Everybody knows what you mean when you say you're happy or sad. But
what about all those emotional states you don't have words for? Here are
ten feelings you may have had, but never knew how to explain.
1. Dysphoria
Often used to describe depression in psychological disorders, dysphoria
is general state of sadness that includes restlessness, lack of energy,
anxiety, and vague irritation. It is the opposite of euphoria, and is
different from typical sadness because it often includes a kind of
jumpiness and some anger. You have probably experienced it when coming
down from a stimulant like chocolate, coffee, or something stronger. Or
you may have felt it in response to a distressing situation, extreme
boredom, or depression.
2. Enthrallment
Psychology professor W. Gerrod Parrott
has broken down human emotions into subcategories, which themselves
have their own subcategories. Most of the emotions he identifies, like
joy and anger, are pretty recognizable. But one subset of joy,
"enthrallment," you may not have heard of before. Unlike the perkier
subcategories of joy like cheerfulness, zest, and relief, enthrallment
is a state of intense rapture. It is not the same as love or lust. You
might experience it when you see an incredible spectacle — a concert, a
movie, a rocket taking off — that captures all your attention and
elevates your mood to tremendous heights.
3. Normopathy
Psychiatric theorist Christopher Bollas invented the idea of normopathy
to describe people who are so focused on blending in and conforming to
social norms that it becomes a kind of mania. A person who is normotic
is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only
doing exactly what is expected by society. Extreme normopathy is
punctuated by breaks from the norm, where normotic person cracks under
the pressure of conforming and becomes violent or does something very
dangerous. Many people experience mild normopathy at different times in
their lives, especially when trying to fit into a new social situation,
or when trying to hide behaviors they believe other people would
condemn.
4. Abjection
There are a few ways to define abjection, but French philosopher Julia Kristeva (literally) wrote the book
on what it means to experience abjection. She suggests that every human
goes through a period of abjection as tiny children when we first
realize that our bodies are separate from our parents' bodies — this
sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme horror we carry with us
throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated when
we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the
boundaries of our sense of self. Often, abjection is what you are
feeling when you witness or experience something so horrific that it
causes you to throw up. A classic example is seeing a corpse, but
abjection can also be caused by seeing shit or open wounds. These
visions all remind us, at some level, that our selfhood is contained in
what Star Trek aliens would call "ugly bags of mostly water." The only
thing separating you from being a dead body is . . . almost nothing.
When you feel the full weight of that sentence, or are confronted by its
reality in the form of a corpse, your nausea is abjection.
5. Sublimation
If
you've ever taken a class where you learned about Sigmund Freud's
theories about sex, you probably have heard of sublimation. Freud
believed that human emotions were sort of like a steam engine, and
sexual desire was the steam. If you blocked the steam from coming out of
one valve, pressure would build up and force it out of another.
Sublimation is the process of redirecting your steamy desires from
having naughty sex, to doing something socially productive like writing
an article about psychology or fixing the lawnmower or developing a
software program. If you've ever gotten your frustrations out by
building something, or gotten a weirdly intense pleasure from creating
an art project, you're sublimating. Other psychiatrists have refined the
idea of sublimation, however. Following French theorist Jacques Lacan,
they say that sublimation doesn't have to mean converting sexual desire
into another activity like building a house. It could just mean
transferring sexual desire from one object to another — moving your
affections from your boyfriend to your neighbor, for example.
6. Repetition compulsion
Ah, Freud. You gave us so many new feelings and psychological states to
explore! The repetition compulsion is a bit more complicated than Freud's famous definition — "the desire to return to an earlier state of things."
On the surface, a repetition compulsion is something you experience
fairly often. It's the urge to do something again and again. Maybe you
feel compelled to always order the same thing at your favorite
restaurant, or always take the same route home, even though there are
other yummy foods and other easy ways to get home. Maybe your repetition
compulsion is a bit more sinister, and you always feel the urge to date
people who treat you like crap, over and over, even though you know in
advance it will turn out badly (just like the last ten times). Freud was
fascinated by this sinister side of the repetition compulsion, which is
why he ultimately decided that the cause of our urge to repeat was
directly linked to what he called "the death drive," or the urge to
cease existing. After all, he reasoned, the ultimate "earlier state of
things" is a state of non-existence before we were born. With each
repetition, we act out our desire to go back to a pre-living state.
Maybe that's why so many people have the urge to repeat actions that are
destructive, or unproductive.
7. Repressive desublimation
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse was a big fan of Freud and lived
through the social upheavals of the 1960s. He wanted to explain how
societies could go through periods of social liberation, like the
countercultures and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century, and yet
still remain under the (often strict) control of governments and
corporations. How could the U.S. have gone through all those protests in
the 60s but never actually overthrown the government? The answer, he
decided, was a peculiar emotional state known as "repressive
desublimation." Remember, Freud said sublimation is when you route your
sexual energies into something non-sexual. But Marcuse lived during a
time when people were very much routing their sexual energies into sex —
it was the sexual liberation era, when free love reigned. People were
desublimating. And yet they continued to be repressed by many other
social strictures, coming from corporate life, the military, and the
government. Marcuse suggested that desublimation can actually help to solidify repression.
It acts as an escape valve for our desires so that we don't attempt to
liberate ourselves from other social restrictions. A good example of
repressive desublimation is the intense partying that takes place in
college. Often, people in college do a lot of drinking, drugging and
hooking up — while at the same time studying very hard and trying to get
ready for jobs. Instead of questioning why we have to pay tons of money
to engage in rote learning and get corporate jobs, we just obey the
rules and have crazy drunken sex every weekend. Repressive
desublimation!
8. Aporia
You know that
feeling of crazy emptiness you get when you realize that something you
believed isn't actually true? And then things feel even more weird when
you realize that actually, the thing you believed might be true and
might not — and you'll never really know? That's aporia. The term comes
from ancient Greek, but is also beloved of post-structuralist theorists
like Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak. The reason modern theorists
love the idea of aporia is that it helps to describe the feeling people
have in a world of information overload, where you are often bombarded
with contradictory messages that seem equally true.
9. Compersion
We've gotten into some pretty philosophical territory, so now it's time
to return to some good, old-fashioned internet memes. The word
compersion was popularized by people in online communites devoted to polyamory and open relationships,
in order to describe the opposite of feeling jealous when your partner
dates somebody else. Though a monogamous person would feel jealous
seeing their partner kiss another person, a non-monogamous person could
feel compersion, a sense of joy in seeing their partner happy with
another person. But monogamous people can feel compersion, too, if we
extend the definition out to mean any situation where you feel the
opposite of jealous. If a friend wins an award you hoped to win, you can
still feel compersion (though you might be a little jealous too).
10. Group feelings
Some psychologists argue that there are some feelings we can only have as members of a group — these are called intergroup and intragroup feelings.
Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your personal
feelings. For example, many people feel intergroup pride and guilt for
things that their countries have done, even if they weren't born when
their countries did those things. Though you did not fight in a war, and
are therefore not personally responsible for what happened, you share
in an intergroup feeling of pride or guilt. Group feelings often cause
painful contradictions. A person may have an intragroup feeling (from
one group to another) that homosexuality is morally wrong. But that
person may personally have homosexual feelings. Likewise, a person may
have an intragroup feeling that certain races or religions are inferior
to those of their group. And yet they may personally know very
honorable, good people from those races and religions whom they consider
friends. A group feeling can only come about through membership in a
group, and isn't something that you would ever have on your own. But
that doesn't mean group feelings are any less powerful than personal
ones.
