A Symbolic, Childlike Reality

I had dinner with Hanna and Jackson on Saturday night at Lalibella, the Ethiopian restaurant in Footscray. I was feeling fearful and tense over Claudia’s decision that morning but Jack and Hanna were in a cheerful and chatty mood so that was good. We talked about games and sci fi and their plans for a trip to Canada in September.

I finished Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman last night. I thought Appendix B, Hallmarks of the Emotional Mind, particularly insightful for my past experiences. Here is an excerpt.

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The logic of the emotional mind is associative; it takes elements that symbolize a reality, or trigger a memory of it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes, metaphors and images speak directly to the emotional mind, as do the arts – novels, film, poetry, song, theater, opera. Great spiritual teachers, like Buddha and Jesus, have touched their disciples’ hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables and stories. Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in the vernacular of the heart.

This logic of the heart – of the emotional mind – is well-described by Freud in his concept of "primary process" thought; it is the logic of religion and poetry, psychosis and children, dream and myth (as Joseph Campbell put it, "Dreams are private myths; myths are shared dreams"). The primary process is the key that unlocks the meanings of works like James Joyce’s Ulysses: In primary process thought, loose associations determine the flow of narrative; one object symbolises another; one feeling displaces another and stands for it; wholes are condensed into parts. There is no time, no laws of cause-and-effect. Indeed, there is no such thing as "No" in the primary process; anything is possible. The psychoanalytic method is in part the art of deciphering and unraveling these substitutions in meaning.

If the emotional mind follows this logic and its rules, with one element standing for another, things need not necessarily be defined by their objective identity: what matters is how they are perceived; things are as they seem. What something reminds us of can be far more important that what it "is". Indeed, in emotional life, identities can be like a hologram in the sense that a single part evokes a whole. As Seymore Epstein points out, while the rational mind makes logical connections between causes and effects, the emotional mind is indiscriminate, connecting things that merely have similar striking features.

There are many ways in which the emotional mind is childlike, the more so the stronger the emotion grows. One way is categorical thinking, where everything is in black and white, with no shades of gray; someone who is mortified about a faux pas might have the immediate thought, "I always say the wrong thing." Another sign of this childlike mode is personalised thinking, with events perceived with a bias centering on oneself, like the driver who, after an accident, explained that "the telephone pole came straight at me."

This childlike mode is self-confirming, suppressing or ignoring memories or facts that would undermine its beliefs and seizing on those that support it. The beliefs of the rational mind are tentative; new evidence can disconfirm one belief and replace it with a new one – it reasons by objective evidence. The emotional mind, however, takes it beliefs to be absolutely true, and so discounts any evidence to the contrary. That is why it is so hard to reason with someone who is emotionally upset: no matter the soundness of your argument from a logical point of view, it carries no weight if it out of keeping with the emotional conviction of the moment. Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and "proofs" all their own.

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Also:

p.20 unconscious opinions; their storehouse is the amygdala

p.28 emotional learning. As the meeting point between thought and emotion, the prefrontal-amygdala circuit is a repository of the likes and dislikes we acquire over the course of a lifetime… cut off… everything takes on a gray neutrality.

p.43
1. knowing one’s emotions
2. managing emotions
3. motivating oneself
4. recognizing emotions in others
5. handing relationships

p.44 neural basis (ie implies innate) but brain is plastic