Encountering Emotion

I was dumbfounded the first time a therapist asked me, “Where do you feel that emotion in your body?” For most of my life, my senses—or at least those senses that would help me answer that question—seemed unreliable. Even my sense of direction was confused. North felt like south; east like west. I learned to compensate by turning up the volume on spatial reasoning mediated by linguistic judgment. If I could name the streets and track the logic of the grid, I could still find my way to the MoMA. I could even feel something stir inside as I encountered Agnes Martin’s famous grids.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that awareness of our internal bodily sensations (interoception) and awareness of our body’s position in space (proprioception) are closely related capacities. Both can become disrupted by traumatic experiences, especially those involving dissociation. For me, this meant that emotion was rarely felt as something arising in my body. Instead, it appeared primarily through judgment.

Late in life, I learned how to identify emotions in my body. It took a lot of effort (and many Yin yoga classes). Still, eventually I discovered a new kind of language for emotion—one that sensed the lump in my throat as grief gathers there, the mild nausea in my gut as disgust is provoked, the tension in my shoulders when anger builds, the pressure in my chest as panic strikes. Even positive emotions, it turns out, show up in the body.

Now that emotions are at the very forefront of what I look for every day, I’ve noticed that some clients, like me, struggle to sense how their emotions show up in their bodies, and still have rich emotional lives. This leads me to wonder what, exactly, an emotion is.

Philosophy may be helpful here. Theories of emotion vary widely in answering this question, and I wonder whether those differences might offer insight into how therapy proceeds for clients whose intuitive theories of emotion also differ.

Writing in the late nineteenth century, William James proposed an embodied account of emotion. In his essay “What Is an Emotion?” (1884), James argued that emotions are not primarily judgments or interpretations. Instead, they arise from the body. He suggests, for example, that we do not tremble because we are afraid; we are afraid because we tremble. According to James, a stimulus first produces bodily changes—shifts in heart rate, muscle tension, breathing, and posture—and the emotion is our perception of those changes. Fear, grief, anger, and joy are felt as patterns of bodily sensation.

On this view, learning to recognize emotions often involves becoming more attentive to the body. What we call an emotion is not initially a thought about what is happening but a felt experience unfolding through the nervous system.

A very different account can be found in the work of Martha Nussbaum. Drawing on the Stoic tradition, Nussbaum argues that emotions are not merely bodily feelings but forms of evaluative judgment. In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), she describes emotions as responses to what we care about. To feel grief, for example, is to recognize that something of deep value has been lost. Fear involves the belief that something threatens our well-being. Emotions, on this account, express our judgments about what matters for our flourishing.

Where James locates emotion primarily in the body, Nussbaum locates it in our evaluations of the world. Emotions are not just responses to sensations; they are ways of apprehending significance.

Both accounts capture something recognizable about emotional life. Sometimes emotions arrive first as bodily sensations—tightness in the chest, heat in the face, a lump in the throat—before we have words for them. At other times they seem inseparable from our interpretations of what has happened and what it means.

If both theories are even partly right, they suggest something for therapy. Different people may approach emotion through different starting points. Some may encounter emotion primarily as sensation, while others encounter it through interpretation and judgment. And this raises an interesting possibility. Therapy may sometimes involve approaching emotion from the side we are less accustomed to inhabiting.

For someone whose emotional life is primarily mediated through interpretation and judgment, the work may involve learning to attend more closely to bodily sensation. Emotion gathers in the throat, the gut, the chest, or the shoulders before it has fully taken shape as thought. For someone who encounters emotion first as bodily intensity, a more helpful task may be to reflect on what that sensation means, what it reveals about what matters, and what judgment about the world or about one’s values may already be embedded in it.

Seen this way, the contrast between James and Nussbaum is not merely a philosophical disagreement. It may also point to two complementary ways of approaching emotion in therapy. Sometimes the work involves helping the thinker feel. At other times, it involves helping the feeler think.

Books to Explore

·       William James (1884/1950). The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2. Dover Publications.

·       Martha Nussbaum (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press.

·       Peter Goldie (2000). The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford University Press.

·       Jesse Prinz (2004). Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford University Press.

·       Robert C. Solomon (2004). Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions. Oxford University Press.