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. 

In my previous post on this blog I wrote about Oscar Wilde’s famous courtroom defence of  the ‘love that dare not speak his name’. Whatever its exact meaning, Wilde’s speech aroused strong feelings in its hearers. It is recorded that it was greeted with some applause, mingled with hisses, from the public gallery, at which the judge was moved to exclaim:

If there is the slightest manifestation of feeling I shall have the Court cleared. There must be complete silence preserved.

This is a wonderfully Victorian judicial pronouncement, and I am interested by what it implies about feeling, as a threatening and unseen force, the manifestation of which could disrupt the proper, silent operation of justice. When the jury could not reach a conclusion in the first Wilde trial, there was a retrial. Again there were outbursts from the public gallery, to which the judge again reacted vigorously:

These interruptions are offensive to me beyond anything that can be described. To have to try a case of this kind, to keep the scales even and do one’s duty is hard enough; but to be pestered with the applause or expressions of feeling of senseless people who have no business to be here at all except for the gratification of morbid curiosity, is too much.

The gratification of morbid passions, like the manifestation of excited feelings, was not a proper activity for a Victorian courtroom. But these were not the only ways that feelings and passions made their way into the legal arena (I have written in the Journal of Victorian Culture, for instance, about the tears of judges and others in Victorian courtrooms).

In the same month that the Wilde scandal was unfolding in the Central Criminal Court, another, less remembered sex scandal was being played out a ten-minute walk away in the Divorce Court, within the recently opened Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand.

The matter at hand had similarities with the Wilde case – a prominent member of high society being accused of ‘abominable’ and ‘unnatural’ crimes. While Wilde’s principal accuser had been the Marquess of Queensberry, the accuser of Earl Russell – grandson of the erstwhile Prime Minister, and elder brother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell – was his own wife, Countess Russell – previously Mabel Edith Scott, who made her living by singing on the variety stage.

The Countess repeatedly and publicly alleged that her husband had engaged in ‘unnatural’ crimes with a certain Mr Roberts. When Earl Russell sued for divorce in 1895 it was on the grounds that these allegations amounted to an act of cruelty by his wife against him. Since 1858 there had been a jury in such cases and in this case they found in favour of the Earl. The allegations made by the Countess (and her mother), the jury thought, were clearly the worst kind of cruelty.

The Court of Appeal and the House of Lords disagreed, however, and to understand why we need briefly to look at the way that the legal concept of ‘cruelty’, as used in divorce cases, had developed during the previous hundred years.

The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 transferred matrimonial cases from ecclesiastical to civil jurisdiction.The newly created secular Divorce Court inherited the rules and principles that had governed the ecclesiastical court prior to that date. And by far the most frequently cited precedent, in cases involving the allegation of cruelty, was the judgement delivered by Lord Stowell in 1790 in the case of Evans v. Evans.

The key tenet was that cruelty must have a bodily aspect – it must give rise to injury to ‘life, limb, or health’ or to reasonable fear of such bodily injury. Lord Stowell explicitly excluded hurt feelings from the category of cruelty:

What merely wounds the mental feelings is in few cases to be admitted, where it is not accompanied with bodily injury, either actual or menaced. Mere austerity of temper, petulance of manners, rudeness of language, a want of civil attention and accommodation, even occasional sallies of passion, if they do not threaten bodily harm, do not amount to legal cruelty.

Stowell’s view was that those who had made an ‘injudicious connection’, no matter how unhappy their married lives, should ‘suffer in silence’ unless they were in imminent physical danger. As in the judicial responses to the public gallery in the Wilde trials, feelings were to be kept silent:

Everybody must feel a wish to sever those who wish to live separate from each other, who cannot live together with any degree of harmony, and consequently with any degree of happiness, but my situation does not allow me to indulge feelings, much less the first feelings of an individual; the law has said that married persons shall not be legally separated on the mere disinclination of one or both to cohabit together.

During the first decades of the secular Divorce Court’s existence, this principle that separations should be granted to protect the body rather than the feelings was frequently reiterated.However, there were occasional cases that suggested the exclusion of injury to the feelings was not absolute.  These fell into two categories.

First, from time to time judges seemed to concern themselves with the impact of the respondent’s conduct on the feelings of the petitioner – especially when that conduct was an outrage to the feelings of a respectable person – for instance in cases where a husband spat in his wife’s face, or treated her in public like a common prostitute, or placed her own domestic servants in a position of authority over her. Countess Russell’s allegation that her husband had engaged in ‘unnatural practices’ was another such case where any respectable person’s feelings would be outraged.

The second kind of case where the petitioner’s emotional state was invoked involved medical evidence. In Stowell’s landmark judgement, he had referred to harm to ‘life, limb, or health’. The case of Kelly v. Kelly in 1869 – involving a tyrannical clergyman’s mistreatment of his wife – seemed to establish the principle that harm to mental health as well as harm to bodily health could qualify as cruelty. This meant not only that nervous disorders brought on by psychological cruelty could be considered grounds for divorce, but also that medical experts were of increasing importance, in determining whether the petitioner’s mental and physical health had truly been damaged.

Despite this move away from a purely physical definition of cruelty, there was still resentment among Victorian feminists about the dominant legal interpretation of ‘cruelty’, as is evident in the editorial pictured below from The Women’s Penny Paper in 1890.

The decision of the Court of Appeal in the Russell case, reaffirmed by the House of Lords, seemed to change things only a little. It reinforced both the Stowell principle that mere injury to feelings was no ground for divorce, and also the suggestion that it was injury to health that must be proved – something that Earl Russell’s lawyers had not even attempted to establish.

However, the category of ‘cruelty’ had in fact expanded considerably since 1790. The discussions in the House of Lords on the Russell case in 1897 made explicit what had already been hinted at by earlier judgements – that any behaviour that even led to a reasonable apprehension of injury to mental health could be considered legal cruelty. That was a broad definition that left plenty of room for judicial discretion in offering protection to the feelings as well as the body of the petitioner.

The survey of Victorian divorce cases I have undertaken so far has encouraged me to think about ways that official ideologies – official regimes of emotion – have come into contact with, and tried to classify and control, the feelings associated with everyday life in general and with marital relations in particular.

The whole process can be seen – as revealed in the comment of the judges in the Wilde trials with which I started – as an attempt to eliminate, whether by punishment, repression or medicine, troublesome and unwanted feelings.

In a typical divorce case there were three sets of unwanted feelings to deal with. First, there were the respondent’s passions – dangerous monsters, unleashed on the body or mind of the petitioner. A typical case would involve violence and authoritarian control, often exacerbated by drink, which had the effect of strengthening the passions and weakening the will.

Then there were the feelings of the petitioner, which may have become excited, strained or outraged by the cruelty of the respondent and which, like vulnerable and innocent children, needed to be protected by the Court.

Finally, in the emotional triangulation of the Divorce Court, there were the feelings of the judge and the jury. These were particularly problematic – like suggestible and muddle-headed theatre-goers who were too easily swayed by the performance.

In the first case in which a jury was asked to decide on questions of cruelty, in May 1858, the judge, the magnificently named Sir Cresswell Cresswell, reflected that previously:

the judges, who have had the sole determination of such questions, used to take the papers home and read them there, and if the first perusal unavoidably excited feelings of indignation on one side or the other, they had ample time for a calm re-consideration.

Now that juries found themselves in a similar position, Cresswell continued, they must ‘not allow themselves to be carried away with feelings of partiality, which may have been excited.’ Instead the jury must be ‘calm and cautious’ in their deliberations. Sir Cresswell Cresswell’s pioneering work in the new secular divorce court was marked by a poem in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1861, including the lines ‘There’s many a wrong we could redress well, If aided by Sir Cresswell Cresswell.’

