blackman feeling fine-1

Feeling F.I.N.E.: Social psychology, suggestionand the problem of social influence

Lisa Blackman

C ritical Psychology emerged through a constructionist paradigmthat re-located intra-psychic processes within the frameworks oflanguage and discourse. This ‘turn to language’ has been

described by critical social psychologists as a more sociological model ofsubjectivity, which privileges the role of social and cultural processes in theformation of selfhood (Gough and McFadden, 2001). The discursive bodythat underpins this paradigm has increasingly been subject to critiqueacross the humanities and psychological sciences, particularly for itssidelining of the role of affect, feeling, emotion and desire in our being andbecoming. This article will consider the nature of this critique, and howcurrent debates across social and cultural theory might help psychologistsreformulate feeling and affect as important areas of study. It will alsoconsider the phenomenon of ‘emotional contagion’ that has been well-documented in social and personality psychology in light of these debates.

Keywords: Affect, suggestion, enactment, social psychology, affec-tive transmission, social influence

Introduction: Feeling F.I.N.E.I was introduced to the significance of the acronym feeling F.I.N.E.(f***ed up, insecure, neurotic and emotional) at a conference organ-

feeling F.I.N.E 23

ised by the Hearing Voices Network (c.f., Blackman, 2001, 2007). Inthis setting which brought together service users, academics andprofessionals, the acronym F.I.N.E. was mobilised in an ironicfashion to refer to those feelings, affects, beliefs and practices whichthe service user does not feel safe in expressing. Thus, rather thansay I feel depressed, anxious, sad, angry or paranoid to a profes-sional (usually a psychiatrist), the service user covers this over by aretort that they are feeling fine. Of course this response to thequestion, ‘how are you?’ is recognised as largely a platitude, but whatthe acronym F.I.N.E. discloses is what has to be firmly placed in thebackground, covered over and silenced in the forms of emotionallabour and self-management required in advanced liberal cultures(Hochschild, 1993; Blackman, 2004, 2006).

The acronym F.I.N.E. provides a trope for organising thefollowing article that will focus upon what became refused, repudi-ated and rejected from social psychology in its move to privilege aparticular version of social influence to theorise subjectivity. I use theterm version following the French philosopher Vinciane Despret(2004) who has explored how psychology has invented and producedmultiple forms of knowledge that co-exist in a complex relationalmatrix. Rather than view the past as a collection of extant knowledgesthat have been superseded in the evolution of the discipline, Despretshows how connections between knowledges or versions can bemapped according to whether they continue, disqualify, negate,emulate or activate previous versions, or even invent new versionsand therefore relations to ourselves. She emphasises the importanceof paying attention to how versions multiply rather than close downquestions or problems, bringing into existence distinct objects andentities. This focus upon the complexity of knowledge practices hasaffinities with Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) which focusesupon how objects and entities are assembled and ‘made up’ exploringthe connections and articulations which make particular versionspossible. What is important are the relational connections and prac-tices which stabilise particular versions and the kinds of problems,questions and entities they engender.

In this article I will focus upon a particular version of suggestibilitywhich was translated within early social psychology such that itbecame possible to ask only certain kinds of questions about the rela-tionship between manifest forms of contagious communication and

24 critical psychology

subjectivity. The background version that early social psychologists,such as William McDougall (1910) and Edward Ross (1909) engagedwith, was one which identified the spread of particular feelings,emotions, affects, beliefs and practices throughout populations as dueto an inter-psychological capacity known as ‘ordinary suggestion’(Sidis, 1898; Tarde, 1903). The psychologist Boris Sidis (1898) in abook, The Psychology of Suggestion, argued that ordinary suggestionwas what underlay subject’s capacity to be affected and affect othersand that this process registered in a realm of feeling rather thanconscious deliberation or will. Sidis alongside his contemporariessuch as William James, Henry Bergson and Gabriel Tarde were allfascinated by practices of hypnosis, spiritualism and particularprocesses of psychopathology, such as Multiple Personality Disorder(Hacking, 1995). These experiences were taken as proof that whatdefined the subject was not rational self-containment, but moreporous and permeable connections with others. This relationalitywas thought through ideas of multiplicity, dissociation andsuggestibility (Littlewood, 1996; Blackman, 2007b, 2008b).Communication was primarily viewed as contagious and was feltrather than processed through a logic of rationality. Given that thisversion of suggestibility was endlessly repeated as an explanation ofsocial forces by philosophers and scientists, I want to consider someof the conditions which led to its substitution by a very different kindof suggestibility within early social psychology, such that what wasincreasingly seen to define the so-called normal human subject wasthe capacity of will (Smith, 1992). We will explore how the parame-ters of this translation are being reactivated by the contemporaryfocus across the humanities and psychological sciences with affect,and the specific ways in which affect and feeling are produced asobjects across different knowledge practices.

‘How can we be one yet many?’

To the puzzle of the multiverse, is now added the puzzle of the foldedbody: how can you contain so much diversity, so many cells, so manymicrobes, so many organs, all folded in such a way that ‘the many actas one’ as Whitehead said? (Latour, 2004, p. 227).

How can the person be one yet many? (Lewis, 2002, p. 150)

feeling F.I.N.E 25

The question … is not ‘What is a human being?’ or ‘What is life?’.The question is ‘What to do?’ (Mol, 1998, p. 163).

The above quotes are taken from the founder of Actor NetworkTheory, Bruno Latour (2005), a personality psychologist informedby dialogic psychology, and an anthropologist interested in thequestion of enactment1 (Mol, 2002). Although the questions areframed slightly differently, they all point towards the concept ofmultiplicity rather than singularity being the defining character-istic of contemporary forms of subjectivity. What is seen to governour being and becoming is multiplicity, although it is recognisedthat this is inevitably lived through a sense of singularity. Thus theparadox raised is precisely, as Lewis (2002) argues how the personcan be one yet many? This question of how the subject ‘hangstogether’ is one that underlies some of the renewed interest inaffect, feeling and sensation across the humanities, and which hasbegun to raise doubt about the continuing usefulness of discursiveapproaches for theorising subjectification. As we will see, the ‘affec-tive turn’ does not provide any unification for the many differentways in which affect and feeling are produced as objects across thehumanities. I will not therefore provide definitions of affect andfeeling from the outset as this assumes that we can somehow ‘know’the objects of which we speak. Rather, I wish to return to a specificversion of suggestion that allowed particular questions to be askedabout human subjectivity such that the experience of automaticity,bodily feeling and rapidity of thought were distributed in a partic-ular kind of way.

