books:

	The Transmission of Affect Teresa Brennan Cornell University Press, 2004 - 227 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

The ability to borrow or share states of mind, once historically and culturally assumed, is now pathologized, as Teresa Brennan shows in relation to affective transfer in psychiatric clinics and the prevalence of psychogenic illness in contemporary life. To neglect the mechanism by which affect is transmitted, the author claims, has serious consequences for science and medical research.

Brennan?s theory of affect is based on constant communication between individuals and their physical and social environments. Her important book details the relationships among affect, energy, and "new maladies of the soul," including attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, codependency, and fibromyalgia.

for more information click here

Really Good

This was an important book for me. Simply written, it explains how people use blame to organize their inner worlds, and interestingly links this impulse to our most primitive physiological experiences. This is the real thing -- an intellectual delight that never strays from the simple pain of emotional truth.


An important but problematic book

Teresa Brennan's book argues essentially that we feel each others' feelings, and that we used to know this--various civil and religious codes are records of such awareness--but in our eagerness to establish our separateness (what Brennan calls our "self-containment"), we have forgotten. In the course of demonstrating her thesis, she takes us through quickie readings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophies of the passions (from Descartes and Spinoza to Hume), Freudian metapsychology, various sociological theories of crowd behavior beginning with Le Bon in 1895, and religious conceptions of angels, demons, and other spirits (which she reads, ingeniously, as personifications of communally shared affects).

This is an extremely important and I think utterly realistic and reasonable theory; but there are some problems with it. One is that her concept-formation is sloppy. On p. 5, for example, she says "By an affect, I mean the physiological shift accompanying a judgment," and later in that paragraph uses "evaluative and judgmental" as further adjectival synonyms for the collective regulatory pressures we put on each other through shared affect. On p. 119, however, "judgment" and "judgmental" have become terms for the blockage of shared affect: "when I judge the other, I simultaneously direct toward her that stream of negative affect that cuts off my feeling of kinship from her as a fellow living, suffering, joyful creature." Here judgment has become not regulatory affective pressure but the repression of shared affect.

Another problem is that she absolutely rejects mimetic theories of affect transmission--the notion, based on the nineteenth-century Carpenter Effect, that we see and hear other people's body language and use it imaginatively to simulate their body states in our own--in order to argue that affect is transmitted chemically, mainly by smell (pheromones). By insisting that affect is transmitted physically rather than imaginatively, she guts her own insistence that shared affect is the basis of all ethics, all societal regulation of behavior: if I am considering a course of action that will harm someone not physically present, the only channel of shared affect that can have any significant ethical impact on my decision is not smell but my imaginative reconstruction and imitation of the other person's body state. (Also, there is a time problem here: the hormonal transfers she discusses take minutes to transform the target organism; the Carpenter Effect has been measured to transform the imitating organism within several hundred milliseconds. The apparent instantaneity of shared affect could not possibly be created chemically.)

Her insistence on rejecting mimetic theories of affect transmission seems to me to have a lot to do with her ignorance of the work of Antonio Damasio, as well as the attachment theorists who have been powerfully influenced by his neurological findings (see especially Allan Schore's books on affect regulation). In fact, she claims that NO ONE has studied the channels of affect transmission--a claim that only reflects her ignorance.

Finally, her style is not particularly user-friendly. For one thing, she doesn't walk the reader through a series of argumentative steps from what we already assume to what she wants to get us to see; she jumps right into the thicket of this or that theoretical tradition (philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, religion), devotes pages and pages to a painstaking summary of the extant work without stepping back and giving us a roadmap of where she is going, then gives us a new section heading and is off into the midst of some other conceptual thicket. This approach is further confused by her tendency to take a set of assumptions from some other discourse than the one she is currently unpacking and not argue them--such as her casual assumption that "masculine" behavior (in men or women) "projects unwanted aggression into the feminine other, who experiences this projected aggression as anxiety and depression." She is not explicitly associating aggression with men and the passive introjection of men's aggression with women, here; but she is somewhere very close to that patriarchal division of labor, and she nowhere stops to problematize or interrogate it. It's just a fact.

She's not particularly handy with words. I hesitate to mention this, because she died--was hit by a car--while in the final stages of editing the book, and the job was finished by her assistants. But however the solecisms ended up on the page, her readers still have to deal with them, so I'll mention some of the problems.

She has a penchant for "that said" constructions, and often uses them as dangling modifiers: "Having said this, let me immediately differentiate my position from ...", "Having said that, there is a peculiar affinity ...", "That said, just as the existence ..."

She has a very hard time keeping track of the antecedents of her pronouns: "... the affects, more or less, win. They win insofar as they succeed in presenting themselves sympathetically, as the constituents of our true natures, entitled to an equal say, if not to rule. Since Hume, they have edged toward the position that all ethics, insofar as they embody passionate convictions, are no more than passions or emotions, affects or sentiments ..." If "they" refers to affects in the first sentence, what does it refer to after "since Hume"? Affects? Can affects really edge toward a position? And after "insofar as," does "they" refer to "ethics"? Or does it still refer back to affects?

And she repeats herself a lot: "In positing that people in the Western world were once aware of the transmission of affect, and that we have been sealed against this knowledge by the deadening, passifying affects of modern times, I have implied that knowledge of transmission was once conscious, although that knowledge is now repressed." In other words, in positing that people knew about shared affect, I have implied that people knew about shared affect. The second part of each clause there is not exactly a repetition, but it's close: "sealed against this knowledge" and "that knowledge is now repressed."

Still, Brennan's book is extremely important, and breaks new ground in many areas. It may not be the revolutionary magnum opus that she herself took it to be, but it is revolutionary enough to enhance what she refers to as "discernment" of shared affect.

for more information click here

products you might be interested in

recommendations

Bergsonism

transmission

	Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Inside Out CISSP Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, 4th Ed. (All-in-One) Outlook 2007 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) Routing Protocols and Concepts, CCNA Exploration Companion Guide CCNA Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802) (Exam ...