In the case in May 1858, the jury found in favour of the beaten wife and against her husband who was ‘a very ill-tempered person, who was in the habit of knocking her about when he was in a passion.’ The verdict in this historic case was met with applause from the public gallery to which Creswell responded by saying he ‘could not tolerate such a manifestation of feeling in a court of justice.’

And in 1912, when a Royal Commission started the process which would ultimately lead to reforms to the divorce laws, again it was ‘feelings’ that were blamed. The former President of the Divorce Court, Sir John Bigham, spoke about the difficulty of persuading juries to act in accordance with the ‘injury’ definition reaffirmed in the Russell case. Bigham told the Royal Commission:

when once you get a question in the hands of a jury you do not know what is going to happen. They disregard all directions and give their verdict (probably quite rightly) according to their feelings.

Bigham later made similar remarks about juries in divorce cases brought by wives petitioning on the grounds of adultery: ‘Their feelings are always in favour of the lady – always.’

Whether in the domestic arena, in the public gallery, or even in the jury room, the task seemed to be to prevent the tangible, physical manifestation of these powerful but invisible psychic forces, the ‘feelings’.

 

Feeling Things in Melbourne

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

Dr Sarah Randles and Dr Stephanie Downes report on a recent event in the Australian ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE).

Feeling Things: A Symposium on Objects and Emotions in History
The University of Melbourne, 14 March 2013.

A representation of the sense of touch in a 15th-century tapestry series depicting the senses: ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’

Emotions work in the humanities lends itself deliciously (to some tastes, at least) to puns. We considered several alternatives before settling with “Feeling Things,” from “Emotional Stuff,” to “Moving Objects.” In the panel discussion at the end of the symposium, we were asked, “Why ‘things’?” ‘Feeling’ we’d talked over, and we both liked the suggestion of the tactile and the physical bound up in that verb, as well as its reference to emotional perception. The ‘things’ themselves just came naturally; a Freudian Kantian slip. But querying how we define and think of objects – as well as emotions – is exactly the kind of the discussion the symposium hoped to generate. Material culture, of course, is as slippery as any other cultural phenomenon. Not even with objects does the historian of the emotions have ‘something’ to hold on to. Attention to material culture, however, opens new paths for the analysis of emotional dynamics in the past. Whether read as agents or carriers of emotionality, objects have much to tell.

The symposium, held at Melbourne University on March 14th, was driven initially our shared interest in material culture in the Middle Ages. As we thought more about emotionality in the context of those objects (books, relics, textiles), we found that the existing frameworks  for considering objects and emotions had limited applicability for the sorts of objects and the time periods we were considering. The initial suggestion came from Sarah: we’d just have to write a new one!

At one point in the discussion, Bill Reddy – the panel guest-of-honour, visiting Melbourne to attend the CHE Methods Collaboratory and delivering public lecture on the history of romantic love that afternoon – asked if modern understandings of  ‘objects’ themselves “threatened to betray us”? The division of subject and object, he went on, is a modern one. How to take that into account when analyzing the ‘emotional’ value of physical objects in the past, especially for human subjects? Object? Thing? Matter? Material? Stuff? Substance? What of its different states – from ‘matter’ into ‘object’, and its relation to different types of subjective handler, from maker to user, owner or audience? Context, it was agreed, was key. By the end of the day, the need to develop a framework and a lexis for doing the history of emotions and material culture was reiterated.

This field opens up so many new avenues for humanities researchers: if an object can gain and lose emotional value, what emotional economies does it move in? Is this sort of language, with its suggestions of monetary worth and social exchange, the right one to evoke in our descriptions of the emotionality of objects in the past? A history of emotions that uses material culture as its focus offers up new and exciting ways of thinking about time as well as value. Objects ‘collapse time;’ they hoard the very shifts in emotional meaning that the histories of emotion aim to explore. Attention to material culture provides a way in to transhistorical approaches to emotion that text yields less readily. This can be especially true for historians of the Middle Ages, for whom text and records are often incomplete or lost. The makers, and the very materiality of these objects also provide an important part of the framework.

The day opened with a paper jointly written by Alicia Marchant and Susan Broomhall, both researchers at the University of Western Australia, on one such medieval ‘object’, the emotional resonance of which stretches into the present – and, dizzyingly, off into the future, too. The Stone of Scone, they argue, has a long emotional history, written in myth and legend, if not in stone. Alicia began with reference to Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and Bennett’s notion of “thing power.” Bennett’s thesis, developed from Object-Oriented Ontological (OOO) perspectives, emphasizes the agency of the object itself in effecting change, emotional or social, and proved controversial (Does the attribution of agency itself anthropomorphise the thing?) Alicia and Sue, however, critically used the stone to travel from thirteenth-century Scotland to twentieth-century England, showing the evolution of its emotional capacities to physical surrounds, temporal context, and proximity to other objects. As a single ‘object’ that ‘hoards’ emotional complexities of various kinds across hundreds, if not thousands of years, the stone was a powerful start to the day’s discussions.

Helen Hickey’s reading of the relic of the sainte-larme – Christ’s tear – reached from medieval to revolutionary France, the point at which the relic was lost. The relic’s affective history, of course, continues well beyond that time, and takes in not only textual evidence and the evidence of the material texts (manuscript and print) but archaeological evidence as well  – reliquary casings, ampullae and seals. As she spoke, Helen passed around a geostone, split to reveal a perfect tear-shape embedded in the crystal. In the space of time the geostone took to pass from hand to hand around the room, a powerful point was made about the traces, invisible though they may be, that an individual object both leaves and gathers, and the ways in which those traces might be described.

The last paper of the first session, by Diana Barnes, married the materiality of text with emotion: early modern letters as emotional objects. Such objects are inscribed with emotional vocabularies of various kinds, but then there is their materiality to consider as well: from inkblots, to quavering lines, torn pages, and tear stains.

From letters to sheets of other kinds, Sarah Randles’ paper centred on what remains the pre-eminent relic of the Cathedral of Notre Dames de Chartres: the ‘chemise,’ a piece of cloth – literally material – believed to have been worn by the Virgin Mary at the birth of Christ. This brought up the question of materiality and bodies: not just bodies as matter but the human body, and its contact with objects. Clearly, the senses have an important role to play in thinking through material culture and emotions in history: starting, perhaps, with skin, with touch, and that wonderful homonym ‘feeling.’

The final two papers of the day were particularly significant in showing how approaches to the medieval and the modern can mutually inform: Sue Broomhall spoke on objects of Dutch colonialism along the West Australian coast, and Jacqueline Van Gent on wampum in colonial America, but their approaches to the temporal and geographical movements of these objects, and the various cultural meanings attached to them, could have applied as readily to a medieval relic. Interrogation of the transhistoricity of objects and emotions almost inevitably comes up against moments of colonial encounter, and here questions of ‘emotional value’ most visibly come into play. Wampum – the shells used in a variety of social situations by the Iroquois – were woven into elaborate belts, which were then used as a means of exchange with Europeans. In 2012, some of these belts were returned to the Iroquoy confederacy. In Sue’s analysis of Dutch encounters with indigenous Australians, domestic objects such as plates and cups become mnemonics for colonial power and present an example of how cross-cultural communication could fail when the objects intended for exchange had vastly differing emotional values for different peoples. The existence of such objects in gallery spaces across Australia and Europe in 2013 continues to develop the length and complexity of the emotional narratives they contain.

To bring our focus firmly back to the material, after lunch participants visited the Dax Centre Gallery, part of the Melbourne Brain Centre, for a floor talk by program manager Penelope Lee, who is also an outreach officer for CHE in Melbourne. Penelope introduced us to several objects in the Dax collection made by mental health patients in the context of art therapy. Her talk gave both historical context and explored the emotional resonance of these artworks.