This version was largely rejected, repudiated and refused withinearly Anglo-American social psychology (McDougall, 1910; Ross,1909) in attempts to understand how ideas, beliefs, affects, feelingsand traditions would spread throughout populations such that theywould achieve a social unity or uniformity. Although the version ofsuggestion as ‘ordinary suggestion’ was largely rejected and placedin the background, it remains as a ghostly and haunting presencewithin contemporary social psychology. I will argue that the veryexclusion of this object has carried through a number of problemsand paradoxes for the psychological sciences that can be mapped inthe contemporary valorisation of affect and feeling within cognitivescience, for example (c.f., Forgas, 2000). This article will consider


the significance of early social psychology’s engagement with theproblem of social influence in light of the renewed interest in rein-venting suggestion across the humanities (Chertok and Stengers,1992; Orr, 2006). The reinvention of suggestion has been recog-nised as an important site for posing new questions about the limitsand modalities of scientific rationalities. These limits are preciselythose that have stabilised particular questions and excluded certainothers in attempts to understand precisely how we might be affectedand affect others through a register of feeling. The importance, asChertok and Stengers (1992) argue, is to examine precisely howdifferent practices frame and invent ways of enacting affectivity,and precisely what has to be eliminated in order for an object, suchas ‘social influence’ to be ‘made true’.

Social psychology and the problem of social influenceThe object of inquiry of contemporary social psychology is largelyaccepted and framed as the problem of social influence. The inventionof the object ‘social influence’ within early social psychology,brought into being the very idea of two separate, yet interlockingdomains of influence. These domains of influence might beconceived as the individual and the social or nature and culture, forexample. In a contemporary social psychology text, Applying SocialPsychology (Kremor et al., 2003), the idea of social influence isaccepted as both the object of inquiry and the means to frame prag-matic solutions to issues. These issues are ‘thought’ through atension which is set up between two separate domains of influence;nature and nurture (ibid: 109). The problem of nature/nurture isreified as the central dilemma that is taken to organise and under-stand ‘the individual in his or her social world’ (ibid, p. 8). Keyareas and issues, or what I will designate following Foucault (1972),‘surfaces of emergence’, are cited as producing contemporary placeswhere this dilemma is made manifest. These include the environ-ment, work, health and illness, peace and conflict andcommunication and the media. The problem of the media is thusframed as a problem of the ‘potentially pernicious influence of themedia on public perceptions of risk’, or as the ‘powerful negativeinfluence on child audiences’ (ibid, p. 109). Although this framingis one which has been subject to contestation within media studiesand critical psychology (c.f. Blackman and Walkerdine 2001), it

feeling F.I.N.E 27

nevertheless is a particular ‘version’ which brings into existence anidea of social influence that has a long, complex history of associa-tion, combination and verification. Social psychology and its variedconditions of existence is a particularly fruitful place to explore thegenealogy of the forms of knowledge which have helped to shapethis contemporary domain of problematisation (Rose 1996,Osbourne 1992).

Gough and McFadden (2001, p. 100) show how increasinglythroughout the twentieth century social influence processes havebecome reduced within experimental social psychology to someaction of the ‘presence of others’. These have included the idea ofsocial facilitation, conceived as ‘whether the presence of othersenhances or inhibits individual performance’ (ibid, p. 96), to theinvestigation of social distortions (Asch 1952).

One famous study of social influence processes conceived in thisway are the studies of conformity conducted by Stanley Milgram(1974). Stanley Milgram’s (1974) experimental study of socialconformity was designed to explore the extent to which personalityvariation might underpin a person’s obedience to authority. In thecontext of what Arendt (1965) had described as the ‘banality of evil’,in the wake of attempts to explain and justify the horrors of theholocaust, Milgram (ibid, p. 5) was concerned with ‘how farordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter’sinstructions’. Obedience was aligned to a psychological mechanismthat might link individual action with what were viewed as‘powerful forms of social influence’ (ibid, p. 115). This notion ofobedience as a psychological mechanism, which could be observed,measured and compared, built on earlier formulations of obedienceas a particular set of psychological attitudes or traits (Adorno, 1950).This was set within a concern with what might influence a person’sconformity to an authoritative or charismatic other. What was seento be ‘a pervasive fact of cultural uniformity’ (Jones and Gerard1967, p. 331), linked to concerns structuring the tradition of Frenchsociology at the turn of the twentieth century (Le Bon, 1896; Tarde,1903), were arrested, compiled, compared and translated within theparameters of a newly emerging social psychology laboratory.

Jones and Gerard (ibid) in a book titled ‘Foundations of SocialPsychology’, argued that social psychology was able to anchor thesebroader socio-political concerns within an experimental setting.


This enabled scientists to manipulate variables constructed on thebasis of what was an already agreed consensus amongst the commu-nity as to what might account for conformity and social influence.These included intrapsychic and intergroup processes which werelinked to personality traits, and differences in cognitive appraisaldue to attraction, intensity of emotional feeling, and a number ofconcepts such as group membership, peer group persuasion and soforth. The book provides an interesting insight into some of the‘surfaces of emergence’ where aspects of thought, behaviour andconduct were being scrutinised and problematised. These diversesites included the military, the media, civil rights protests anddebates, prison camps, cults, bargaining relationships and thegroup. These sites and the general assumptions and divisions whichgoverned how behaviour was being problematised, provided someof the key distinctions through which the idea of social influencewas to be increasingly specified and understood.

