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Psychoanalysts often believe that academic psychology has little to contribute to depth psychology and that assumption is often justified. Academic psychology sometimes seems to apply sophisticated scientific methodology to the study of trivial issues from the point of view of the practicing clinician. Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, is an academic psychologist whose research into the psychology of emotions is a must read for every practicing psychoanalyst. Ekman is probably the foremost expert in the scientific study of the communication of emotions through facial expressions. Ekman picked up back in the 1950s where Charles Darwin left off in 1872 in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
In the 1950s the prevailing assumption among cultural anthropologists such as Margaret Mead was that the expression of emotion was socially learned and culturally variable. Darwin, originally, and Sylvan Tompkins, in the 1950s, claimed that facial expressions were innate and universal to our species. Ekman, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in clinical psychology of Adelphi University, set out to collect data that would settle this scientific debate. Ekman entered the Stone Age culture of the people who lived in the isolated highlands of Papua New Guinea. First, he studied many hours of films from daily life and found that their facial expressions were quite familiar and fit the context in which they were observed. Observers who viewed edited versions of the film without contextual clues were also able to correctly interpret the facial expressions. Second, he told his Stone Age research subjects a story that evoked an emotion, like a story about a child dying. Ekman then showed the subjects a variety of pictures of various facial expressions and ask them which picture matched the emotion aroused by the story. The results were clear-cut for anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness. The research