part of a dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be)

This was initially an e-mail to a friend and classmate, a compulsion to more deeply explore in writing a piece of a conversation shared over some really good polenta and spinach at Ciao Vito on Sunday night. Upon reading it, I thought: Well, there you go with one of your damn essays again!

Rather than leaving my dear friend with an e-mail that may make her wonder: "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do with *this,*" I am casting it out to a broader audience. This is a topic that, as someone approaching work as a therapist, I feel like I have not given sufficient philosophical thought. It is, I imagine, frequently discussed in therapy. Thus, I will be writing for a bit on the old blog about it, as I give the topic more thought. What better time to do it than between sessions? Love is, after all, both luxury and necessity.

This first installment, below, is a copy -- a bit edited -- of the e-mail I sent to my patient friend and one of my favorite conversationalists. Going forward, I'll post my developing thoughts about it on my blog. And I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on the matter.

So my topic: My question to you last night was about love. I was pondering on that axiom about how one must love thyself before being capable of really loving others. I proposed that idea was bullshit, mainly because I think the process of learning to "love" oneself is a lifelong process, a job that, like knowing oneself, is really never complete. (You, for the record, said you think there is something to that.) Before I get into that, I also want recall that the conversation turned to how one even defines "love," whether it's really an "emotion" or more like an "attitude, a broader concept that describes a relationship more than it *is* something in and of itself." (You said you think the social construct of romantic love creates idealized, distorted views of what relationships should be.) That is something else I'd like to explore conceptually in greater detail, as I think the answer to that -- or rather, one's philosophy about the nature of love itself -- really impacts the understanding of how one approaches therapy on this topic (and surely, it is a *huge* one). And then, lastly, I mentioned I had read somewhere that there are only, like, seven or eight identifiable emotions, and we had a brief discussion about how such things are determined, but we both kind of shrugged at it and moved on to something else.

It is with the last topic on this list that I would like to begin: identifiable emotions.

So, without any difficulty, I did a little Google search and came up with some information. I haven't spent any time whatsoever examining the sources of all this stuff, but a quick summary: Darwin was among the first westerners to diligently and systematically attempt to identify and categorize the experience of emotions. He came up with more than 30 and conceptualized them as evolutionary adaptations. The behaviorists have plenty of thoughts about how emotions are primarily a the effect of some kind of reward or punishment based in a pleasure/pain construct. You've also got the opinions of the neurobiologists and their thoughts on mirror neurons and whatnot. I could go on, but basically, there are several schools of thought that regard emotions in biological or social constructs -- or a mix.

Plenty of debate on where they come from, so you can imagine it's also vigorously debated in some circles just *what* an emotion is, or rather, how to categorize them and talk about them. What do we mean when we say we're "happy" after all? If you can't define "happiness" because it's so individual, how can you possibly assume to be talking about the same emotion?Emotional experience is sometimes visible to others (laughter, crying, happiness -- and a particular depth of all of those being expressed sometimes in tears) and sometimes audible ("hearing emotion" in the voice) -- but sometimes invisible as well (a highly practiced skill in our society). Given the latter, we can't really trust our senses. We have to rely on what others tell us they are feeling.

But, again, lacking the ability to share the experience of others, we lack a true understanding even with words. That's why there are so many amazing synonyms for emotions. Consider: joy, happiness, elation, exuberance. I could make a longer list. Our language is rich, mainly because we keep trying to find more precise terms to describe things. Emotions must certainly be among the most difficult. How can I, the writer, capture in a single word all that I felt in a moment of note, such as hearing a young girl read to me just after she has learned to do so? Would "cool" really capture it? "Captivated?" "Touched" (to witness something in a dear child at a developmental milestone)? See how a feeling has already failed to be summed up in a single expression?

Frankly, as a lover of words and a believer in the unique experiences of individuals, I am opposed to broad categorizations of emotion. And yet, I am struck by the need, at least among colleagues, to have a common language. I am also opposed to diagnosing your average human but recently found myself arguing on behalf of the DSM if for no other reason than that common language. I vacillate on this topic tremendously because I'm generally not interested in labeling the complexity of a human life with a few words -- Anxiety Disorder, for example -- but also know that an approach requires a starting point, a position from which to view a situation. We sum up people all the time in many respects, don't we? How do we talk about them, even to ourselves, without a conceptualization, without words that in some way or other ... label? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The ability to distinguish between emotions requires not just a good understanding of English synonyms but also an conceptualization of the broad regions where the physical experience of the body (the emotion) and its associated cognitions cross paths. There's a particular list I like. It is clinical and utterly lacking in the poetry I think humans deserve, but it's useful for discussions about the experiences associated with emotions. Each item on the list is part of a circular spectrum in which the opposite side of the circle describes the opposite emotion: "pleasantness" vs."unpleasantness."

The spectrum: pleasantness, high positive affect, strong engagement, high negative affect, unpleasantness, low positive affect, disengagement and, (as it comes back around toward pleasantness again) low negative affect. There are common linguistic expressions that fall into these categories. So "high negative affect" was commonly associated with words like distressed, fearful, hostile, jittery, nervous and scornful. To my artistic heart, those sound like very different emotions, but they certainly are constitute a high negative affect.

My purpose in mentioning all of this is simply to define the jumping off point for a philosophical discussion about love -- whether it's an emotion or the description of a relationship (or both/and?) and whether it really is necessary and/or possible "to love yourself completely before you can love others."

Ideally, I'd like to spark a discussion on this, but I also want to organize my thoughts on the topic. It keeps talking to me, and I keep thinking: Well, yeah, this is something I'd better have a more constructed personal philosophy on if I'm going to be working with people.

I can tell you my personal philosophy on "meaning of life" -- and I'm developing a rather substantial one on "female sexuality" as well -- and those well-defined bits of self knowledge help me reflect on my reactions to what other people on the subject. But I cannot tell you what I think about "love" -- about the complexity of its social construct, its evolutionary or biological purposes, whether it's an emotion or a collection of attitudes, needs and wants. And yet, will it not be among the most bantered about of terms in therapy? Will our clients not speak of it endlessly? Do we not use the word ourselves with so many complex meanings? It occurs to me that I have not given it sufficient thought.