These sites, for Jones and Gerard (ibid, p. 5) provided ‘illustra-tive cases of social psychological processes’ which formed aroundthe problem of social deprivation in the case of the ‘Wild Boy ofAveyron’ (see Rose, 1985); the problem of morale within armytraining groups; the problem of media influence and media panic inrelation to Orson Welle’s radio dramatisation of H.G. Wells’s War ofthe Worlds in 1938 (see Bourke 2005; Orr, 2006); the problem ofracial segregation within the southern states of the USA in the1950’s; the problem of thought reform within North Korean prisoncamps during the Korean war; the problem of cults (brainwashing)in relation to the proselytising activity of ‘Mrs Keech’; the problemof competitive motivation in local, national and transnationalbargaining relationships; and the problem of initiation withingroup membership and exclusion. The idea of simulation was centralto the kinds of object-making engendered by the social psycholog-ical laboratory, which translated a complex set of processes into arange of factors and variables which could be compared, compiled,documented, measured, inscribed and transported across differenttheoretical persuasions and debates. The aforementioned sites werelinked into a complex assemblage which created the very object,‘social influence’, which could be further differentiated and speci-fied according to a range of factors which could be manipulated bythe scientist. Jones and Gerard (ibid, p. 4) refer to these processes of

feeling F.I.N.E 29

simulation as a form of ‘experimental stagecraft’, linking inventionand creativity – ‘optimism, ingenuity and dash’ – (ibid, p. 4) withthe very possibility of positivist science. Thus a particular version ofsocial influence was inscribed into the practices of positivistscience, such that the laboratory was viewed as the site for exam-ining a particular cluster or configuration of what were designatedas intra and inter-psychological processes. These processes wereprimarily taken to be readable and comprehensible through theaction of cognition and its various distortions.

Social psychology and a suggestive realmIn a fascinating genealogy of ‘panic disorder’, Jackie Orr (2006)cogently illustrates how social psychology, despite its engenderingof social influence as its object of inquiry, has also worked with anassumption that a ‘suggestive realm’ is central to how populationsare governed and managed. This tension between the primacy ofwill and the possibility of suggestion was held together within theknowledge practices of social psychology by displacing suggestiononto particular kinds of body. These bodies were inscribed andviewed increasingly through the lens of mass psychology that re-distributed suggestion in relation to a particular concept of the‘mob’ or group mind (McDougall, 1920). As we will see, socialpsychology took the idea of suggestion as its object of study andre-figured and translated it through concepts derived from evolu-tionary biology. Although the concept of contagiouscommunication was recognised as a modality that would bondpeople together, ‘ordinary suggestion’ was increasingly redistrib-uted as a more ‘primitive’ mode of communication to be found inthose who were considered lower, inferior and closer to theanimal. One of the most popularised proponents of this re-formu-lation of suggestion can be found in the writings of the crowdtheorist, Gustave Le Bon (1922).

Gustave Le Bon, a French Royalist, became a central figure inthe inauguration of a ‘mass psychology’, which was concerned with‘how it is that an individual can, under certain conditions, comeunder the influence of a crowd and commit acts he is normally notcapable of committing’ (Jones and Gerard, 1967, p. 331). Le Bon,like many of his contemporaries was interested in hypnotic tranceand was impressed by the writings and practices of the nineteenth


century French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud had goneto study with Charcot in 1885 at the famous La Salpetriere hospitalin France in order to refine his own practice and study of the alter-ations in thought, feeling and behaviour made possible bypractices of hypnosis. He later diverged from Charcot in his owninterpretation of hysteria as a psychological rather than neurolog-ical condition (c.f. Chertok and Stengers, 1992; Ellenburger, 1970).Le Bon (1922) mobilised the understanding that hypnotic trancewas a particular induced somatic mode of awareness (Csordas,2002) and used this to understand crowd psychology. He wasparticularly concerned with how to understand the revolts anduprisings of the Paris Communes and understood suggestion as themode of communication that forged powerful social bonds. Heframed this through the action of instincts that were allowed freereign in crowd situations where people were seen to lose theirrationality and become more amenable to modes of suggestion. LeBon therefore refigured suggestion as an abnormal phenomenonthat was aligned with an instinctual economy. This connected up anotion of inherited biological predispositions with behaviour,thought and feeling that were considered automatic and involun-tary (Foucault, 2003). This voluntary/involuntary axis was mappedonto a distinction between the primitive and civilised central toevolutionary theories of degeneracy prominent at the turn of the20th century (Darwin, 1859).

The person swayed by the crowd was to become a prototypicalbeing seen to embody the attributes which connected the humanwith the animal. This concatenation between the mysteriousworkings of the unconscious and the identification of the primitivewithin the civilised acted as a potent unifying strategy. The workingclasses, colonial subjects, women and children became the bearersof this fear of the primitive and its potential irruption into thesmooth running of the social order. Contact between persons,groups, leaders and demagogues was fraught with the potential forcertain people to be ‘reduced to a primitive state and (to be) swayednot by logic but by emotionally charged words’ (Jones and Gerard1967, p. 331). As Orr suggests, the apparent psychopathology ofcrowd behaviour that Le Bon mobilised in his writings aligned thecrowd with ‘an array of pathologized “others” – neurotic, feminine,“primitive”, and racialized others, the mass of working classes and

feeling F.I.N.E 31

the poor’ (2006, p. 42). The concepts that Le Bon popularised in hisbook, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1922) which wastranslated into many languages, became one of the stated bases ofthe emergence of social psychology. It was also one of the conditionsof possibility for Freud’s (1921) work on the psychopathology ofgroups, as well as the emerging discipline of media studies(Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001). We can certainly still see theresonance of these concepts in more recent accounts of the problemof media violence (Barker and Petley 1997; Gauntlett and Hill,1999) and the death of Diana, for example (Blackman 1999;Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001).