There’s a rich seam to be mined in thinking about how objects carry, deflect, transmit, gather or retain emotional meaning. As the afternoon discussion moved on to questions of authenticity, to objects real and imagined, to the differences between matter and the thing itself, to the social relations objects can maintain or rupture, to the ways in which they collapse time itself across the centuries, we were pretty certain we were on to something. Or maybe some thing.

What’s in a name? Pope Francis, the Jesuits, and the Emotions

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

Professor Yasmin Haskell is a Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100-1800, at University of Western Australia. Her research project on Jesuit emotions explores the theory, experience and performance of emotion in the Early Modern Society of Jesus, the most influential order of educators in Catholic Europe and its colonies until the end of the eighteenth century. Her project on ‘passions for learning’ opens up the emotional worlds of scholars, scientists, teachers, and students from the Middle Ages through to the nineteenth century. Here she reflects on an alternative possible inspiration for the new Pope’s choice of name.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio has chosen the papal name ‘Francis’, which will suggest to most Catholics the founder of the Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi. Pope Francis’ gentle and unassuming style, his poverty – if catching the bus and cooking one’s own meals really qualifies as poverty in the Latin American context … – point to the medieval Italian saint who preached to the common people, and legendarily, to the birds.

But Francis was also half the name of one of the Jesuits’ earliest saints, Francis-Xavier (1506-1552), the fervent and restless ‘Apostle to the Indes’, who took Catholic Christianity to India, Japan, and the East Indes in the early modern period, dying of a fever just fourteen kilometres from the shore of mainland China. Perhaps Pope Francis quietly gestures to this sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary, too, who has come to represent the global reach of the Catholic Church, and embodies the evangelical zeal for ‘harvesting souls’ which fired so many members of his order in the early modern period.

So who were the Jesuits? The Society or Company of Jesus was a Catholic Reformation order founded in 1540 by Basque nobleman and former soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, and a bunch of his student friends (among them Francis-Xavier). They quickly earned a formidable and paradoxical reputation. The Pope’s crack troops were deployed from Messina to Macao, Paris to Paraguay, recruiting converts, fighting the spread of Protestantism, and educating the élites of Catholic Europe and her New World colonies. They conducted diplomatic business and scientific research, composed music and poetry, and shocked and awed audiences with theatre and pyrotechnics, art and architecture. Jesuits were prepared to die for their beliefs in faraway missions, but they were also accused of being slippery and self-serving. They championed native Indian rights, but enslaved Africans. In their ranks were to be found hard-nosed heretic hunters, as well as defenders of the rights of ‘witches’, and believers in magic. Renowned for their chameleon-like ability to adapt to local circumstances – dressing as mandarins in China or brahmins in India – the proud and powerful ‘black robes’ couldn’t help but stand out even on Catholic home turf. Victims of their own success, the Jesuits were hounded out of France, Spain, Portugal, and the New World. The ‘Old’ Society of Jesus was shut down by the Pope in 1773.

The Society of Jesus was restored in 1814 and has regrown to become the single largest order of the Catholic Church. The ‘New’ Society has had its share of arch-conservatives, Nazi-resisters, freedom-fighters, and most recently, liberation theologians. It retains its former reputation for education and intellectual sophistication, and the twentieth-century names of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (philosopher, mathematician, palaeontologist, and evolutionary biologist) and Frederick Copleston (philosopher and historian of philosophy) would not look out of place among the great biographical dictionaries of pre-modern Jesuit careers (e.g. Carlos Sommervogel’s Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus). But the heart has always been just as important as the head in Jesuit theology, and much of the Society’s thinking, historically, has gone into questions of how to rouse, channel and discipline the emotions.

Histories of Emotion: From Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia

Posted on April 26, 2013 by

Dr Stephanie Downes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Here she introduces the ARC Centre’s new blog.

William Strutt, ‘Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia 1852’ (1887). Reproduced courtesy of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne.

What is the history of emotions in Australia, and how do we write it?

In December 2012, the ARC Australian Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions’ new blog launched with the following explanation:

This blog documents the process of researching emotions, then and now, from the perspective of the Australian humanities. It tells the unfolding story of our research into the histories of emotion across time and place, and the stories of our own emotional lives in that process. 

I didn’t ask the above question there, but I might have. How to write the history of emotion and all the various histories that make up that history is at the centre of what the blog aims to explore.

Managed and with most of its content supplied by the Centre’s early career researchers, the blog wasn’t conceived of as a space for finished research, but for work-in-progress: the thoughts, impressions, and ideas of humanities researchers into the vast realm of the emotions; half-formed, hazy, and as yet unsubstantiated; but exciting, innovative, and full of possibility.

As one of a number of research fellows and associates in the Australian Centre of Excellence, I’m in excellent company. But the job of the researcher is often a lonely one, and for early career researchers especially the task at hand can be highly pressurized.

The blog was conceived to articulate some of the highs and lows of the job, from office to archive.

We wanted an accessible, informative, and stimulating public blog space. In breaking from the ‘usual’ mode of published academic research – refereed and completed – the blog would show something of what it’s like to contemplate publishing. Selfishly, I hoped that the act of committing to words in the online community would help me commit them to print faster. In showing an interest in the process of researching the history of emotions, I wondered if the blog might even chart some of our own emotional responses to research along the way. When Dr Una McIlvenna describes the ‘tough work’ of her research into early modern ballads, I think I am right in sensing that she is only half joking. Conversely, Dr Raphaele Garrod blogs about the ‘pleasure’ of the past in her linguistic forays into seventeenth-century France. What are the emotions of the historian? Would any of us keep writing if it weren’t for the pleasure?

We’ve been inspired immeasurably and continuously by Queen Mary’s own unfurling Conversations about the history of feeling; but we hope that you’ll keep reading the Histories of Emotion blog too for more conversations on emotions in history from an Antipodean angle: the ‘emotional turn’ here is as down under as it is inside out. A tab at the bottom of the page will allow you to ‘follow’ updates. And please, don’t hesitate to share with us what you’ve been thinking about feeling, and feeling about doing the history of emotions.

 

Richard Layard on happiness, CBT and Christianity

Posted on April 19, 2013 by

Here’s an interview with Lord Richard Layard, one of the contemporary thinkers I most admire for his ability to turn ideas into policies. Perhaps his greatest success was persuading the Brown government to pass Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT), a policy which doubled the NHS budget for talking therapies. We began by discussing Action for Happiness, the grassroots movement Layard began to promote happiness science, which he hopes might one day become a secular alternative to Christianity.

Jules Evans: Is it true one of the inspirations for your idea for Action for Happiness groups around the country came from a Quaker group you attended?

Richard Layard: Yes. My wife, Molly, and I started going to a Quaker meeting in the mid-1990s, in Hampstead. The group went through a pack of 10 sessions produced by Friends House, and then we just carried on meeting and chose our own reading. That was where I first read Thich Nhat Hanh. It made me think that we need, today, something secular that provides the support religion used to provide – something that brings people together to experience uplift and spirituality, and to affirm what people believe. That was one of my inspirations for Action for Happiness – I hoped it would lead to groups of people inspiring and supporting each other. And the Alpha Course was another inspiration – it’s done a lot to build up evangelical Christianity. We want to launch an ‘H Course’.

JE: So you basically think Christianity is a busted flush?

RL: In the long-term, Christianity will be gone. It’s completely incredible. The scientific spirit, and basic ideas of cause and effect, are slowly taking root in more and more people. The idea that miracles happen, that we can pray for people and they’ll get better, has been disproven experimentally. So religion can’t continue in its present form. But religion has enormous value as a way of promoting the values of Stoicism – acceptance, gratitude and so on.

