Five
fundamental feelings
as five fingers
The day my daughter turned three, I taught her the names of her fingers. That day for the first time ever before going to sleep we enumerated them all: thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, and little finger. My daughter repeated the sequence for several consecutive evenings, counting her own digits. Sometimes I think that’s the only thing I taught her. Anything else came on its own. On second thought, I also handed her the names we attribute to feelings. Our mnemonic technique involved an act of imagination where each finger embodied a different emotion: the thumb was joy, the index finger – fear, the middle finger – anger, the ring finger – sadness, the little finger was disgust. We need all these feelings as much as we need all our fingers. Five basic emotions like five fundamental feelings. Five facial expressions recognised by humans all over the world, just like five fingers. And then we segued into senses. Another enumeration: joy is touch, anger is hearing, because it is audible whenever we shout at each other or stamp our feet. Fear makes cowards of us all and is a sight to behold. Sadness leaves its bitter aftertaste, while certain smells fill us with disgust. There’s no doubt we need all five senses.
But why have I just introduced this highfalutin didactic tone in discussing commonplace human emotions? Because naming them remains a challenge into adulthood, stretching well beyond primary school. In fact, these are problems that have frequently originated there. This is because we, the adult children we are, have been socialised to learn how to feel, how to also experience unwelcome emotions, such as sadness, or forbidden ones, such as anger. It’s exhausting when universal feelings are in most cases negative psychic states. We shy away from experiencing them yet whenever we decide to feel them anew, we’re at a loss about how to do it. How to feel what for years we’ve been denied? Conditioned to perform risk-free joy, we act out the dystopian script of Brave New World, in which Aldous Huxley warned us against prioritising the senses of joy, pleasure, and comfort over the full world of emotions – not just the positive, simple ones. This is a warning about the tolerant parental voice saying “I only want my child to be happy. Nothing else”. Nothing else? Can anyone simply want less? As if that faux-minimalist parental voice wasn’t demanding too much of us?
Years ago, psychologists Beverly Fehr and James Russell remarked that “Everyone knows what an emotion is until asked to give a definition. Then, it seems no one knows”. As a psychology student, I’d heard my disarmingly helpless professors repeat this catchphrase, which in time I came to pass on to my own students. Hard-pressed and fumbling for an academic definition of emotions, I spoke of conscious or unconscious, relatively long-lasting psychic states, preceded by a specific real-life event. By the same academic token, feelings are interpretations of emotions, while moods are less intense feelings and more uneventful. This does the trick, if only superficially.
In the late 19th century, French physician Hippolyte Baraduc asserted that he could capture emotions by means of a standard camera. To do so, Baraduc would search for emotionally disturbed individuals. By placing lightproof paper a few centimetres above their heads, he showed that different feelings caused different shapes to appear on a photographic plate behind it, with the same emotions yielding the same images. For instance, anger always looks like fireworks. But Baraduc isn’t moonlighting as an assistant curator of this online exhibition. Anger fabricates diverse images: once it’s a portrait of a woman, another time a decorative goblet.
Today, my intention is to guide you through this emotional turmoil: from the hall of anger via the room of sadness and into the funhouse. As we explore, we’ll take our sweet time in the cabinet of disgust, then pick up speed in the house of horrors.
Come along, follow me this way, please.