The view of the psychological subject that was to take root withinthe psychological sciences was one where the normal subject wasseen to exercise certain psychological capacities, such as will andinhibition, fortifying them against social influence processes(Smith, 1992). Smith suggests that inhibition as a conceptconnected up a number of contrasts between the higher and thelower, reason and emotion, mind and body and the elite and themasses, which were coordinated in relation to ‘an individualisticsense of self ’ (p. 5). Inhibition was viewed as a form of psycholog-ical control that would enable the domination of the instincts andthe action of the mind over the body. As Smith (ibid) argues:

The act of inhibition is dynamic and implies conflict, perhapsbetween powers within the individual, perhaps between the indi-vidual and outside forces. The relation may refer simply to one forcecontrolling another, or it may imply the suppression of some spon-taneous or natural energy. The language often suggests that control,expressed as inhibition, whether internalized or coming fromwithout, is a fundamental condition of social life (p. 5).

In relation to understandings of panic that governed social psycho-logical inquiry during WWII and the subsequent Cold War in theUSA, Orr argues that the concepts of suggestion and ‘emotionalcontagion’ were replaced by ‘an emphasis on the normative, reason-able, even adaptive features of crowd behavior’ (ibid, p. 128).Quoting the social psychologists, Lindesmith and Strauss (1956, p.456), she argues that, ‘much of what is called suggestibility actuallyinvolves judgment and reasoning and may represent a quite real-


istic adaptation’ (ibid, p. 129). This shift between suggestion, as aform of contagious communication, and sympathy, understood as aform of conscious judgment and deliberation became the twodistinct versions of social influence that social psychology enacted indifferent ways.

In an interesting commentary on how these versions were coor-dinated, Orr (ibid) draws attention to the role that socialpsychology increasingly played in communications research thataimed to explain collective behaviour, as well as providing tech-niques and strategies to the military, industry and the mass-mediato induce suggestive commitment amongst the ‘masses’ to certainbeliefs, ideas and practices. Although will had become the psycho-logical capacity that defined the normative human subject (Smith,1992), what remained was an understanding that feeling, affect andemotion were important in communication processes, and that theso-called masses must be ‘moved’ beyond a logic of reason andrationality in order to induce subjective commitment. Socialpsychology increasingly played a role in USA panic prevention andproduction (in relation to the fears generated by the Cold War) andenacted suggestion in this context as a mode of communication thatcould be manipulated in order to regulate and manage psychic life.This included the understanding, for example, that radio was atechnique that could induce mass-mediated suggestion or what wasalso understood as ‘contagion without contact’ (Orr, 2006, p. 48).This mobilisation of suggestion as a form of contagious communi-cation that could create psychic realities, represented, for Orr, ‘thecurious theoretical vertigo in which social suggestion becomesreasonable just as reason starts to experiment with its oh-so-sugges-tive symbolic powers’ (ibid, p. 132). The relationships betweensuggestion and sympathy were articulated through a number ofcontrasts and dualisms that produced suggestion as an objectaligned with the body, emotion and primitiveness, whilst sympathywas aligned with the mind, reason and civilised thought, feelingand conduct.

Mass psychology‘The only language they understand is one which by-passes reason,speaks directly to the heart and makes reality seem either better orworse than it in fact is (Moscovici, 1985, p. 31).’ With the separation

feeling F.I.N.E 33

of suggestion from sympathy different sub-disciplines ofpsychology could further add to their differentiation and specifica-tion. Thus, mass psychology connected up the body, emotion andprimitiveness, through producing the feeling body as its object.Feeling was viewed as an integral part of the way in which imitativeprocesses were seen to reproduce themselves between actors withina field of complex social processes. Mass psychology therefore tookthe study of ‘imitative behaviour’ (Moscovici, 1985, p. 1) as itsobject and proclaimed itself as a new branch of the psychologicalsciences that could tackle this phenomenon. Mass psychology alsobecame a study of mass communications and was concernedprimarily with the repercussions of ‘group entities’ for communica-tion processes. Mass communications were produced as a particularkind of social influence that would alter individual minds thusproviding the fertile soil for forms of crowd psychology. The ideawas that the masses would need to be swayed, rather than appealedto through reason and rationality, didactic command and instruc-tion, and staged forms of persuasion. These modes ofcommunication would miss the mark, and even make followersmore resistant to change and transformation. What were neededwere appeals to the heart, to feeling, to passion, to the imagination;to a realm of affect which was co-present with the psychic andemotional rather than the intellect and reasoning. As Moscovici(1985, p. 104) proclaims, ‘the age of the crowd was the age of theimagination, and he who rules there rules by imagination’.

Moscovici (ibid, p. 139) characterises these appeals as creating an‘illusion of love’ through the use of a range of techniques; affective,bodily, and psychological, designed to maximise and facilitateprocesses of suggestion and imitation. These might include the useof symbols, flags, images, singing, music, affirmations, phrases,speeches and slogans. These would be delivered through the hypno-tising use of repetition, rather than didactic command andinstruction. Individuals would be touched in ways which might benon-conscious or create the feeling that they are the originator ofthe feeling, rather than simply mechanically reproducing the beliefsof a charismatic other. There would be a resonance or attunementbetween actors within a social field or between leaders andfollowers. This was based upon a non-logocentric way of thinkingabout relationality or connection which depended upon the idea


that individuals were open to being affected. The capacity to beaffected was linked to the imagination that was constituted throughthe concept of impression or mental touch. Social influence was notabout brute power or force, but conceived more as a lightness oftouch, where ‘everything is at once inside and outside everythingelse’ (Connor, 2004, p. 281).

