The History of Emotions

A Very Short Introduction

De: Thomas Dixon

Narrado por: Mike Cooper

Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural rather than singular. The history of emotions is where the history of ideas meets the history of the body, and where the history of subjectivity meets social and cultural history.

In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Dixon traces the historical ancestries of feelings ranging from sorrow, melancholy, rage, and terror to cheerfulness, enthusiasm, sympathy, and love. The picture that emerges is a complex one, showing how the states we group together today as "the emotions" are the product of long and varied historical changes in language, culture, beliefs, and ways of life.

With examples from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, this Very Short Introduction sheds new light on our emotions in the present, by looking at what historians can tell us about their past. Dixon explains the key ideas of historians of emotions as they have developed in conversation with psychology and psychiatry, with attention paid especially to ideas about basic emotions, psychological construction, and affect theory.

©2023 Thomas Dixon (P)2023 Tantor

Mostly insightful

… but marred by silly attacks on a straw man version of basic emotion theory. Dixon studies the way people historically talk about emotion, not emotion itself, and there’s obviously no tension between that approach and study of the physical reality of internal motivational states. A good tenth of a very short book is wasted on dumb quibbling about terminology.