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Psychoanalysis has long had a love affair with the so-called negative emotions. Where the positive-thinkers have wished to banish shame, sadness, and anxiety from the human repertoire; where the stoics and Buddhists have learned to tolerate them; where the artists and humanists have celebrated them as essentially human—psychoanalysis has taken up a sober, optimistic, mechanistic, and evolutionary view. The negative affects are tools. Helpful, indispensable tools. They are as necessary a part of the psychic apparatus as the left leg is to the physical one. In the most general sense, they are mechanisms by which the ego accommodates the wishes of the id to the realities of the world. Did you love someone who now is gone? Sadness is necessary to accommodate the loss. Do you fear something that can harm you? Fear is your friend. Do you feel threatened by someone who, if left unchecked, will trample your rights and lower your status? Go ahead, get mad. None of this is said directly to patients, of course, but an underlying message to the repressed neurotic patient (though not the splitting borderline) is to let go. What's so scary about being sad, or mad, or scared? To the analyst, Roosevelt's famous warning stopped one repetition short. What we have to fear is not fear itself but, rather, the fear of fear. The patient in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is, therefore, implicitly encouraged to feel, rather than suppress, his or her negative emotions. Such affects open to the patient psychological vistas only dimly sensed previously.
Given this, it has been with some impatience that many of us have listened to the cognitive neurosciences talk about emotion. An underlying premise of a large majority of these articles is Utopian. They imply that life would be better without anger, fear, sadness, guilt, and the like. Negative emotions need to be “controlled” and “regulated.” Even the term “negative emotion” has rung, somehow, false. The implication is that negative emotions do no