New Ideas in Psychology

These articles depend on the ideas put forward in the section on emotions.

A person's state of emotion is always changing. Whichever emotion is currently present in consciousness, eventually it fades away, only to be immediately replaced by another one. Hence a person experiences an endless flow of emotions.

Since emotions are transient, what is the use of identifying them ? . Each particular emotion casts its own influence on our responses to daily situations ; if we are unaware of this influence, then we become deluded as to our real motivations and reasons for acting. Therefore this identification is needed if we are to eliminate confusion from our minds. [¹] Once this identification is accomplished, then we can understand the pivotal role of anxiety within the subconscious mind.

I have found that some particular emotions flow in certain sequences.
The articles in this section deal with the effects of these sequences.

Once I was able to identify my repertoire of regular emotions I discovered that these sequences form laws, so I call them laws of the unconscious mind.. They are laws of abreaction and are invariable in their operation. Hence I consider them to be fully scientific. Since they apply to everyone, so they produce common social effects, and thus can be rated as social laws too. To discover such laws were the elusive dreams of the nineteenth-century Positivists, like Herbert Spencer.

These sequences are one of the major causes of sorrow and distress in a human life. So by identifying our emotions and learning to understand these special sequences we can begin to control our reaction to sorrow.

These sequences are laws because they occur to everyone. They are laws of abreaction. The term ‘abreaction’ was first thought up by ancient Greek dramatists to describe the purging or cathartic effect that the release of emotion gives. It was a major influence on Freud. However, neither the ancient Greeks nor Freud fully understood abreaction. They saw only the initial response and not the consequences. The consequences only became apparent to me once I learned to identify some emotions and thence could observe the way that they formed special sequences.

To understand these laws requires an understanding of the role of anxiety in the mind. This role is explained in the next few articles.

Understanding the nature of emotions has profound implications for the development of self-awareness and to psycho-therapy, whether cognitive, Freudian psychoanalysis, Rogerian counselling, etc.

The world of emotion is a strange world, and the key which unlocks its meaning is psycho-dynamic psychology.

[ E1 [ ] E2 ] [ E3 ] . [ Table of Contents ] . [ A1 ] [ A2 ] [ A3 ] [ A4 ] [ A5 ]

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Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
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