JE: Yes, although the problem with Stoicism is it didn’t really bring people together through myths or rituals or festivals and so on. Like most philosophical movements, it was rather rational and not very emotive, or good at community-building.

One of Action for Happiness’ posters

RL: We’re still looking for a really powerful image to motivate people. It’s all very well to say ‘produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. It doesn’t have the same force as ‘Your will, not mine, Oh Lord’.

JE: But it’s a pretty ambitious operation to invent a new religion. Weren’t you ever tempted to try and work within the existing religion?

RL: I’ve tried talking to bishops about running meditation classes in churches, but on the whole they’re not into that sort of accommodation. And it’s interesting that the Quakers haven’t grown into this void. They’ve failed, I think, because they don’t give any guidance on how to manage your mind. Meditation is the nearest thing we have to fill that void. Apparently something like 10% of the population meditate now. People need two things which religions gave: firstly, a form of spiritual discipline, which teaches you how to manage their minds. And secondly, imagery. I don’t know if we’ll all become Buddhists, but Buddhism has good imagery, and doesn’t assume the existence of miracles. I guess we’re looking for a bit more excitement, these days. Alpha offers people excitement.

JE: My own feeling is that Positive Psychology to some extent points the way to religion. It emphasises the importance to our flourishing of community, meaning, positive affect, relationships, self-discipline and so on, and the best way to achieve these things, to my mind, is membership of a religious community. The Aristotelian ethics of Positive Psychology point towards God, in my opinion. If we’re ‘designed for happiness’, then it suggests some sort of Designer. I’m also interested in how communities coalesce around a sense of the sacred, and how successfully something like Alpha builds community. So I’m not sure Christianity is finished just yet.

RL: I’ve been hugely influenced by Christianity, and regularly go into a Catholic church and look on the Cross. Though I think Christianity no longer means anything to most people. The chance of a revival of Christianity is minimal.

JE: OK, so I’d like to know why, in the noughties, you suddenly got so into happiness?

John Layard, the anthropologist and psychologist, living on Malakula

RL: As you may know, my father was a Jungian psychologist. [His father was the anthropologist John Layard, who suffered from depression and shot himself in the head. He survived, and was treated by Carl Jung. He later became a Jungian psychologist.] I’d thought of becoming a psychiatrist at Cambridge. In the 1980s, I published an article looking at the Easterlin paradox and developing the policy implications. But at that time, there wasn’t much evidence for happiness economics. Meanwhile, unemployment was so high, and we were well-placed to work at that at the LSE, so I spent the whole of the 1980s doing that. Then, in the 1990s, I discovered there was a bigger evidence base for happiness economics, mainly through the work of Daniel Kahneman.

JE: So, in 2003, you were writing a book looking at happiness economics and its policy implications. And obviously one of those policy implications was the expansion of mental health services.

RL: Yes, it’s the most obvious conclusion, because we know so much about mental health and how to improve it.

JE: So had you heard of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy when you met David Clark in 2003?

RL: Yes, I’d heard Louis Appleby [a leading professor of psychiatry appointed National Director for Mental Health in 2000] talk about it on Radio 4. So I rang him up and said, is it really true you have these success rates, and he said it was.

JE: So then you happened to meet David Clark [the psychologist who, together with Layard, master-minded Improving Access for Psychological Therapies] at a tea-party when you both became fellows to the British Academy in 2003?

RL: Yes. It was a timely and fortuitous meeting.

JE: And you decided at that tea-party to massively expand the provision of CBT?

RL: Well, I’d sent off the book on happiness to the publishers in July 2004. And I thought the next thing I might do was get something done about mental health. I talked to Ed Miliband, and he suggested I write a paper on it, for Number 10. So I wrote a paper called Mental Health: Britain’s Biggest Social Problem. That led to a seminar at Number 10 in 2005, chaired by David Halpern [who was then chief analyst in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit]. David told me no one would believe what I was saying unless we also had some practitioners at the seminar. So I rang up David Clark, who was at Stanford at that point, and said would you come to London to talk for five minutes at Number 10. He said he would.

JE: Who else was at the seminar?

RL: Ed Miliband, Louis Appleby, David Halpern, David Nutt, and senior figures from the Treasury and Department of Health. David Clark was brilliant at that seminar. He answered people’s questions for 30 minutes or so. Then I think the project was greatly helped by Alan Millburn, who is married to a psychiatrist. So we managed to get a section in the 2005 election manifesto, about the need to expand mental health services. That meant that, after the election, the Civil Service had to implement it. In 2006, David and I worked out how it would work in practice – the idea of stepped care, the idea of rolling out the service in waves, the idea of measuring outcomes, and so on.

JE: How much political opposition was there to this plan?

RL: No one was interested really. The Treasury had set up a working group on mental health and employment, because we believed the project could pay for itself. There was no support for it at all. And then word went round Whitehall that this policy was not evidence-based and was expensive. That made me very angry, so I went round various civil servants complaining about what was being said. There was no political supporter of the policy at that stage. I spent a huge amount of time trying to see Gordon Brown, and finally did, and his support was important, probably. These things are very chancy. We were told there was no money, right up to the moment we got some money.

JE: How do you think IAPT has done in its first five years?

RL: I think it’s remarkable that it’s developed so closely along the lines that David Clark envisaged. He’s a visionary.

Five years of Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT)

Posted on March 29, 2013 by

It’s been five years since the launch of the government’s flagship mental health programme, Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT).

IAPT is the biggest expansion of mental health services anywhere in the world, ever. It has already trained 4,000 new therapists in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and 2,000 more therapists are being trained. It’s doubled the NHS spend on mental health services (from 0.3% to 0.6% of the NHS annual budget), and is on course to treat 900,000 people for depression and anxiety in England every year, many of whom would never have had access to therapy in the private sector. The recovery rate for people requiring two or more sessions of treatment is approaching 45%, with others making improvements even if they remain depressed by clinical standards. That is a lot of human suffering healed, though still only 10-15% of those afflicted by depression and anxiety.

I’m now researching a long article on the first five years of IAPT, which hopefully a magazine will publish. This week I interviewed David Clark, the CBT psychologist who masterminded IAPT, as well as several other therapists and service-users, and next week hopefully I’ll interview Richard Layard, the economist who made the economic case for IAPT to the Labour government in 2006. IAPT only arose, by the by, because Clark and Layard happened to meet when they were both made fellows of the British Academy in 2003. They met during the tea break, and Layard said he was writing a book on happiness and was interested in mental health. Clark told him a bit about CBT, and the rest, as they say, is history.

David Clark, left, having some more tea

Here are five interesting things I’ve learnt so far about IAPT:

1) IAPT is the prime example of psychotherapy in the age of big data

Back in the early 20th century, the evidence for psychotherapy consisted of therapists’ personal case histories, anecdotal evidence like Freud’s Anna O or Wolfman cases. These were interesting to read (who doesn’t love a good story) but they also turned out to be misleading and not very scientific (some of Freud’s patients didn’t recover, like he said they did). Today, psychotherapy is embracing the era of big data, and IAPT is the prime example of that. Service-users fill out feedback forms before each session, which are used to assess how well the treatment is working. These forms are then collated to assess how well the programme is working at the national level too.

So far, the data from IAPT has been fairly rudimentary, only really looking at recovery rates. But as of next month, the data sent through will be much richer, taking account of what conditions patients have, what treatment they received, what ethnicity and demographic they are, which region they’re in, and so on. All of this will be available to the public through the NHS’ information centre, which will which therapies have worked well for which conditions, and where the service is failing to reach people, in particular regions, demographics or ethnicities. There are already signs, for example, that IAPT is not sufficiently reaching the millions of people who suffer from social anxiety – so this group may need to be encouraged to self-refer for services.

