Dynamic congruency

The bodily nature of emotions has been a subject of controversy as well as interdisci-plinary discussion, the controversy and discussion being perhaps most prominently centered on, and exemplified by the writings of William James and Carl Lange on the one hand and the writings of Walter Cannon on the other. The purpose here is not to review aspects of the controversy or the contrasting theses driving it, nor is it to pres-ent argumpres-ents for sustaining a belief in the bodily nature of emotion to begin with. It is to set forth empirical evidence substantiating the intimate bond between emotions and movement, to point out the concordance of this evidence with the phenomeno-logical analysis of movement, and on these grounds to document the dynamic congru-ency of emotion and movement (Sheets-Johnstone 1999a). The import of recognizing the dynamic congruency will become apparent not only with respect to the need to recognize animation in the sense of a whole-body dynamic – a dynamic that goes beyond facial expression, for example – but with respect to the need to recognize that talk of ourselves as “embodied” beings distracts from, if not elides altogether the foundational animation that undergirds all facets of our being and thus provides the proper point of departure for examining the full spectrum of our human faculties and dispositions.

It is notable that in his Introduction to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin voices concern that his analysis has a sound foundation and in this context calls attention straightaway to infants. He states: “In order to acquire as good a foundation as possible, and to ascertain, independently of common opinion, how far particular movements. . . are really expressive of certain states of the mind, I have found the following means the most serviceable. In the first place, to observe infants; for they exhibit many emotions, as Sir C. Bell remarks, ‘with extraordinary force’; whereas, in after life, some of our expressions ‘cease to have the pure and simple source from which they spring in infancy’” (Darwin 1965 [1872]: 13). The

“after life,” adult shift away from the “pure and simple source” of infancy can surely be described as a shift away from the animate body, in more precise terms, as an

espousal of measured intellect over spontaneous feeling, a definitive predilection for mind over body. A provocative observation made in a panel discussion on “Expres-sion” during a conference on “Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (Ekman, Campos, Davidson & de Waal 2003) aptly captures the muted kinetic character of adult emotion remarked on by both Darwin and Bell. An unidentified audience member comments, “I’ve been so excited by this whole presentation of this session because everybody is coor-dinated into one unit, but what has fascinated me is the absence of the body below the neck [laughter]” (ibid: 273). He or she goes on to explain: “I was fascinated by hearing the words, by seeing the faces, but I did not see the talking by the fingers, by the hands, by the movement, poise, and pattern of the people that were moving, sitting, or shifting.” He/she then asks “if there is any further matter going on with the body as a Gestalt when you are communicating with your voice and your face”

(ibid). Psychologist Paul Ekman responds first by citing the “pioneering work” of David Efron on gestures – what Efron referred to as “emblems”– and comments,

“They are the only body language” (ibid: 273). He mentions Efron’s specification of “speech illustrator movements”, and then alludes to his own research on “bodily movements that we called self-manipulative movements,” movements such as playing with one’s hands or scratching one’s face (ibid: 274). He concludes his response by stating, “There are other approaches that aren’t looking in this formalistic way, but are looking at the flow, or quality, of movement,” and goes on to remark, “These are people who primarily come out of dance. It doesn’t appear that these body move-ments are as direct a signal source for emotion, in humans at least, as the face and voice. That’s why we couldn’t have found someone able to give a scientific talk on the body movements of emotion” (ibid).

The “absence of the body below the neck” might well be characterized as a chronic metaphysics of absence in “scientific talk on the body movements of emotion”, and the absence of “flow, or quality, of movement” as a chronic absence of both dynamics and first-person experience in “scientific talk on the body movements of emotion.”

The absences conceal “the pure and simple source” of emotions that infants enjoy, a source that is quintessentially defined by animation and that is not only typically lost in the “after life” of adults but typically unrecognized in the qualitatively blinkered life of most scientists and philosophers if not academic and non-academic people generally. The deficiency of our “after life” and of a blinkered science notwithstand-ing, we can nonetheless clearly recognize that the absences constitute an absence of whole-body qualitative dynamics. Our voices and faces are part and parcel of those dynamics, part of the qualitative affective-kinetic dynamics created by otherwise spontaneously whole moving bodies. Animate bodies are indeed ones from which movement flows, and in flowing, creates a qualitative dynamic that, as we have seen, can be elucidated in fine phenomenological detail, a detailing that in truth is far

more kinetically elucidating and exacting than scientific disquisitions on emblematic gestures, illustrator movements, and self-manipulative movement. It is pertinent to recall in this regard that phenomenological analyses are open to verification within a methodology no less demanding than that of Western science, which means they can be brought to self-evidence by anyone caring to examine experience. Emotions do indeed “spring” from the body and in their own distinctive qualitative kinetic dynamics as both Darwin and Bell demonstrate graphically as well as descriptively (Darwin 1965 [1872]; Bell 1844). Infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Dan-iel Stern aptly terms these kinetically-charged affective dynamics “vitality affects”

(Stern 1985; 1993). Obviously, to appreciate them, we need to regain touch with our primordial animation by affectively and kinetically interrogating our “after life”

as adults.

In “Concluding Remarks and Summary”, his final chapter on the expression of emotions, Darwin emphasizes “the intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestations” (Darwin 1965 [1872]: 365). Indeed, both implicitly and explicitly throughout his text he has validated the intimate bond.

