ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses with historical and contemporary engagements with emotion in the history of Homo sapiens. It reviews the mythologies and philosophies, traces some clinical observations from consulting rooms since the time of C. G. Jung, and the framing of emotion from neurosciences. Across the known millennia, emotion has been at the heart of most matters. Spectrums of affect, emotion, and feeling have been at play in species-wide encounters as well as personal and group engagements. Human history has been shaped and reshaped, colored, and gauged by the appraisals, use, and misuse of emotion. Cultural, intellectual, religious, and scientific stances on emotion have impacted turns of mind and pivots in history. The view of humans as special emanations of divine mind, entirely apart from other beings, was dealt an existential blow when the naturalist explorer Charles Darwin crossed hemispheres and the equator and transgressed establishment boundaries and philosophical limits.