2) IAPT needs improving

There is a risk that IAPT will suffer from ‘mission creep’ and end up being allocated serious cases it was not designed to treat. It’s designed for the treatment of common mental disorders like depression and anxiety. Unfortunately, in some local authorities, commissioning boards have cut funding for other types of psychotherapy which are used for more serious conditions, so IAPT services are now treating patients with, say, bipolar disorder or personality disorders. David Clark says that’s not happening at a national level, but may be happening in some regions (it is).

IAPT also remains controversial in so far as many psychotherapists in non-CBT traditions say it only really provides CBT. This is because the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) mainly recommended CBT when it reviewed the evidence for psychotherapies for depression and anxiety (it also recommends Interpersonal Therapy, Couples Therapy, Counseling and Behaviour Activation Therapy). But psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapists say NICE is wrong, and that in fact the evidence suggests all talking therapies work roughly as well as each other. They also suggest studies comparing CBT to other treatments are often biased because the researchers have an allegiance to CBT. And, finally, they insist randomised controlled trials aren’t necessarily the best assessment of how therapies work in practice.

These issues remain very contested within psychotherapy. This is unsurprising – IAPT must have arrived like a bomb into the world of private psychotherapeutic practice. Suddenly, there were 4000 new therapists providing therapy for free, many of them with only a year’s training. That was bound to annoy older therapists in the private sector.

Peter Fonagy

There are signs that other forms of therapy are beginning to embrace the IAPT methodology. Several prominent psychoanalysts from the Maudsley Clinic, including Peter Fonagy, are trialling Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy, which is a form of brief psychoanalytic therapy for depression. If the trial is approved by NICE, it might mark an interesting moment of mass Freudian therapy.

3) The NHS’ mental health services are about to become a free market

Just a few years after IAPT created a free national mental health service, the Coalition government’s NHS reforms are about to open it up to competition. Starting this year, Health and Well-Being Boards will be able to commission ‘any qualified provider’ to provide mental health services in their area. That might be the existing IAPT service, or it might be some new organisation competing for tenders.

Well-Being Boards will have to decide how to choose between competing organisations. They could decide to give money to the organisation with the best recovery rates. But that might create what David Clark calls “a skewed incentive” for organisations to only take on easy cases where recovery is much more likely, while turning away any harder cases. It also creates the risk of unscrupulous organisations simply faking their results in order to win NHS contracts. The Department of Health is considering how best to evaluate organisations at the moment – perhaps ‘progress made’ is better than recovery rates, in that it takes account of difficult cases who have made a lot of improvement even if they’re still clinically depressed. Some therapists think outcome measures should also assess actual changes people have made in their lives, rather than simply how they’re feeling.

4) IAPT is being expanded into new areas, and new countries

IAPT is now being rolled out for children and young people, though it appears to be happening on a smaller scale than the adult roll out. It’s also being expanded to treat patients with chronic physical health problems that may be co-morbid with emotional problems, like say cardiovascular disease or chronic pain; or for physical conditions that may be partly psychosomatic, like Irritable Bowel Syndrome. There are also trials underway of IAPT-style services for psychotic illnesses like Bipolar Disorder, Manic Depression and Personality Disorders, often using CBT but also Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. I would be interested to see if CBT might become one tool the NHS uses as it tries to reduce national obesity levels: there is some evidence it’s useful as part of a diet plan.

In terms of other countries, Scotland and Northern Ireland have still yet to put serious investment into mental health services, although their national mental health strategies have suggested they should. Canada’s new national mental health strategy also calls for greater provision of talking therapies. Norway has recently launched an IAPT-style pilot programme, with around 12 IAPT-style centres around the country.

Sweden already has a CBT programme to help people back to work, which hasn’t alas proved very successful. IAPT in the UK has more modest targets for helping people back to work, which so far it’s met – but a new article in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggests that Richard Layard’s original estimate of IAPT’s contribution to QALYs (Quality-adjusted Life Years) was “highly inflated” – so it may not be quite as good economic value as Layard originally argued.

5) There is a role for community arts organisations to work with IAPT services

IAPT services sometimes try to help patients beyond their course of therapy, so that they carry on their recovery and also meet other people working to get better. Sometimes, IAPT services will run post-treatment groups – for example, some services run mindfulness-CBT groups for people with histories of depression. And sometimes they will connect with local community groups, such as MIND or Re-Think. That includes connecting with community arts groups – Lambeth’s IAPT service, for example, works with local sports organisations, a theatre group called Kindred Minds, an African culture group called Tree of Life, a debating club, even a circus-trapeze training group, as well as with several peer-led recovery groups. These groups have their own funding sources, by the way, they’re not funded by IAPT.

Some local authorities are also developing Recovery Colleges, which take a more educative approach to mental health recovery, treating people as students learning how to take care of themselves. I’m teaching a workshop in ancient philosophy at one such Recovery College next month, and I think there’s a lot of room for arts and humanities academics to connect with IAPT services or Recovery Colleges for their own expertise, whether that’s in art history, drama, history, literature, philosophy or other disciplines.

One therapist I interviewed, Nick McNulty from Lambeth’s IAPT centre, said he’d just had a client who was interested in Stoic philosophy, and wanted more of a values-based approach to mental health recovery. IAPT’s job is not to help people flourish, it’s to help get them through difficulties and crises and to get them to a position where they can begin to seek the good life for themselves. I think at that stage, after IAPT, there is potentially a role for practical philosophy, particularly when it offers a broader ethical context for some of the CBT skills that people have recently learned.

In general, IAPT strikes me as an educational project as much as it is a health programme. A lot of what it provides is ‘psycho-education’, or ‘guided self-help’, trying to teach people to learn how to take care of themselves, as Socrates tried to do, and become ‘doctors to themselves’ as Cicero put it. NICE clearly sees the benefits of self-help, which is a big validation for people like me who believe that self-help isn’t a load of junk, although clearly the relationship with a therapist is very important for some people too. By providing a ‘stepped care’ approach, IAPT tries to help both people like me, who are interested in learning how to take care of ourselves, and other people who are really seeking a relationship of care.

We, as users of the service, need to learn how to ask for what we want – how to self-refer for talking therapy even if our GP wants us to take Prozac, how to ask to step up to a higher level of care if guided self-help isn’t enough, how to ask for specific types of therapy, and also how to ask how to change therapist if we don’t have a rapport with the one allocated to us. We need to learn how to take care of ourselves and each other, not entirely relying on the NHS to do the work for us. And, finally, we need to learn how to support the young service politically, if it’s something we think is worth keeping.

The Shining: Kubrick’s unheimliche manoeuvre

Posted on March 22, 2013 by

‘How do you…fill your days?’
My editor was looking at me with a hint of concern, in a cafe on Portland Street. She was worried I was losing my edge. It had been almost a year since my first book had come out, and still I hadn’t started working on another. Well, I thought to myself, Kubrick didn’t rush his projects. Twelve years between his penultimate and final movie. Besides, how could I explain to her or anyone else that I’d spent the last four days somewhere else entirely, perhaps in another dimension, also known as the Overlook Hotel.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It all started on Tuesday.

On Tuesday evening, I watched a film called Room 237. It introduces us to some of the online obsessives who, in the last few years, have put forward complex and often very sophisticated readings of Kubrick’s horror-masterpiece of 1980, The Shining. We hear from six critics, each putting forward a different master-theory of the film: that it’s about the Indian genocide, or the Jewish holocaust, or the faking of the moon landing. Some of the theories are more credible than others, but the film certainly convinces you that Kubrick is playing some strange semantic games in that film.

