The proto-psychologists James and Lange have (separately) proposed that emotions are experiencing of physical responses to external stimuli. They are mental representations of totally corporeal reactions. Sadness is what we call feeling of crying. This was phenomenological materialism at its worst. To have full-blown emotions (not merely detached observations), one needed to experience palpable bodily symptoms. The James-Lange Theory apparently did not believe that a quadriplegic can have emotions, since he definitely experiences no bodily sensations. Sensationalism, another form of fanatic empiricism, stated that all our knowledge derived from sensations or sense data. There is no clear answer to question how do these sensa (=sense data) get coupled with interpretations or judgements. Kant postulated existence of a "manifold of sense" – data supplied to mind through sensation. In "Critique of Pure Reason" he claimed that these data were presented to mind in accordance with its already preconceived forms (sensibilities, like space and time). But to experience means to unify these data, to cohere them somehow. Even Kant admitted that this is brought about by synthetic activity of "imagination", as guided by "understanding". Not only was this a deviation from materialism (what material is "imagination" made of?) – it was also not very instructive.

The problem was partly a problem of communication. Emotions are qualia, qualities as they appear to our consciousness. In many respects they are like sense data (which brought about aforementioned confusion). But, as opposed to sensa, which are particular, qualia are universal. They are subjective qualities of our conscious experience. It is impossible to ascertain or to analyze subjective components of phenomena in physical, objective terms, communicable and understandable by all rational individuals, independent of their sensory equipment. The subjective dimension is comprehensible only to conscious beings of a certain type (=with right sensory faculties). The problems of "absent qualia" (can a zombie/a machine pass for a human being despite fact that it has no experiences) and of "inverted qualia" (what we both call "red" might have been called "green" by you if you had my internal experience when seeing what we call "red") – are irrelevant to this more limited discussion. These problems belong to realm of "private language". Wittgenstein demonstrated that a language cannot contain elements which it would be logically impossible for anyone but its speaker to learn or understand. Therefore, it cannot have elements (words) whose meaning is result of representing objects accessible only to speaker (for instance, his emotions). One can use a language either correctly or incorrectly. The speaker must have at his disposal a decision procedure, which will allow him to decide whether his usage is correct or not. This is not possible with a private language, because it cannot be compared to anything.

In any case, bodily upset theories propagated by James et al. did not account for lasting or dispositional emotions, where no external stimulus occurred or persisted. They could not explain on what grounds do we judge emotions as appropriate or perverse, justified or not, rational or irrational, realistic or fantastic. If emotions were nothing but involuntary reactions, contingent upon external events, devoid of context – then how come we perceive drug induced anxiety, or intestinal spasms in a detached way, not as we do emotions? Putting emphasis on sorts of behavior (as behaviorists do) shifts focus to public, shared aspect of emotions but miserably fails to account for their private, pronounced, dimension. It is possible, after all, to experience emotions without expressing them (=without behaving). Additionally, repertory of emotions available to us is much larger than repertory of behaviours. Emotions are subtler than actions and cannot be fully conveyed by them. We find even human language an inadequate conduit for these complex phenomena.

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Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com

The dream mechanisms and/or dream contents of psychotics must be substantially different and distinguished from ours. Their dreams must be "dysfunctional", unable to tackle unpleasant, bad emotional residue of coping with reality. Their dialogue must be disturbed. They must be represented rigidly in their dreams. Reality must not be present in them not at all. Most of dreams, most of time must deal with mundane matters. Their content must not be exotic, surrealist, extraordinary. They must be chained to dreamer's realities, his (daily) problems, people that he knows, situations that he encountered or is likely to encounter, dilemmas that he is facing and conflicts that he would have liked resolved. This, indeed, is case. Unfortunately, this is heavily disguised by symbol language of dream and by disjointed, disjunctive, dissociative manner in which it proceeds. But a clear separation must be made between subject matter (mostly mundane and "dull", relevant to dreamer's life) and script or mechanism (colourful symbols, discontinuity of space, time and purposeful action). The dreamer must be main protagonist of his dreams, hero of his dreamy narratives. This, overwhelmingly, is case: dreams are egocentric. They are concerned mostly with "patient" and use other figures, settings, locales, situations to cater to his needs, to reconstruct his reality test and to adapt it to new input from outside and from within. If dreams are mechanisms, which adapt model of world and reality test to daily inputs – we should find a difference between dreamers and dreams in different societies and cultures. The more "information heavy" culture, more dreamer is bombarded with messages and data – fiercer should dream activity be. Every external datum likely generates a shower of internal data. Dreamers in West should engage in a qualitatively different type of dreaming. We will elaborate on this as we continue. Suffice it to say, at this stage, that dreams in information-cluttered societies will employ more symbols, will weave them more intricately and dreams will be much more erratic and discontinuous. As a result, dreamers in information-rich societies will never mistake a dream for reality. They will never confuse two. In information poor cultures (where most of daily inputs are internal) – such confusion will arise very often and even be enshrined in religion or in prevailing theories regarding world. Anthropology confirms that this, indeed, is case. In information poor societies dreams are less symbolic, less erratic, more continuous, more "real" and dreamers often tend to fuse two (dream and reality) into a whole and act upon it. To complete their mission successfully (adaptation to world using model of reality modified by them) – dreams must make themselves felt. They must interact with dreamer's real world, with his behaviour in it, with his moods that bring his behaviour about, in short: with his whole mental apparatus. Dreams seem to do just this: they are remembered in half cases. Results are, probably, achieved without need for cognitive, conscious processing, in other, unremembered, or disremembered cases. They greatly influence immediate mood after awakening. They are discussed, interpreted, force people to think and re-think. They are dynamos of (internal and external) dialogue long after they have faded into recesses of mind. Sometimes they directly influence actions and many people firmly believe in quality of advice provided by them. In this sense, dreams are an inseparable part of reality. In many celebrated cases they even induced works of art or inventions or scientific discoveries (all adaptations of old, defunct, reality models of dreamers). In numerous documented cases, dreams tackled, head on, issues that bothered dreamers during their waking hours. How does this theory fit with hard facts?

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Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com