Connor (2004, p. 100) links the notion of impression to the idea ofthe skin as having active powers to register and express feelings andstates between people. This is what he terms, ‘the translation ofotherwise inchoate states and feelings into epidermal terms’, whichhe links to theories of maternal impressions in the nineteenthcentury. These theories were based on the idea that there was anintimate and symbiotic relationship between the mother and herfoetus, such that the boundaries between self and (m)other wereporous and permeable. This folding and infolding between motherand foetus was achieved through a kind of ‘sympathetic impression’(ibid, p. 118), where both could touch and be touched throughprocesses of ‘psychic imprinting’ (ibid, p. 103). A feminised space ofrelationality provided a way of thinking about social influence,which did not instate the figure of the clearly bounded individualexerting their will and exercising rationality, as the means to setthem apart from others. The metaphor of psychic or mental touchwas one which depended on ‘the idea that the skin is not simply aboundary or interface … the skin begins to wake and wonder, anactively unfolding and self-forming organism rather than merelypassive stuff ’ (ibid, p. 118).

Moscovici (1985) however laments the fact that mass psychologywas largely ignored or discredited by other sub-disciplines of thepsychological sciences. Moscovici (ibid) suggests, as Orr corrobo-rates (2006), that the study of contagious communications becamethe object of ‘media and advertising and propaganda specialists’ (p.68). Teresa Brennan (2004) argues that what became normalisedwithin the psychological sciences was the idea of ‘affective self-containment’, rather than the idea of affective transmission. Thenormal psychological subject was one who could fortify themselvesagainst social influence processes, foregrounding the importancewithin social psychology of separation and singularity, over connec-tion and relationality. McDougall and Ross both framed the socialpsychological project as an investigation of individuality and how

feeling F.I.N.E 35

this might be promoted such that subjects could ‘become a voiceand not an echo, a person and not a parrot (Ross, 1909, p. 4).Suggestion was increasingly translated into a kind of physiologicalautomatism, located in those who were considered lower, inferiorand closer to the so-called animal and primitive. Although affectivetransmission was considered part and parcel of crowd psychology,and therefore a concern for governance and regulation, the norma-tive psychological subject was increasingly seen to be coherent,bounded and autonomous, able to withstand social influence.Suggestion was to be re-distributed within a contrast between theprimitive and the civilised, where sympathetic identification was tobecome a conscious, rational, cognitive process. These processeswould ideally over-ride the action of the instincts, emotion anddesire through the acquisition and sedimentation of habits throughtraining and discipline (c.f., Blackman 2007b, 2008b).

Smith (ibid) cogently shows how inhibition as a concept alsoconnected and coordinated a variety of sites that consolidated thecontrasts of higher and lower, mind and body, primitive andcivilised and reason and emotion. These included Victorian self-improvement (Smiles, 1864), law, work and reproductive capital,education, and importantly, mesmerism, hypnotism and trance.These practices were reformulated as those that would potentiallyremove the will rather than point towards the capacity of the subjectto affect and be affected. Thus, as Chertok and Stengers (1992)argue: ‘Like hypnosis, suggestion has taken on a predominantlypejorative meaning denoting an illegitimate influence, that is, aninfluence the acceptance of which cannot be rationally justified bythe one who accepts it … Suggestion is impure, it is the uncontrol-lable par excellence’ (p. xvi). Ruth Leys (2000) has argued that whatwas radical about suggestion within early hypnotic techniques ofsuggestibility was its potential to displace the boundary between theself and other, inside and outside, conscious and non-conscious andpsychic and material. As a model of affective transmission it workedwith an understanding of connection and relationality that did notseparate the mind from the body, the individual from the social andreason from emotion. Christian Borch has argued that what is inter-esting about the way that suggestion took form within earlysociology was its relationship to ‘a complex interplay or in-betweenof rationality’ that dissolved boundaries between self and other


(2006, p. 3). Although suggestion has become a very different kindof object within sociological and psychological theorising, largelyunderstood as a primitive form of contagion (Blackman andWalkerdine, 2001), or a physiological automatism (Blackman,2007b, 2008b), this does not mean that the problem of suggestion isover. Indeed I would argue that the current focus on affect andfeeling across the humanities and psychological sciences, pointstowards the importance of reinventing suggestion through modelswhich do not presume singularity and separation from the outset.What we will see in the next section is how the limits of singularityand affective self-containment have been demonstrated in a vastempirical literature on ‘emotional contagion’ that presents aperplexing challenge to the psychological sciences.

Emotional contagionAlthough, the idea of affective self-containment has becomenormalised across the psychological sciences, I want to turn tocontemporary work in social and personality psychology thatremains as an excess to this model. The phenomenon of ‘emotionalcontagion’ refers to the ways in which feelings can be passed betweenpeople such that their moods can shift and change. This phenom-enon is recognised within the clinical literature exploring therapist’sexperiences of working with their clients (Hatfield et al., 1994).Hatfield and Rapson worked together as therapists and comment on,‘how easy it is to catch the rhythms of our clients’ feelings frommoment to moment and, in consequence, how profoundly ourmoods can shift from hour to hour’ (ibid, p. 1). They describe thisexperience as a kind of being ‘in tune’ (p. 16) that creates asynchrony of feeling with those around you. This phenomenonsuggests that people can be linked and connected physiologicallyand emotionally and can communicate this through the exchange offeeling that they are not necessarily consciously aware of. They chartthe long history of this realm of affective exchange in clinicalresearch, literature, the psychological and behavioural sciences, andin events that have occurred within populations throughout historythat involve the passing of mood, emotion and passion. One suchexample that they recount is cross cultural evidence that documentsvarious epidemics of laughter, depression, mania and seizures thathave occurred in Singapore, Malaysia and Africa, for example.

feeling F.I.N.E 37

Although such ‘contagions’ have been documented throughouthistory there is plenty of evidence to suggest that affective trans-mission is a phenomenon that is part and parcel of everydayencounters. It is usual to focus in the literature on exceptionalphenomenon such as the mass waves of panic that followed OrsonWelles’s legendary radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in the 1940sin America (Cantril, 1940; Bourke, 2005; Orr, 2006). Many listenersactually believed that this was an unfolding reportage of theinvasion of America by alien visitors that caused ‘mass hysteria’.However, a recent study documents the centrality of affective trans-mission in intimate relationships. This study carried out by NickPowdthavee at the University of Warwick was presented at theRoyal Economic Society’s Annual Conference in Nottingham(March 21-23, 2005). The study purported to answer the centralquestion: Could your spouse’s happiness determine your ownhappiness? The articles did not challenge the idea that happinessmight be contagious and inhere between individuals; rather thesensational aspects of the stories revolved around the findingswhich suggested that the only couples to benefit from such goodfeeling were married couples. What were clearly documented werethe contagious aspects of happiness and how in the married couple’sthis buffeted them against the stresses and strains of losing a job,coping with illness and whether they owned their own property.