There’s the question, for example, of whether the ghosts in the hotel are real or just a reflection of Jack’s inner demons. He only ever sees the ghosts when there are mirrors around. Who is the management of the hotel, the higher powers driving him to kill his wife and child? There’s also the weird ending, with the photo of Jack from a party at the hotel in 1921. He is told that he’s ‘always’ been the caretaker. Has he been reincarnated? And who in damnation is that guy in the bear suit?

Then there are the little details that have driven online theorists crazy with speculation. The film is full of continuity errors – furniture appearing then disappearing, photos on the wall changing arrangements. The first scene in the hotel takes place in a room which appears to have an impossible window (see the map below) – as if the hotel’s architecture doesn’t make sense, like a building in a dream. These hints of hidden meanings and codes have driven people to construct theories bringing together every single detail in the film, from typos on the page Jack writes (‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy) to the cartoon figures on Danny’s bedroom door. Everything becomes soaked with hidden significance.

Re-activating Animism

One way to understand the film is as an exploration of how we have an emotional need to find hidden meanings, as Sigmund Freud discussed in his essay, Das Unheimliche, or The Uncanny. Kubrick and his co-writer Diane Johnson repeatedly read and discussed this essay while writing the script for The Shining.

In his essay, Freud begins by exploring the etymology of the German word unheimliche, the opposite of heimliche which means ‘homely’ or ‘familiar’. He suggests that the uncanny is the fear we feel when the homely is made strange and frightening to us. Freud then explores some of the plot-devices with which Gothic writers produce this feeling in us – ghosts, dopplegangers, telepathy, curses, apparitions in mirrors, inanimate objects coming to life, events from the past repeated, numbers repeated, symbols and patterns repeated, all of which produce the over-riding sense of “something fateful and unescapable”. Freud suggests that these Gothic plot-devices work on us emotionally because they reconnect us to our pre-modern animist beliefs. The uncanny, he writes, connects us to

the old animistic conception of the universe, which was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled by the sprits of human beings, and by the narcissistic over-estimation of subjective mental processes (such as the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts…the carefully proportioned distribution of magical powers)…It would seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage of primitive man, that none of us has traversed it without preserving certain traces which can be re-activated.

Romantic literature attempted to keep alive this old animist paradigm within the scientific-industrial age, and succeeded for a while, but gradually such beliefs came to seem more and more childish to us, and were pushed to the margins of our culture, into nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and then into the ‘low art’ of fantasy, horror, science fiction and comic book culture. Modern men and women duck into the low dives of ‘trash culture’ to re-activate their primitive belief in the spirit-world.

Kubrick recognised this cultural-religious function in sci-fi (he explored animist-religious ideas in 2001: Space Odyssey) and in horror-fantasy. He rang up Stephen King at 7am one morning, in their first conversation, and launched in with ‘I think stories of the supernatural are always optimistic, don’t you?’ King, perplexed, asked ‘why do you think that?’ ‘Because supernatural stories all posit the basic suggestion that we survive death.’ They appeal, he later said, to our ‘longing for immortality’. They also posit the suggestion that there is some higher pattern, some secret dimension, to our banal material existence, which is also perhaps optimistic, even if the secret dimension turns out to be Evil.

Engineering the Uncanny

What Kubrick does in The Shining, and what David Lynch does in his works, is masterfully re-activate these animistic traces and engineer a sense of the uncanny. (Kubrick made the crew watch Lynch’s Eraserhead before making The Shining to give a sense of the mood he wanted to evoke, while Lynch’s Twin Peaks is clearly influenced in turn by The Shining). Take Kubrick’s repetition of numbers. Freud noted:

we of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered 62. But the impression is altered…if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number – addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains – always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures. We do feel this to be ‘uncanny’, and unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number…

Kubrick seized on this idea for The Shining. The cover of his edition of Stephen King’s novel is covered with scrawls of him trying to work out ways to use the number 217, which in King’s novel is the hotel-room number where Danny and Jack see a witch (it’s changed to the number 237 in the film).

Kubrick’s copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

Kubrick repeats the number 42 throughout the film – on Danny’s shirt, on the number-plate of Hallorann’s car. When Danny and his mum are watching TV, it’s showing a film called The Summer of 42. The numbers 2, 3 and 7 when multiplied together make 42. The stools in the bar where Jack meets the ghostly barman are arranged in a group of four and a group of two. And so on.

Kubrick also plays with mirrors, twins, dopplegangers and doubling to suggest hidden connections between figures – Danny is connected by telepathy to Hallorann, Jack is haunted by the ghost of the previous caretaker Grady, or maybe he is the previous caretaker. David Lynch did the same sort of thing in Twin Peaks – Laura is doubled with her evil doppleganger from the Red Room, and also with her cousin Maddy. Her father Leland is also Bob, who appears when he looks in mirrors. In the Red Room, the giant is doubled with the dwarf, who speaks in reverse in a sort of mirror-language, just as Danny does when he chants Red Rum. Both Kubrick and Lynch also use garish carpet patterns to suggest hidden patterns in reality, by the way (they should have opened a store together: Uncanny Carpets).

 

 

 

 

 

At the heart of the uncanny is a confusion of the self and its boundaries. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that in the modern secular age we all have ‘buffered selves’ that are walled off from nature and from each other. In the animistic age, we had ‘porous selves’, selves without firm boundaries, invisibly connected to each other by thoughts, energies, elective affinities, and also connected to the spirit-world, capable of being invaded by benevolent or malevolent spirits. In the modern world, we are autonomous agents trying to figure out what to do in an indifferent universe. In the animist world, we are the creatures of the Fates, threads in some cosmic pattern of Good and Evil.

The uncanny is a particularly modern emotion, however, because it rests on an ambiguity and uncertainty about whether there is a natural or a supernatural explanation for the eeriness of the atmosphere. The Bible is not an uncanny work because it is very clear that all the supernatural events are the work of God or the Devil. There is no ambiguity. The Shining is an uncanny work because there is this uncertainty. This is what initially drew Kubrick to King’s novel. The ghosts appear at the corner of our eye, at the margins of our modern rational consciousness. The events in the Overlook Hotel could be explained in secular Freudian terms as fantasies emanating from the hidden violence in the Torrance family – Jack’s murderous anger and Danny’s Oedipal rage. The Shining could simply be a story of male domestic violence against women and children. Likewise, Twin Peaks could simply be a drama about an incestuous family.

Kubrick complicates matters further by introducing a political level of significance. The violence in the film could also point to the historical violence of white Americans against Indians (the hotel is on an Indian burial-ground and there are Indian symbols around the hotel) or African slaves, or the Nazis against the Jews (42 was the year Hitler began the Genocide). Or the film could simply be a story of how the powerful (the hotel management and its powerful guests) use stooges like Jack for their state-sponsored mass murders – look, in the final photo, how Jack’s hand seems to be held up by the rich people around him. He is their puppet, their errand-boy.

Can we escape the past?

Is The Shining really an optimistic film, as Kubrick suggested all horror stories are? On one reading, the film could suggest humans are trapped in cycles of violence, frozen in sin like Jack at the end of the film, doomed to repeat our crimes over and over. On the other hand, Danny and his mother escape the Overlook Hotel. Danny is not lost in the maze – he retraces his steps and gets out. Perhaps we too can escape history.

Perhaps the film suggests that we’re at risk when we overlook things, when we forget the crimes of the past – like Dilbert Grady apparently forgetting that he killed his wife and children. Art holds a mirror up and show us our dark side, reminding us to take care, showing us a way out of the maze like Ariadne’s thread or Perseus’ mirror-shield. Kubrick said: “There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.”

