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The Mind’s Affective Life

Gemma Corradi Fiumara

2001 Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 
pp. 166 + index ISBN 1-58391-154-5  (pb) £17.99 

Practical Philosophy  (Book Reviews) Autumn 2002 Volume 4.2

Reviewed by: Peter B. Raabe

I first became acquainted with Gemma Fiumara’s writing when I read her book The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (London: Routledge, 1990). It is a small book on what seems at first to be a simplistic topic - listening. But it offers so many bright flashes of philosophic insights that it remains in my memory as a very thought-provoking book. I remember this book filling me with both the joy of inquiry and the excitement of discovery. It reminded me of Epicurus who said, ‘In philosophy the pleasure accompanies the knowledge.  For enjoyment does not come after the learning but the learning and enjoyment are simultaneous.’  In The Mind’s Affective Life, Fiumara conducts a psychoanalytic and philosophical inquiry into exactly this type of phenomenon: the relationship between joy and inquiry, between excitement and discovery, that is, between the emotions and the intellect.

The overarching argument Fiumara makes is that it’s true that emotions or feelings, such as anger, frustration, and love, can complicate reasoning in the same way that values can complicate a discussion of facts. But just like leaving out a consideration of values is to ignore a significant interpretive element in any discussion of facts, leaving out a consideration of emotions and feelings is to ignore a significant interpretive element in reasoning. And she argues that, more than emotions simply being important to the process of reasoning, emotions are integral to the very structure of the mind.

The book is divided into twelve relatively short, but densely packed, chapters. Fiumara points out that in order to have it appear as legitimate, rigorous, and neutral, humans have defined knowledge as emotion-free. Rationality has gained ascendancy in philosophy’s epistemology by means of repressing the emotions (or ‘affects’ as they are called in psychology). Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is concerned in part with rescuing the ignored, silenced, or smothered affective elements, including a person’s desire to know, which she calls  ‘epistemophily’. She argues that, despite the claim that rationality is objective, it is always contingent upon one’s relationship with the community in which one lives. Rationality is therefore ‘not a matter of detached theorizing, but rather a caring way of being rational or searching for rational ways of caring’ (p. 22). 

Furthermore, the emotions always influence what one chooses to know about, because a certain kind of love, passion, or emotional drive must be present in order to sustain the effort required to study a particular topic, even in the hyper-rational world of science. This is why, Fiumara says, it makes no sense to believe that the world merely contains ‘objects of knowledge’ or facts to be discovered, because ‘the production of facts is ultimately an expression of human desire’ (p. 36). After all, what is the point of struggling to know everything if there is no way to care about it? Even, the ‘will to power’, which is such a pervasive theme in philosophy is, Fiumara argues, ‘persistently misrecognised and often portrayed as purely cerebral or intellectual’ (p. 41).  

In order to locate the emotions holistically within the human organism, Fiumara discusses the reciprocal relationship between the mind and the body, between thinking and feeling. She points out how a clear knowledge of the emotions has been difficult because the epistemological inquiry has, paradoxically, been rational, and so the language we use to define the emotions is therefore often inadequate and vague. This lack of a distinct language of the emotions is not, according to Fiumara, evidence that the emotions are unimportant; it indicates instead a lack of awareness, or worse, a denial of their importance. She explains that, while we have largely given up the erroneous belief that emotions are simply an unsolicited psychic function that must be endured, there still seems to be a general denial among scholars that emotions are in fact an active process vital to human survival and intellectual growth. 

This book contains a certain amount of information. But more importantly, the author creates in the reader the feeling that there is much more to be discovered. She offers tantalizing concepts such as  ‘passionate listening’ (p. 23), ‘risky listening’ (p. 67), ‘knowing as that feeling of being on the right track’ (p. 78), ‘the ‘sweet pain’ of curiosity’ (p. 81), and the ‘legitimacy’ of feelings  (p. 94) that stir the imagination. The section of the book subtitled ‘The legitimacy of affects and moods’ actually made me realise that something as seemingly rational as the guaranteeing of human rights is in fact based on emotions – it is not merely a judicious political proposition; it is in fact an act of compassion meant to alleviate human suffering! 

Fiumara is both an Associate Professor of Philosophy and a training analyst. So besides offering exclusively theoretical arguments, she also discusses the clinical significance of the conclusions for which she is arguing. For example, in speaking about the fact that therapy is not simply a quest for propositional truth, but requires the therapist to become a sort of receptacle of his patient’s emotions, she writes, ‘The patient’s fear that the therapist will prove to be an inadequate container of invasive affects – and turn into a proselytizing agent – remains a serious limiting factor which contributes to the inability of such patients to trust the safety of the therapeutic setting’ (p. 129).   

While I wholeheartedly endorse this book, I want to offer two cautionary remarks. First, the book focuses narrowly on the emotions and the psychoanalytic approach to mental distress. Psychoanalysis, according to Fiumara, may be seen as ‘emotional education’ (p. 107) which tries to develop a  ‘harmonious interaction between whatever it is that we describe as id and ego’ (p. 120) and to ‘capture ulterior meanings presented under cover of literal discourse’ (p. 130). Because of this narrow focus the reader may be tempted to conclude that the relief of mental distress is best accomplished by means of  ‘rearranging our inner world’ (p. 95). This may lead the reader to forget the very important fact that a great deal of mental distress is not individual psychopathology but is instead the result of social factors such as poverty, oppression, enforced conformity, and so on. Many post-Freudian therapists argue that the relief of mental distress is generally best achieved, not by treating the emotions directly but indirectly, by helping their patients deal with those external stressors which caused their emotional upset in the first place. This is not to say that Fiumara sees external causal factors as unimportant; it is only to caution the reader that this book may give the mistaken impression that the psychoanalytic approach to the emotions is the best or only therapy for mental distress.

Second, I find Fiumara’s prose style somewhat difficult. I often had to struggle to retain the sense of what was being discussed within the dense and complex juxtapositions of scholarly terminology. Fortunately she does occasionally offer relief in the form of concise examples which quickly clarify, in a few sentences, what remains obscured in the narrative passages. 

Despite these criticisms, I would recommend this book to both instructors and students of philosophy,  philosophical counsellors, psychoanalysts, and anyone else who believes that the emotions don’t simply interpret but in fact help to define human rationality. This book is a serious challenge to the flawed image of the mind as a passionless generator of analytical rationality that has been so long defended by academic philosophers.

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