Page 62 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Disaster Relief 31

her selves into a human relationship and was afraid Freud was going to lose
patience because she was insisting, through her symptoms, on her right to have
him accept that her “crazy” (unruly) reactions to his therapeutic efforts had to
do with him as well as her. (p. 235)
Thus, in the example of Joan Didion’s efforts to bear her grief over the
loss of her husband, my understanding of emotion theory would suggest
that it is not my job to help Didion feel less. I don’t want to “cure” her of her
grief but, rather, to help her feel it fully enough to find, within it, its adap-
tive potential. Grief can, for example, bind us more fully to each other, in
our appreciation of the universal pain of the human condition.
The third basic belief, drawn from emotion theory, is that social com-
petence requires the ability to communicate emotions and read them suf-
ficiently accurately when others express them.
A wealth of data support the view that very young infants are capable
of discerning different facial expressions of emotions, and no one can
argue with the notion that emotionality is our first language. But, clini-
cally, we certainly can differ about how much the ability to read faces can
or should be taught to children and/or adults. (For a very positive view
about teaching adults to read emotional expressions, see Ekman, 2003.)
Once again, this touches on issues of “normal” and “ideal” emotional
perception and expression.
I don’t think it would be useful for me to simply teach people what a
smiley face looks like. But I come to my work with the assumption that
human beings naturally learn about the interpersonal impact of our emo-
tions as we develop, so something must have blocked this ability if some-
one is unable to read the feelings of others or adequately communicate his
or her own feelings to others.
Next is the fourth tenet, that “each of the fundamental emotions has
unique motivational properties of crucial importance to the individual
and the species, and each adds its own special quality to consciousness as
it mobilizes energy for physical or cognitive adventure. An intense emo-
tion may be considered as a special state of consciousness experienced as
highly desirable or highly undesirable” (Izard, 1977, p. 83).
The viewpoint that there are fundamental emotions, which are sepa-
rate or discrete, rather than merely different in intensity or some other
aspect, is derived from Charles Darwin’s (1872) fascinating contribution,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. So, for example,
rather than seeing fear as on a continuum with surprise, with fear as
a reaction to a greater degree of novelty, the fundamental or discrete
emotions perspective sees fear and surprise as two separate emotions,