The Logic of Emotional Thought: A Contribution to the Metapsychology of Emotional States

The title of this paper implies two fundamental concepts.

1. Emotion — a complex psycho-physical phenomenon — involves thought, or in other words, cognitive or propositional activity. In simpler terms, someone who loves, who experiences feelings of love, has thoughts of love; someone who hates, who experiences feelings of hate, has thoughts of hate. Phenomenological thinking — and I am referring in particular to Sartre's all-important studies — has clearly grasped the presence of this cognitive element in emotional phenomena, and has clarified its most intimate nature. Using Sartre's words (1939), we may attempt to summarize this nature in three brief points, whose importance becomes more and more obvious in the light of Freudian theory:

   1. “Emotion is a certain way of apprehending the world (…); it is a transformation of the world”.

   2. “What is constitutive of emotion is the fact that it takes from

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      the object something which infinitely overflows emotion (…); every quality is conferred on an object only through a step towards the infinite”.

   3. “We shall give the name of emotion to a sudden fall of consciousness into the magic. Or, if one prefers to say it otherwise, there is emotion whenever the world of utensils vanishes suddenly and the magical world appears in its place”.

2. This cognitive activity has a logic of its own which breaks away from the logic that distinguishes our conscious thought, the so-called Aristotelian logic that is the basis for scientific thought, and which is characterized by a respect for the principle of noncontradiction; its heterogeneous and dividing nature reflects the heterogeneity of the world. Contrary to any artificial dichotomy between what is rational and what is emotional, then, we may say, — at this initial encounter with this phenomenological problem — that every human emotion, of any kind and intensity, confronts us with something that is not purely chaotic and in opposition to the pure order and rationality of thought, but is a different kind