ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three philosophers, Amelie Rorty, Ronald de Sousa, and Jonathan Lear, who speak of emotions as modes of seeing-as that are, by and large, conceptually structured scenarios, general schemas that match an emotion-type to characteristic objects. It demonstrates that the contemporary developmental accounts can all be understood as similar to and inspired by the early Freudian account for psychological symptoms, including recalcitrant emotions. The model for Freud's primal scene etiologies is that of physical trauma. The etiological importance of the primal scene thus comes from its emotional import, and so there is no reason to suppose that the actual content of the scene must be sexual, although it can be. The chapter talks about a conceptual relation between the concept or the image that, that is embedded in a paradigm scenario, and the resulting occurrent emotional scenario. The philosophers do justice to a very common phenomenon, familiar in everyday experience as well as in psychotherapeutic experience.
