Is Emotion Nothing More Than a Form of Cognition?
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Is Emotion Nothing More Than a Form of Cognition?

Is Emotion Nothing More Than a Form of Cognition?

March 1, 2013

Here’s some promo for the latest products from the Psychotherapy Networker, a popular online resource for therapists—

“Learn how working with emotions can transform your practice”

“Gain the understanding, insight, and know-how to engage authentically with clients as emotions emerge”

“Working with emotions can be tough for both clients and therapists. This series is designed both to deepen your understanding of emotions and to strengthen your ability to work with them effectively. The focus is on providing you with practical insights that you can put to work right away.”

Really? Sounds like something from The Onion to me.

Aren’t emotions the stuff of psychotherapy? Is this an admission of a blatant omission in the therapist’s toolbox? What have therapists been doing all these years?

I know—they’ve been relating to emotional pain with cognitive and behavioral therapies. This unfortunate irony is only highlighted by the “revelation” of the Psychotherapy Networker (and several other organizations). I hadn’t realized that emotions had been so absent from psychotherapy training and literature that therapists have to be told to work with emotions and shown how.

What’s happening that emotions are hailed as the new frontier in psychotherapy? And what does it reveal about the depth of the cognitive bias of psychotherapy, psychology, and our overall culture?

At least in part, the surge of interest in emotion is coming from discoveries in neuroscience—which, even from reading just the popular press, seem to be made each day (and which are fascinating). But what are others doing with these discoveries?  Quoting the Psychotherapy Networker again, “Neuroscientists have recently established that emotion is the prime organizing force shaping how we cope with challenges…emotion is anything but primitive and unpredictable. It’s a complex, exquisitely efficient information-processing system, designed to organize behavior rapidly in the interests of survival.”

Sounds just like a typical descriptions of cognition, doesn’t it?

For sure, Western culture has not been kind to emotion. It’s been ignored, demeaned and outcast as inferior to cognition, the enemy of rationality, characteristically female (and so unworthy of attention) for centuries. Even though feminist psychologists and philosophers have exposed the male biases of accepted conceptions of being human, the overall cultural environment of psychology and psychotherapy hasn’t changed much. Theoretically and institutionally, it remains paradigmatically male and cognitively overdetermined. I fear that legitimizing emotion because of findings in neuroscience—and distorting the enormous historical and cultural complexity of human emotionality to fit a cognitive, information-processing model will only makes it worse.

If you know of therapists who work with some kind of social-cultural understanding of human emotion, sing their praises! I do.

 

 

12 Comments
  • loisholzman
    Posted at 13:49h, 05 April

    Your post is here. Can you see it?

  • w.s.
    Posted at 11:59h, 05 April

    I posted a comment but it has disappeared without further notice. Please inform me.

    Dr. w. schlamilch
    amsterdam
    meervoudiger@planet.nl

  • w.s.
    Posted at 08:57h, 05 April

    When asked : what do you feel , an individual responds from within the cognitive field :
    pain, joy, sadness The existence of emotions can never be proven in another way then by
    using the words that the indivual has learned during his life time. He experiences emotions as nonspecified objects but still believe those emotions have a reality of their own.
    A psychopath is brought up in a learning enviroment where there was no use for example for the word : compassion. So he never learned the behaviour associated with that
    word. He never developed a emotion called compassion with is nothing then the
    interpretation other people use for a pure special sensation of their body. The word emotion
    is useless but it lends itself for neverending dramatization, the human need par excellence.

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 18:43h, 06 March

    Matt,
    The easiest place is an article on this site: Holzman, L. and Newman, F. (in press). Activity and Performance (and their Discourses) in Social Therapeutic Method. In T. Strong and A. Lock (Eds.), Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice . London: Oxford University Press.There’s also Newman’s and my book, The End of Knowing.

  • Matt Rosenblum
    Posted at 23:21h, 05 March

    interesting…anything I can read about non-causal connectedness?

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 23:12h, 05 March

    Thanks, Matt.
    Yes, I have heard of it and some of my colleagues have done a bit of study and conversation about it. I’m sure it’s a helpful way of seeing/thinking for some people. I prefer to see things/events/people as having what my mentor Fred Newman called “a non-causal connectedness”—which may have some resonance with integral theory but I suspect is far less systemitized. I apprecaite your comment!

  • Matt Rosenblum
    Posted at 23:04h, 05 March

    Lois, have you heard of integral theory?

    Check out the graph in the link…they try to combine the interior way (what is going on in my mind), and the behavioral way of seeing things (science, biology), and then also collective interior perspective (sociocultural relationships) and collective exterior perspective (art, technology, organizations).
    http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-operating-system?page=0,5

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 03:26h, 03 March

    Thanks, Mary.
    I think of emotion and cognition as in a dialectical relationship, the way Vygotsky did.

  • Mary Ann Gdula RN, PhD, CAS
    Posted at 23:47h, 02 March

    I think we all try to simplify that which is not. I do not believe emotions are thoughts, nor come from same areas as cognition. The task we all have is to understand in the individual how they both interact and yet remain separate. Which comes first has been a forever controversy; that seems to depend on one’s theoretical orientation.but I believe they are far too complex to be shuffled into the same neurological spot, and will remain the challenge of every psychologist / psychotherapist. As for me,I have never sacrificed emotions for cognitions..

  • Ulla
    Posted at 20:32h, 02 March

    Spot on!

  • loisholzman
    Posted at 16:18h, 02 March

    Well put!

  • Don
    Posted at 06:30h, 02 March

    In the words of a friend of mine, not a surprise but certainly a shock. Thanks for writing about this as clearly as you do…

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