History of Emotional Suffering: from emotions to needs in the history of emotions

Abstract

Questions about the nature of emotions and the role of emotional expressions have been addressed frequently in the study of the history of emotions. However, the extent to which emotional suffering is present in the cultures and societies of the past is seldom queried. Our first goal is to identify criteria that historians of emotions can use to evaluate the emotional suffering of the people they study. We locate these criteria not in the theory of emotions, whether Norbert Elias’s psychoanalytic theory or William M. Reddy’s theory of emotives, but in the theory of basic, universal human needs proposed by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Although we agree with most contemporary historians of emotions that emotions themselves can be understood only within the context of a particular culture, we propose that additional inquiry into basic needs and their satisfaction could help historians of emotions cast more light on the inner lives of the members of the societies they investigate. Our second goal is to apply these insights to the case of acedia, a peculiar psychological state experienced by the Desert Fathers. We examine what acedia was for the Desert Fathers by analyzing Evagrius’s writings. Our goal here is to capture what historians of emotions regularly do; that is, we aim to reconstruct how monks of the fourth century felt, expressed, and thought about emotions from within their own monastic culture. In addition, we analyze acedia from the perspective of the theory of needs. In this way, we hope to show how the theory of needs can help historians in their endeavors to understand the past.