Or perhaps that is too neat and utilitarian an explanation of art’s power, and art is in fact more dangerous than that. The uncanny, after all, is a dangerous emotion. Once activated, how can we be sure it will stay within the bounds of art and not spill out into reality? How can we be sure we will not ourselves be possessed by the old belief-system and find ourselves back in the demon-haunted world we thought we had left behind?

Kubrick wrote: “Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If [horror] required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.” For better or for worse, we crave the uncanny. We have a deep emotional need for patterns of meaning and intimations of immortality. Freud would say that was the vestige of our primitive self, Jung would say it was our true self seeking its Maker. Either way, modern life does not that satisfy this emotional need for the uncanny, so we turn to art, and to The Shining. We try to decipher Kubrick’s intentions as if he was God, and every detail of His creation is a clue to His meaning. Like lost souls, the acolytes haunt the Kubrick archives at the University of Arts London, which I imagine as a vast warehouse containing an almost infinite number of crates. And in one of those crates, perhaps, lies the key.

 

The Carnival of Lost Emotions

Posted on March 19, 2013 by

Dr Chris Millard recently completed his PhD at the QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions, on self-poisoning, self-damage and the “cry for help”. He was one of the brains behind the recent ‘Carnival of Lost Emotions’ first presented at the Barts Pathology Museum as part of Brain Awareness Week 2013, which will be part of the ‘Wonder’ street fair at the Barbican next month. More details about the event (including a short film) will be posted on this blog in due course. In this post (which was delivered as a closing reflection at the end of the event at the Pathology Museum) Chris reflects on the thinking behind the carnival. His fellow performers on the night – acting out ‘lost’ emotional states from the past with the help of the amazing lost emotions machine – were Rebecca O’Neal, Tom Quick, Sarah Chaney, Jen Wallis, and Claire Trenery.

Just to be clear, I am now talking to you as Chris the historian, rather than a Victorian physician or an army psychiatrist! I’m going to talk to you briefly about the Carnival, and try to explain what we are doing here. But first, thank you all for coming to the Carnival of Lost Emotions, helping us mark – in our own special way – Brain Awareness Week 2013.

I also want to thank the Wellcome Trust for funding this and giving feedback, especially Chloe Sheppard. Thanks also for all the help we have received to put this event on, including Charlotte Thorley, Bryony Frost and Emma Sutton at QM, Becci Feltham at the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, and Russell Beck Studio for making our fantastic machine. Thanks also to Åsa Jansson for much help with the script. I would especially like to thank Carla Connolley, whom many of you will know, for being so efficient, facilitating, and friendly, making the whole process of staging the event so, so much easier.

This is a short reflection on the logic behind the event, which also will try to provide an insight into why six academic historians might dress up, and act out, emotional states from history.

So, with the Carnival of Lost Emotions we have attempted to show that the emotions humans are able to experience have been different at different points in history.

It is easy to think that emotional states are universal and unchanging across time and cultures. However, we are suggesting that the historical differences are not merely a case of the same, true and unchanging emotions being interpreted differently at different times.

To argue that ‘shell shock’ is simply post-traumatic stress disorder, or that ‘melancholy’ is simply depression suggests a sort of blindness to the richness and complexity and difference of the past. To understand reports of past emotions as simply a less correct, or less precise, versions of present emotional categories, is to collapse the past into the present. In other words, it flattens the past to suit whatever theory currently holds sway. In fact, even to call some of these examples ‘emotions’ before 1800 is problematic. However, for the sake of coherence – and through use of artistic license – we have labelled these states of mind, body, soul or spirit as ‘emotions’.

Neuroscientists (for example) might tell you different – arguing for their current understandings. However, as we have tried to show, neuroscientific ways of understanding what humans feel, are part of the stream of history too. Neuroscientific explanations are just as historical as anything else you have seen on this stage.

And this is the funny thing about emotions. The ways in which we understand them, how we report them, the terms we have for expressing them, these change the emotions themselves and how they are experienced. Telling somebody that what they feel is a ‘chemical imbalance’ in their brains, can make them feel very different from telling them that they lack ‘moral fibre’ or have an ‘excess of phlegm’.

What the Carnival has tried to do, then, is to show how the act of taking emotions from another time period, and assuming them to be close approximations to the ones that we are familiar with is fraught with problems.

The history of the emotions can show how the ways that we experience ourselves, the things that we consider most personal, or private, have a history. The feelings that we might think are universal human responses, might look just as nonsensical and alien to those who come after us, as ‘black bile’ and ‘humours’ look today.

The point, then, is not so much in the details of the individual emotional states (interesting as they are), but much more in the general idea that the emotional repertoire of human beings at any given point in time is fundamentally historical and changeable.

(We have focussed only upon Western Europe, but there are revealing differences across geographical and cultural boundaries – differences that we have not the time or expertise to convey properly.)

We have tried to communicate this ‘big idea’ through the intensely laborious process of a short play. As Tom, the Ringmaster, commented during rehearsals – ‘this is why nobody puts on a play for one night only’. As you have probably guessed, none of us are trained actors, and a Lost Emotions Machine is not something you can just order off the internet.

But what we are trying to do is to start breaking the mould on the way academia engages with wider society . This ‘reflection’ is offered as a bridge between the ‘academic seminar’ way of doing things, and the dramatic performance. We are aware that this format is not everybody’s cup of tea, and we are not trying to replace formal academic seminars. But we have tried something a bit different. It is a bit of a risk, but we hope that it has encouraged you to take an interest in the Centre for the History of the Emotions, and historical approaches to emotions more generally.

We hope it has worked, that is, provoked, intrigued, entertained or enraged some of you. To open oneself up to the idea  that the intense private, personal feelings that you experience as so raw and unmediated, are much more complicated and much more historical than they might seem, can feel foreign and odd, perhaps even shocking at first.

I shall be sending a link to a survey about this event to everybody who booked tickets. Please forward it on to anybody who you have come with.

Please take 5-10 minutes to do the survey, it will really help us out. One person who completes the survey will win £50 worth of book tokens, if they leave their email address, as prompted in one of the question boxes.

Should universities teach well-being?

Posted on March 8, 2013 by

This week, I traveled to Durham to visit my godmother, who has just been made principal of one of the colleges of Durham University. She invited me to high table at one of their formal black-tie dinners, and then asked me to give a little after-dinner speech. It was somewhat nerve-racking, considering the calibre of the dons sitting around me and my lack even of a PhD, but I think it went OK, bar one don who I heard mutter ‘it’s just philosophy as self-help’. Yes indeed!

The morning after the dinner, I met for a coffee with Martyn Evans, the co-founder of Durham’s Centre for the Medical Humanities. The Centre was set up in 2008 along with King’s College London’s Centre for the Humanities and Health, both via a £4 million grant from the Wellcome Trust, and both with the mission to explore how health issues (like, say, hearing voices) are never simply biomedical, but are also subjective experiences, experienced through the prism of our beliefs, values, and culture. That sort of work is the humanities at its best: re-humanizing experiences which might have been reduced to mechanistic explanations. It’s the approach of, say, Oliver Sacks, who asks not just ‘what is happening in the brain’ but also ‘what is it like to experience that and make sense of it?’

This, to me, is why psychotherapy is such an interesting meeting-place between the sciences and humanities – it’s the place where our beliefs, values and culture meet and mesh with our bodies. We are flesh, blood and bone, but we are also bundles of beliefs and ideas, and our beliefs can be as good or bad for us as any other aspect of our diet. The word diet, by the way, comes from the ancient Greek diaita, meaning ‘way of life’ – you can’t separate health issues from ethics, as we are slowly remembering.

