Normalcy and Emotion

Are you a “normal person”? Probably, for the most part, you are. Doubtless, however, you have occasional misgivings. Your “sex-complexes”, your emotional depressions, or your “hidden fears” seem to you, at times, distinctly abnormal. And so psychology might adjudge them. On the other hand, you undoubtedly experience milder fears, furies, petty jealousies, minor hatreds, and occasional feelings of trickery and deception which you have come to regard as part of your normal self. And psychology aids and abets you in this notion, also. In fact, many psychologists at the present time frankly regard “fear” and “rage”, not only as normal emotions, but even as the “major” emotions. By some writers ¹ “choc”, or emotional shock is suggested as the one element essential to normal emotion. Some psychological experimenters have compelled women subjects to cut off the heads of live rats, proudly presenting reaction data thus obtained as a measure of normal emotional response to an adequate stimulus. One of the most eminent investigators of emotion ² goes so far as to advocate retention of “fear” and “rage” in normal human behaviour, for the purpose of supplying bodily strength and efficiency ! This suggestion seems to me like recommending the placing of tacks in our soup for the sake of strengthening the lining of the alimentary canal. I do not regard you as a “normal person”, emotionally, when you are suffering from fear, rage, pain, shock, desire to deceive, or any other emotional state whatsoever containing turmoil and conflict. Your emotional responses are “normal” when they produce pleasantness and harmony. And this book is devoted to description of normal emotions which are so commonplace and fundamental in the every-day lives of all of us that they have escaped, hitherto, the attention of the academician and the psychologist.