Although this study pushes the economics of happiness closer tothe psychological sciences, the psychological literature does notcontain a unified or coherent explanation of emotional contagion.Indeed, what marks the literature is the puzzling challenge that theliterature makes to the idea of the individual being self-enclosed,clearly bounded and separate from others. The phenomenon ofemotional contagion however has travelled widely, forming thebasis of discussions of the importance of affect management in theworkplace (Barsade and Gibson, 2007). It is also presented indifferent ways as an important component of effective andsuccessful communication where individuals are introduced to theneed for more intensive micromanagement of interactions in theworkplace, community, amongst friends, lovers and partners inorder to restore some notion of intentionality and conscious will tothe proceedings. The importance of micro-managing the environ-ment or potential viral culture in which one moves is supported by


the burgeoning literature on emotional intelligence (Goleman,1996). This concept assumes that one can learn certain psycholog-ical competences that will allow the successful consciousmonitoring, understanding and altering of emotion, feeling andaffect in order to achieve certain desired ends. Although on the onehand emotional contagion threatens the notion of voluntarismassociated with the fiction of autonomous selfhood (Rose, 1996),one of the key responses across different settings has been to rein-state the importance of developing the psychological resources thatwould allow one to cope with the implications of the transmissionof affect. Emotional contagion has therefore become an importantsite for creating and orchestrating certain psychic realities thatmight be beneficial for personal well-being and work-place perfor-mance, for example. It has also formed the basis of new practices ofmarketing and advertising, such as neuromarketing and emotionalbranding, which are seeking to manipulate and exploit the impli-cations of affective transmission understood through particularneuroscientific concepts such as mirror neurons, for example(Gallese, 2006). Hatfield et al. (1994) liken emotional contagion toa form of magic that is little understood (within prevailingmodels), but has huge implications for public policy, and for thepracticing knowledge’s of Dr’s, lawyers and therapists. As theyrecount: ‘We may believe we guide ourselves through our dailytreks, but a moment’s reflection shows we neither proceed alonenor have as much control as we might have thought over others orour interactions with them’ (p. 190).

The puzzling challenge of ‘emotional contagion’ to work on theaffective body within social theory has been picked up by feministcultural theorists, such as Teresa Brennan (2004), in her book, TheTransmission of Affect. I would like to draw out some of the keyconcepts that she deploys in order to consider the kinds of newentities, objects, problems and questions that are made possible byrefiguring the subject as connected and not separate from others.She suggests that the huge field of documented instances of thetransmission of affect are important, as they break down thedistinction between the individual and the social and the naturaland the cultural. She argues that, ‘the transmission of affects means,that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies’ (p. 6). Sheturns the question of affective self-containment on its head. Rather

feeling F.I.N.E 39

than presume we are self-contained and separate from others, shedirects the question to historical material that would suggest thatthere have been, ‘different, more permeable, ways of being’ (p. 10).She looks rather at how we maintain an image of self-containmentin the relationships that we develop with ourselves and others. Oneprocess that is part of the formation of a separate, singular body isone that relies on ‘othering’. The concept of ‘othering’ is usually usedto refer to the ways in which within imperial and colonial settings,the bodies of certain groups, such as women, colonial subjects,people with different sexualities and the working classes are madeto signify as inferior and degenerate in relation to a white, male,middle-class norm (c.f. Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001). Theirbodies become othered and viewed as the site of animality, primi-tivism and irrationality.

She argues that these othering processes occur on a mundanelevel between individuals. Rather than recognise the permeabilityof boundaries and the transmission of affect we deny that affects arecoming from the other, or deny that they are coming from us. Inother words, we draw limits and boundaries around what we arewilling to recognise, which often means that certain people aremade to carry the affects of another. This failure to recognise meansthat we deny the emotional and affective connections that sustainour sense of subjectivity. There is a language for this denial of affec-tive exchange that Brennan locates within Freudian psychoanalysis.Thus, the assumption that ‘othering’ relies upon ‘projection’ wascentral to Freud’s theories of the unconscious. This can createparticular relational connections between people where as Brennanargues: ‘The person projecting the judgement is freed from itsdepressing effects on him or herself. However, he or she is depen-dent on the other carrying that projected affect, just as the masterdepends on the slave … a kind of hook on which the other’snegative affect can fix’ (p. 111).

However, the affective language that people tend towards is onethat emphasises separation, and tends to cover over or occlude therather different kind of language that psychoanalysis, for example,makes possible. This has been explored by critical psychologistssuch as Paul Stenner (1993), who has explored how projectionbecomes a discursive or linguistic strategy, hidden in the kinds ofnarratives and practices that people tend to deploy to understand


