Sartre and Magic

Safety Valves of the Psyche: Reading Freud on Aggression, Morality, and Internal Emotions

“…Our angers, by contrast, are usually explicit and episodic, with a particular object at a particular moment, and for a particular (perceived) reason. I get angry at someone or something-it has a one-on-one correlation that can be explained well phenomenologically [4,18] (pp. 10-15, 26-27; pp.…”

“…149.) Even though much of our language shows that we are often under the sway of the magic of emotions [4] (pp. [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40] in a way that makes us feel like a passenger, even though a proper phenomenology would show that not all of our feelings can and should be subsumed under a cognitive and rationalistic idea of emotions, and even though the hydraulic model does not even argue for treating all feelings, let alone emotions, in this manner, these are all points that we should somehow "resist".…”

“…Although the philosophy of emotion has burgeoned in the last few decades, and although it is now clear that many of our emotions automatically engage and interact with the world and its people-in short, it is not all "just in the head", to borrow Noë's [1] well-known phrase-this article will return to "the head" somewhat, i.e., the psyche, and show how some basic internal feelings, affects, and emotions go a long way in formatting some of our rudimentary personal (and interpersonal) structures, which, in turn, format not only our characters and behaviours, but parts of human morality and society more generally. In this manner, although I am returning to studying some internal emotion thanks to Freud viewed as a philosophical anthropologist, this in no way means to discount or detract from more "externalist" or phenomenological accounts of emotion, including my own [2][3][4][5]. The two sides can be seen as interesting and even complementary avenues of study in a colossal and highly complex domain of human behaviour and study.…”