So let me get to the main course of this week’s newsletter.

While I was in Durham, I read that Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, had called for better measures at universities for the well-being of undergraduates. He sent a questionnaire to 104 heads of secondary schools, among whom 96% thought universities weren’t doing enough for the well-being of their undergraduates. Seldon is particularly concerned with binge-drinking among undergrads. He’s called for higher prices in student bars (sure to make him popular with students), the introduction of personal tutors for each student, and the introduction of happiness or well-being classes at every university.

I’m a little wary when people use the language of epidemics to justify policy measures. Why would school headmasters have particular expertise on life at universities? In fact, the latest evidence (from a Durham academic) suggests young people are drinking less and taking fewer drugs. Teenage pregnancies are also down. I also think the stigma around mental health problems is much lower now than it was 15 years ago, when I was at university and too afraid to discuss my panic attacks with anyone apart from my long-suffering girlfriend. But other indicators are more worrying: students’ demand for counseling services is rising sharply, and the number of student suicides has also risen, perhaps in connection with higher levels of debt and worsening job prospects. There are problems at other levels of academia too: taking a PhD can be socially isolating, while senior academics are often depressed by the amount of paper-work they have to cope with.

Nonetheless, to some academics, the call for happiness classes in universities sounds awful. Shouldn’t university teach us to criticise simplistic or politically convenient definitions of happiness? Frank Furedi, lecturer in sociology at Kent and one of the loudest opponents of therapy culture, called Seldon’s proposals a ‘therapeutic crusade’ which would ‘infantilise academic life’.

Furedi has previously written an interesting book in which he bewailed the loss of the public intellectual. He’s also written many books and articles criticising our culture of therapy and well-being. To me, those two positions are contradictory. The greatest public intellectuals, from Aristotle to Marx to Maynard Kenyes, engaged with the public because they thought their ideas would improve people’s lives and enhance their well-being. In this sense, well-being thinkers like Seldon and Richard Layard are good examples of public intellectuals – though of course, like many intellectuals they can sometimes be a little too sure their ideas will help everyone.

I’ve criticized Seldon and Layard in the past for their certainty that they’ve scientifically proved precisely what happiness is and how we can all reach it. I’m wary of too positivistic an approach to well-being. I’ve since been surprised and impressed by their generous response to those criticisms. To me, that’s a good measure of a person: how well they respond to criticism (a measure by which I myself have repeatedly failed). I think both of them, and their organisation Action for Happiness, increasingly recognise the need for a more philosophically pluralist approach to well-being, one which strengthens people’s critical capacity to choose their own definition rather than accept the definition of experts. However, the work of experts is useful too – whether that be scientific or philosophical experts – as long as we don’t swallow their advice without question.

If universities were to introduce well-being classes, they would have to be philosophically pluralist, exploring the different approaches to well-being and the good life. I also think they could be liberal, in the American sense of balancing the humanities with the sciences, balancing ethics with evidence. There are good precedents for such courses in American universities, such as Stanford’s course in the Art of Living, or Yale’s course in the philosophy and science of human nature. My ideal course, as I said in my book, would be a combination of two Harvard courses – Tal Ben-Shahar’s course in Happiness (now alas finished), and Michael Sandel’s course in Justice. My ideal course would combine the scientific evidence of the former with the Socratic ethical inquiry of the latter.

I’ve been running the pilot of such a course at Queen Mary, University of London, for the last few weeks – we have another session coming up on Tuesday evening. The course explores the various Greek and Roman philosophies of the good life – Epicurean, Stoic, Platonic, Skeptic – all of which share the cognitive theory of the emotions and the idea that philosophy can help us flourish, while disagreeing on broader questions of the meaning of life. The course tries to balance philosophical discussions with some ideas and techniques from cognitive therapy.

I think the course is going well, though it’s still very much a prototype. Running it has certainly increased my respect for university lecturers who do this work week-in, week-out. I wouldn’t say I’ve been over-whelmed by hordes of eager undergraduates, and those that do come are often texting away on their mobiles. This makes me think that it would be a mistake to make such courses compulsory, but it might help if such courses carried credit, as they do in American universities. Undergraduates are, on the whole, happy-go-lucky, and mainly focused on partying. But a few of them are hungry for meaning and for answers to life’s big questions. That search for meaning should be at the heart of the university experience, not out-sourced to counseling services on the fringes of campus life.

The idea that academic work should be involved with the emotions and with well-being is not necessarily ‘infantilizing’. Students went to Plato’s Academy, or Aristotle’s Lyceum, or Epictetus’ school in Nicopolis, precisely to learn how to flourish. When Plato founded his Academy, 2,400 years ago this year, the idea was that you brought the whole of yourself to education, not just your intellect. When did we start thinking that academic work should leave out the emotions?

Academics are right to be wary of pat solutions to questions of the good life. It’s an on-going conversation, to which we can all bring something and take something. I can’t think of a better place for that conversation than universities, nor can I think of a better way for universities to engage with their societies.

PS, here’s a great article by Richard Schoch, who used to work at Queen Mary but has now alas left for Belfast, on a debate between Seldon and Furedi back in 2008. Schoch, who is the author of The Secret of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life, also argues that the latest science should be taught alongside the wisdom of the ancients.

An account of the trial of a Livonian werewolf in Jurgensburg in 1692

Posted on March 6, 2013 by

From Carlo Ginzberg’s The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:

The accused, a certain Thiess, an old man in his eighties, freely confessed to his judges that he was a werewolf (wahrwolff). But his account seriously differs from the concept of lycanthropy which was widespread in northern Germany and the Baltic countries. Thiess related that he once had his nose broken by a peasant of Lemburg named Skeistan, who at that time was already dead. Skeistan was a witch, and with his companions had carried seed grain into hell to keep the crops from growing. With other werewolves Thiess had also gone down into hell and fought with Skiestan. The latter, armed with a broom handle (the traditional symbol of witches) wrapped in the tail of a horse had struck the old man on the nose.

This was not a casual encounter. Three times each year on the nights of St Lucia before Christmas, of Pentecost, and of St John, the werewolves proceeded on foot, and in the form of wolves, to a place located ‘beyond the sea’: hell. There they battled the devil and witches, striking them with lon iron rods and pursuing like dogs. Werewolves, Thiess exclaimed, ‘cannot tolerate the devil’. The judges, undoubtedly astonished, asked for elucidation. If werewolves could not abide the devil, why did they change themselves into wolves and go down into hell? Because, old Thiess explained, by doing so they could bring back up to earh what had been stolen by the witches – livestock, grains, and the other fruits of the earth…

At this point the judges asked where the werewolves went after death. Thiess replied that they were buried but that their souls went to heaven. The judges were visibly shaken. They insisted that werewolves served the devil. The old man emphatically rejected this notion: the werewolves were anything but servants of the devil. The devil was their enemy to the point that they, just like dogs – bceause werewolves were indeed the hounds of god – pursued him, tracked him down and scourged him with whips of iron. They did all this for the sake of mankind. The Livonian werewolves were not alone in their fight with the devil over the harvests. German werewolves did so as well, although they did not belong to the Livonian company and they journeyed down to their own particular hell. The same was also true of Russian werewolves…

The parish priest was summoned, who scolded him and called on him to abandon the errors and diabolical lies with which he had tried to cover up his sins. But this too was useless. In a burst of anger Thiess shoted at the priest that he was tired of hearing all this talk about his evil doings: his actions were better than the priests, and morever he, Thiess, would neither be the first nor the last to commit them. The old man remained steadfast in his convictions and refused to repent.