the basis of jealousy. Thus, he tells us that commonsense practiceassumes that jealousy is a property of the self-contained individual;there are ‘jealous types’ who cannot control their feelings in relationto another. Stenner troubles this view of jealousy as a property of anisolated mind, and instead approaches it as a ‘subject position’. Theconcept of a ‘subject position’ is one that has evolved from discur-sive work within critical psychology that assumes that intra-psychicprocesses can be relocated within our linguistic and accountingpractices. Thus the notion of a ‘jealous type’ can be used to positionsomebody as unaware and unenlightened, or as being emotionallyweak or insecure. Both of these strategic uses of a ‘jealousy narra-tive’ or story have particular implications for the person positioningand being positioned. Thus, in the example that Stenner developsof a couple, Jim and May, Jim positions himself as enlightened andprogressive and May as fragile, unstable and weak. Because of thisrelational positioning he sees himself as having to walk oneggshells, therefore crediting himself with the power to hurt orprotect May according to his actions. This relational positioningrelies upon the concept of separation and also hides or covers overthe kinds of projections or ‘othering mechanisms’ that maintainthis splitting. Although Stenner’s approach is aligned with discur-sive psychology and assumes that affect, feeling and emotion can beenfolded into language and discourse, it still discloses somethingimportant about the narratives of feeling and affect that arecommonly reproduced in our everyday languages. What is impor-tant to this formulation of jealousy is separation: knowing whereyou end and the ‘other’ begins. As Brennan (2004) argues: ‘TheWestern psyche is structured in such a way as to give a person thesense that their affects and feelings are their own, and that they are,energetically and emotionally contained’ (p. 25).

Biology and affectBrennan (2004) suggests however that the literature that pointstowards a model of connectedness and ‘affective transmission’,rather than separation and singularity is overwhelming. Theassumption of affective transmission forms the basis of a range ofcontemporary work within social and feminist theory that isattempting to explain the mechanisms through which affects arepassed between people. This work does not discount work within

feeling F.I.N.E 41

the biological and psychological sciences. Brennan argues that aposition of hostility and suspicion towards ‘the biological’ was a keymarker of work that is described as social constructionist or as orig-inating within a model of cultural inscription. Brennan revisitscontemporary and earlier models of corporeality and attempts torework them within a more embodied paradigm. For example, sherevisits work within human endocrinology (the study of the effectsof hormones on behaviour and mood), and argues that this is onearea that has not been approached through a model of ‘affectivetransmission’. Thus, she brings together exciting work within socialtheory that is bringing into play a rather different notion of the‘communicating body’ with work in the biological sciences on‘chemical entrainment’. ‘Chemical entrainment’ is a concept that isused to refer to the subtle effects of hormones and pheromones thatare communicated via smell and touch and that demonstrate thathumans can affect and be affected at the level of the nervoussystem. As she argues: ‘If olfactory communication turns ahormone into a pheromone and changes another’s affects, does italso change their hormones in a way that (temporarily) changestheir habitual affective disposition. Are such changes, in turn,communicated by additional pheromones? If such cycles can beshown to hold in groups, then the contagion of affects has beenexplained’ (p. 72).

However, she argues that this needs a more complex re-framingas, at this point, studies of human endocrinology start from theposition of ‘affective self-containment’ rather than connectednessand mixing. Brennan argues that one of the problems for socialtheory, and I would add critical psychology, is that science tends towork within the paradigm of social influence. We have seen howthis version became sedimented within the knowledge practices ofsocial psychology, such that alternative versions were rejected andrepudiated (Despret, 2004). Thus, she argues science holds backfrom alternative versions or views of the communicating body, and isthus constrained by a ‘foundational fantasy’ (p. 73). However, onestrategy of the growing body of work on becoming within socialtheory (Despret, 2004) is to look for marginal work within thephysical, psychological and biological sciences that raise problemsand conceptual difficulties for the paradigm and assumptions ofsocial influence models. This is an important strategy and one that


might provide the fruitful basis of a more engaging dialogue withwork in the psychological sciences that has been discounted anddismissed by the overwhelming discursive focus of much thatpasses as critical psychology. Brennan turns to work within‘psychoneuroendocrinology’ that is a sub-branch of work onhormonal systems that produces anomalies for the fantasy of ‘affec-tive self-containment’. Psychoneuroendocrinology is replete withexperimental studies that demonstrate that hormones can affectemotion and mood and that they appear to be passed between indi-viduals. She argues that this work demands attention from socialtheorists interested in corporeality and the materiality of the body,and offers a fertile starting point for new alliances between socialtheory and the biological, psychological and physical sciences. Theaim of an alliance or dialogue between science and social theory isthe goal of a diverse range of studies working within a moreembodied paradigm across social theory and critical psychology(Blackman, 2001; Connolly, 2001; Massumi, 2002; Wilson, 2004).

Conclusion: The reinvention of suggestionWith this in mind I want to suggest some concepts that might beimportant in our re-engagement with affect, feeling and emotionacross critical psychology and social theory. Recent calls for arevision of the ‘thinking self ’ are introducing a conception of thebody that is governed by a number of key concepts: connectivity,proportionality, relationality and somatic feeling (Blackman, 2008).What this work emphasises is the radical intersection of nature andculture, the individual and the social, the inside and outside and thehuman and non-human, such that the idea of discrete entities inter-acting is beginning to lose its explanatory power. Rather what westart with is an assumption of the permeability of boundaries andthe inextricable connection of mind with body, psyche with social,human with non-human and biological with cultural. This work isalso introducing the importance of engaging a ‘non-cognitive’conception of embodied thought (Thrift, 2000). That is a traditionof work that is exploring the potency and centrality of non-conscious perception; of that which occurs below the threshold ofconscious thought and deliberation. As Thrift argues, manyphilosophers and sociologists have argued that ‘much of human lifeis lived in a non-cognitive mode’ (ibid, p. 36). Although these

feeling F.I.N.E 43

moves are important and turn our attention to the role of affect andfeeling in our being and becoming, we must be careful to notassume that we can simply ‘know’ and add these areas of study toour analyses in an unproblematic fashion. If we focus upon practicerather than objects, we start to see that affect and feeling areproduced and enacted as very diverse and varied objects acrossdifferent traditions and perspectives (Mol, 2002). This article hasexplored some of what was repudiated in social psychology’s substi-tution and translation of ‘ordinary suggestion’ into a form ofphysiological automatism located in bodies considered inferior andmore primitive. My current research aims to explore what sugges-tion could and might become when we explore its production as avariety of objects across different practices and traditions. I amparticularly interested in those practices that reactivate and createconnections with ‘ordinary suggestion’ that do not simply negate ordisqualify its possible radical potential. This is rather different toassuming we ‘know’ what suggestion is and therefore can judge,evaluate and even dismiss suggestion in the evolution of our ownpractices. The focus shifts more to the new kinds of entities, rela-tionships, problems, objects and questions that are made possible indifferent practices that enact suggestion, for example, as a particularkind of affectivity.

