Lisa Appignanesi - Emotions: good, bad and maddening

Lisa Appignanesi, Visiting Professor at King’s College London and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, explores “good” and “bad” emotions.

About Lisa Appignanesi "I’m a Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities at King’s College London. I’ve written books on anger, on love and trials of passions, and on women.

I’m fascinated by the subject of emotions: extreme emotions, madness, Freud, the therapeutic and psychiatric professions."

Key Points

• Emotions in themselves can be both good and bad at the same time; it’s when they take over and there is an imbalance that things begin to go astray. • Women become the bearers of many of the emotional extremes. They are considered to be far more emotional than men. • Freud allowed women to have and experience desire. Women’s desire was no longer aberrant. • There has been a great medicalisation of our emotions and our potential behaviours. And we have nowhere to go except to doctors.

Classification of emotions

The classification of emotions has been with us for a very long time. The seven deadly sins are a form of classifying the emotions, of charting what is good and what is bad and what is desirable and not desirable. Emotions are aspects of feeling which lead you towards action, towards behaviour. And they also are linked to our motives. Emotions in themselves can be both good and bad at the same time; it’s when they take over and there is an imbalance that things begin to go astray. Every epoch, every moment in history, has its very own ways of behaving or characterising or acting crazy. So, what topples you over into something which is diagnosable by doctors? What topples you over is often that you don’t behave like everybody else or your emotions, the ones that are visible, don’t seem to be like those of others. Sanity itself, as a definition, of course, also changes because it’s very much linked to what society expects.