You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We are living in a world marked by violence. The exploration of what underlies this violence is thus timely and urgent, not only from an academic theoretical, but also from a societal perspective. If we, as human beings, can reflect on what this violence means, what its antecedents are, there is a slight chance that collectively the frightening spectre of an ever increasing spiral of violence can be staved off. Richard Mizen's contribution is thus welcomed.
The separating out of affects, emotions and feelings is challenging. From the very start, Mizen refers to ‘emotional-feels’ without defining what he means and yet the reader intuitively understands what he is saying. Damasio defines emotions as ‘complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern’ (2000 p. 51), that exist outside conscious awareness. These emotions become feelings when there is a conscious sense of what is happening in the body. Mizen's ‘emotional-feels’ thus make perfect sense. While Daniel Stern uses emotions and affects interchangeably (2010 p. 42), Mizen describes affects in terms of linking ‘behaviour to body systems that maintain body homeostasis’ (p. 118). Leaving aside the finer definitions of the terms, the point of the paper is that the outer objective behavior and inner subjective emotional-feels are linked, and that instead of excluding affective elements they should be considered primary and used as the point of departure.
The seven affective brain systems, which have been identified and described by Panskepp, acquire meaning in infancy, when the caregiver