The Emotion Machine

the title of consciousness. In one kind of block that he calls “repudiation,” an idea is deliberately condemned—and thus is rendered powerless—although one can remember rejecting it. In another type, which he calls “repression,” an impulse is blocked at an earlier stage—without the thinker knowing this. However, repressed ideas can still persist, expressing themselves in clever disguises.

Inside Freud’s three-part model of mind, many resources are working at once—but they don’t always share the same purposes. Instead, that mind is a battleground between animal instincts and social constraints. These are frequently incompatible, so the rest of the mind must struggle to find acceptable ways to compromise—and that’s often accomplished by subterfuge. One way to deal with a constraint is to suppress the resource that imposes it. Another is to disguise or re-describe it so that it arouses no Censors or Critics. Freud used the term sublimation for this; we sometimes call it ‘rationalizing’.

Few modern ‘cognitive psychologists’ appreciate Freud’s architectural concepts. He was one of the first to recognize that we deal with everyday problems in ways that are more complex than any one centralized process could. Instead, he saw the human mind as the product of diverse activities, many of which become engaged when we face conflicts and inconsistencies. Resolving these will often involve many different processes—to all of which we give vague names like Conscience, Emotion, and Consciousness.

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§3-7. Controlling our Moods and Dispositions

“Love, he believed, made a fool of a man, and his present emotion was not folly but wisdom; wisdom sound, serene, well-directed. … She seemed to him so felicitous a product of nature and circumstance that his invention, musing on future combinations, was constantly catching its breath with the fear of stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony …”

—Henry James, in The American.

In §1-2 we described some ways that a person’s state of mind might change:

“Sometimes a person gets into a state where everything seems to be cheerful and bright— although nothing outside has actually changed. Other times everything pleases you less: the rest of the world seems dreary and dark, and your friends complain that you seem depressed.”

If you could switch all your Critics off, then nothing would seem to have any faults. You’d be left with few worries, concerns, or goals—and others might describe you as elated, euphoric, demented or manic.

However, if you turned too many Critics on, you’d see imperfections everywhere. Your entire world would seem filled with flaws, engulfed in a flood of ugliness. If you also found fault with your goals themselves, you’d feel no urge to straighten things out, or to respond to any encouragement.

This means that our Critics must be controlled: If you turned too many on, then you’d never get anything done. But if you turned all your critics off, it might seem as though all your goals were achieved—and again you wouldn’t accomplish much.

Nevertheless, in everyday life there remains a wide range in which it is safe to operate. Sometimes you feel adventurous, inclined to try new experiments. Other times you feel conservative—and try to avoid uncertainty. And when you’re in an emergency (as when you face danger or aggression), you don’t have time to reason things out, so you have to make quick decisions without considering most other factors. Then you’ll have to postpone long- range plans, suspend some relationships with your friends, expose yourself to stress and pain, and make other choices you’ll later regret. To do this, you’ll have to suppress your suppressors—and then you may seem like a quite different person.

We use terms like ‘disposition’ and ‘mood’ to describe someone’s overall state of mind. But terms like these are hard to define, because a person’s present state involves so many processes. Some of these change the ways we perceive, while others affect which goals we’ll select, which strategies we’ll choose to use, and what degrees of detail we’ll focus on. Yet other processes turn our thoughts from one mental realm to another, so that first one may think about physical things, then about some social concern, and then about some longer-term plan.

What determines the spans of time that our minds spend in each dispositional state? Those intervals span an enormous range. A flash of anger, or fear, or a sexual image may last for only a very brief moment. Other moods may last minutes or hours—and some dispositions persist for weeks or years. “John is angry” means that he’s angry now—but “an angry kind of person” may describe a lifelong trait. The durations of such mental states could depend on how we regulate the rates at which we switch.

In §7-2 we’ll speculate about how our Critics might be arranged. To what extent are they independent—like demons that constantly survey the scene, waiting for moments to intervene? To what extent are they controlled by special, more centralized managers? How do we learn new censors and critics? How many critics have critics themselves to scold them for poor performances? Are certain minds more productive because their critics are better organized?

Now it is more than a century since Sigmund Freud raised questions like these—but they have been so widely ignored that we still have don’t have adequate answers to them. Perhaps this situation will change as we get better ways to see inside brains.

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§3-8. Emotional Exploitation

Whatever you may be trying to do, your brain may have other plans for you.

I was trying to work on a technical theory, but was starting to fall asleep. Then I found myself imagining that my rival Professor Challenger was about to develop the same technique. This caused a flicker of angry frustration, which blocked for the moment that urge to sleep—and enabled me to proceed with my work.

In fact, Challenger was not doing any such thing; he works in a totally different field. But although he was a close friend of mine, we had recently had an argument. So he served as an opportune candidate when I needed someone to be angry at. Let’s make up a theory of how this worked.[49]

A resource called Work was attending to one of my principal goals.

Another one called Sleep tried to seize control—but then that fantasy appeared.

This aroused a mixture of Anger, annoyance, frustration, and fear.

Somehow, these then had the effect of disrupting the process of falling