With respect to rage, for example, he observes:

[R]espiration is laboured, the chest heaves, and the dilated nostrils quiver. The whole body often trembles. The voice is affected. The teeth are clenched or ground together, and the muscular system is commonly stimulated to violent, almost frantic action. But the gestures of a man in this state usually differ from the purposeless writhings and struggles of one suffering from an agony of pain;

for they represent more or less plainly the act of striking or fighting with an

enemy. (ibid: 74)

Even as concerns speech, he observes, “The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken words. They reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified” (ibid: 364)

Darwin’s observations on the intimate bond between movement and emotion are consonant with the lifelong experimental studies of medical doctor and neuropsy-chiatrist Edmund Jacobson, who developed and honed a form of introspection that he called “auto-sensory observation”.⁶ The introspectional practice allowed patients to monitor and ultimately dissipate excessive, unproductive bodily tensions and in consequence to decrease their anxieties and other debilitating feelings. The self-observational technique centers essentially on tactile-kinesthetic awarenesses of one’s

6.  For a more detailed exposition of the work of Jacobson and of the work of Bull and of de Rivera that follow, see Sheets-Johnstone (1999a).

specific and overall tensional levels. Of seminal interest is Jacobson’s description of the holistic nature of a trained observer’s awareness. He states:

The trained observer (not the tyro) identifies and locates signals of neuromuscular activity as integral parts of the mental act [of ‘attention, imagination, recall, fantasy, emotion, or any other mental phenomena’]. He does not discern two acts, one so-called ‘mental’ and the other ‘neuromuscular’, but one act only.

(Jacobson 1970: 35) As if prescient of the direction in which his neuropsychiatric profession will go, he comments that “those who would do homage to the brain with its ten billion cell-amplifiers can well continue to do so,” but they must also not overlook empirical evi-dence: that “muscles and brain proceed together in one effort-circuit, active or relaxed”

(ibid: 36, 34). Jacobson’s empirical evidence of a singular muscle-brain ‘effort-circuit’

accords with Darwin’s basic insight that movement and emotion go hand in hand.

The innovative research of psychiatrist Nina Bull delineates the intimate bond in further, strikingly revealing experiential ways that demonstrate to begin with that there is a generative as well as expressive dimension inherent in the relation between move-ment and emotion; that is, “a basic neuromuscular sequence is essential to the produc-tion of affect” (Bull 1951: 79). Using a methodology based on hypnosis, Bull elicits reports from subjects experiencing one of six specified emotions: fear, anger, disgust, depression, joy, triumph. With respect to fear, one subject reports, for example: “First my jaws tightened, and then my legs and feet. . . my toes bunched up until it hurt. . . and. . . well, I was just afraid of something” (ibid: 59). With respect to anger, subjects report “wanting to throw, pound, tear, smash and hit” and what restrains them, Bull reports, is “always the same, clenching the hands” or making some similar restraining movement (ibid: 65). Of particular interest is her locking subjects hypnotically into a particular emotion – the subjects were first read a particular description from their own experiential reports and told to adopt the specific bodily attitude they themselves had described – and were to remain in that locked position until specifically unlocked.

Without unlocking them, however, Bull told the subjects they were to feel an entirely different, contrasting emotion. That they were unable to do so is indicative of the fact that a change in affect requires a change in postural tensions and general bodily attitude. As one subject responded: “I reached for joy – but couldn’t get it–so tense”;

another responded: “I feel light – can’t feel depression” (ibid: 84, 85). What Bull’s gen-erative study shows indisputably is that affective and tactile-kinesthetic feelings are experientially intertwined. Moreover that subjects did not distinguish between the two feelings is testimony to the fact that they are experienced holistically and integrally, not as causally sequenced phenomena.

Further empirical evidence of the intimate bond is set forth by psychologist Joseph de Rivera in his “geometry of emotions,” which shows that emotions move

us, “transforming” our relation to the world (de Rivera 1977: 35). In delineating “The Movements of the Emotions,” de Rivera singles out and illustrates four fundamental kinetic-affective relations, that is, four basic modes of bodily extension and contraction with respect to four basic emotions: anger, fear, affection, and desire. “If the arms are held out in a circle so that the fingertips almost touch, they may either be brought toward the body (a movement of contraction) or moved out in extension. The entire trunk may follow these movements” (and so, we should add, might also one’s legs and thus one’s whole body). De Rivera then states that “if the palms are facing in, the exten-sion movement corresponds to a moving toward the other – a giving – as in tenderness, while the contraction movement suggests a movement toward the self – a getting – as in longing. If the palms are rotated out, the extension movement corresponds to the thrusting against of anger, while the contraction intimates the withdrawal away of fear.” He points out: “If one allows oneself to become involved in the movement and imagines an object, one may experience the corresponding emotion” (ibid: 40).

De Rivera actually elaborates a complex structure of emotions based on these

“four basic emotional movements” (ibid: 41). In addition to demonstrating the inti-mate bond between movement and emotion, the further point of moment here is pre-cisely the basic one of an animated subject-world relationship: de Rivera demonstrates kinetically that emotions resolve themselves dynamically into extensional or contrac-tive movements that go either toward, against, or away from something in one’s sur-rounding world and correlatively away from or toward oneself. In sum, and as the previously cited research studies from Darwin onward show, emotions are affectively-charged kinetic forms of the tactile-kinesthetic body. To appreciate the dynamic congru-ency of emotions and movement thus requires recognition of a holistic whole-body qualitative dynamics.

5.  Semantic congruency and dynamic congruency: Cornerstones