"What does the average teacher of psychology mean when he glibly rattles the words "fear", "rage", "anger", and "sex-emotion"? Almost any literary light of the Victorian era, if asked to define these words, would have answered, readily enough : "They are names for emotions possessing distinctive conscious qualities, experienced by everybody, every day. These easily recognized, primitive emotions constitute the very backbone of literature." I submit that the backbone of literature has been transplanted intact into, psychology, where it has proved pitifully inadequate. The whole structure of our recently christened "science", in consequence, remains spineless in its attempted descriptions of human behaviour. Most teachers of psychology, it would seem, are still unable to define these time-worn emotional terms with greater exactness or scientific meaning than that employed by literary men of the last century. Nor can the average teacher be blamed. Theorists and researchers upon whom the teacher must depend for his scientific, concepts have written many hundreds of thousands of words on the subject of emotions, without attempting definite, psycho-neural descriptions of a single basic, or primary emotion. On the other hand, nearly all writers seem to accept the old, undefined literary names of various "emotions" without question ; each writer then giving these terms such connotation as they may happen to hold for him, individually."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
William Moulton Marston, The Emotions of Normal People, (1928), pp.3-4.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emotions
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Emotions
19 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Emotions →
Related Quotes
"One’s emotions are one’s own; to suggest that others should imitate them is to impose on the personal integrity of ot…"
"Feelings are a very difficult business. So outsource them."
"“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”"
"EMOTION, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by …"
"You know, the objective of all of the acting classes really was for you to show how you feel, and not to be clever an…"
"Dolphins read each other’s emotions by sonar and it’s the inside of the body, the configuration of the viscera, that …"
"I'm not actually sure if guilt is an emotion. In fact, that was - at the very beginning of this process, we realized,…"
""I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." After a pause full of intense thought on …"
"People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themsel…"
"Anything that touches my heart holds the potential to inspire me, as it enables me to delve into my emotions and forg…"