Re:Emotion, Cognition & Psychotherapy

Hi Fred,

You've done a lot of good thinking over this,I know from experience, and I suppose have also done a lot of service to your faith in pharmaceuticals and your disdain of therapy.

However, technically I think there are a lot of weaknesses in the argument as you've framed it. Your view of emotions and the roots of distress seem to be very simplistic, essentially:

"all distress is emotion, and emotions are all rooted in primitive neurological reflexes informationally opaque to cognition"

Therefore, you conclude, re-interpreting a situation is useless for helping alleviate our distress in that situation.

Yet that conclusion is completely unsupported, even by the basic data surveyed by your primary source, Joe LeDoux, in my opinion. Even rats respond differently to different situations based on circumstances (such as their perception of control). That's cognitive.

The fact that cutting the amygdala out of a rat eliminates its emotional responses is no more helpful to us in healing people than noting that pulling the plug on a television turns it off would help us in diagnosing a fluttery picture. Primitive neurology is neccessary but not sufficient.

It also simply ignores the fact that re-interpreting a situation *does* change the way we feel about it after the fact. Re-interpretation also *does*, regardless of the informational opacity between supposed primitive emotions and higher cognitive functions, alter patterns of response to different kinds of situations. That is, cognitive therapy works, whereas if your view was accurate, it simply wouldn't work at all, we would have only post facto rationalization that we were helping ourselves, which is demonstrably not the case.

The conceptual issues involved in understanding different kinds of feelings, their perpetuation and their origins, are covered particularly well in Paul Griffiths' "What Emotions Really Are," from The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:Emotion, Cognition & Psychotherapy , by Fred H., 01/06/01 Re:Emotion, Cognition & Psychotherapy , by Todd I. Stark (toddstark@aol.com), 01/07/01

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