In work on affect and feeling within cognitive science there is nomention of suggestion and only brief engagements with ‘emotionalcontagion’ (c.f. Forgas, 2000). Affect is produced and enacted as auseful and necessary adjunct to rationality that forms the unspokenbackground of decision-making and evaluation. Although affectand cognition are being reintroduced as inseparable and interde-pendent processes, rather than separate and distinct entities, thereare still problems with how to move beyond the singular, boundedindividual and theorise the radical relationality of subjectivity. Thefocus is ultimately on the information-processing individual andthe question of ‘how the outside gets in’ is often thought throughbehaviourist models of social life (c.f., Damascio, 2000). Althoughwork across social theory has privileged understandings of affectand feeling in theorising being and becoming the radical potentialof suggestion has also been eliminated from the analyses. As wehave seen, Brennan (2004) plunders the area of neuro-endocrinology to provide possible answers to the puzzle of affective


transmission. She does recognise that early work on masspsychology was an area where ‘there once nearly was a theory of thetransmission of affect’, but that the mechanism of transmission wasnot effectively explained (p. 51). Much like McDougall and otherearly social psychologists such as Floyd Henry Allport (1924), shedismisses suggestibility, although as we will see in the followingquote she also derides McDougall for even considering suggestionin his translation of the concept as a form of primitive sympatheticresponse: ‘With this principle, McDougall came very close to myargument, although it is unclear what his “primitive sympatheticresponse” consisted of, partly because he did not free himself fromthe rhetoric of “suggestibility”’ (ibid, p. 55).

Brennan suggests that the biochemical literature on entrainmentwithin the area of neuro-endocrinology would be a better place toconsider the problem of affective transmission. Like much of theexciting work within this new paradigm, the ‘turn to affect’ is a wayof re-inventing the emotional, re-engaging the materiality of bodiesand displacing the centrality of cognitivist and rationalist modelsfor understanding sociality and subject formation. However, I willargue that this work is also part of an anti-mimetic2 turn that orig-inated within the work of early psychologists and sociologists whoattempted to eliminate suggestion from their theorising (c.f.Blackman, 2007b, 2008b). It seems that work in the psychologicaland social sciences tends to start from the position that suggestionis a primitive physiological automatism and therefore of little use tocritical analysis. However, I hope that I have convinced you that‘ordinary suggestion’ remains in the background, raising problemsfor the view of affective self-containment which became assumedalongside its repudiation. Christian Borch (2006) has argued thatsuggestion should be opened up to new theoretical horizons withinsocial theory. Although I am not arguing that suggestion is atimeless object that can simply be recovered by critical psycholog-ical or social inquiry, we need to be mindful of what suggestioncould and might become in our analyses. The concept of becomingand its articulation as the subject’s capacity to affect and be affected(Despret, 2004; Latour, 2004), might usefully be augmented by areturn to some of the background versions that make this concept apossibility. The knowledge practices of social psychology provide auseful starting place for such a project of reactivation and recovery.

feeling F.I.N.E 45

Notes1. ‘Enactment’ is a term that Mol (2002) uses to refer to the processes through

which practices engender or bring into being particular kinds of objects andentities. The focus on enactment shifts attention away from the idea ofsingular pre-existing objects, to the ways in which practices alter, transform,interact and shape objects through diverse and various practices. As sheargues: ‘What we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one’(p. vii). This article will adopt such a ‘praxiographic inquiry’ (p. 32) byexploring the ways in which the psychological sciences have enacted sugges-tion and the ways in which the multiple forms of suggestion that we findacross psychological practices are related.

2. Ruth Leys (2000) uses the term ‘anti-mimetic’ to refer to a range ofapproaches and traditions across the humanities and social sciences thatshifted attention to conscious will and deliberation as the normativemarkers of personhood. This created a suspicion and mistrust of suggestionand a move away from models of imitation and contagion, other than asmore primitive forms of communication. This was mirrored by a dismissalof hypnotic technologies of suggestion, which were assumed to operatethrough the ‘removal of will’. This equates to the popular parlance thathypnosis is a form of brainwashing or manipulation, for example.

ReferencesAdorno, T.W., E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford (1950).

The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.Allport, F.H. (1924). Social Psychology. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.Arendt, H. (1965). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

London: Viking Penguin. Asch, S.E. (1952). Social Psychology. New York: Prentice-Hall. Barker, M., and J. Petley (eds) (1997). Ill Effects. The Media-Violence Debate.

London: Barsade, S.G., and D.E. Gibson (2007). ‘Why does affect matter in organizations?’.Academy of Management Perspectives, 36-59.Bergson, H. (1920). Mind – Energy. Lectures and Essays. London: Henry Holt

and Company.Blackman, L. (1999). ‘An Extraordinary Life: The Legacy of an Ambivalence’.

New Formations. Special Issue: Diana and Democracy 36: 111-124.Blackman, L. (2001). Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience. London and

New York: Free Association Books. Blackman, L. (2004). ‘Self-help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female

Psychopathology’. European Journal of Cultural Studies. Vol 7 (2): 219-36.Blackman, L. (2006). ‘Inventing the Psychological: Lifestyle Magazines and

the Fiction of Autonomous Self ’. J. Curran and D. Morley (eds). Media andCultural Theory. London and New York: Routledge.

Blackman, L. (2007). ‘Psychiatric Culture and Bodies of Resistance’. Body andSociety. Vol. 13(2): 1-23.


Blackman, L. (2007). ‘Reinventing psychological matters: the importance ofthe suggestive realm of Tarde’s ontology’. Economy and Society 36(4): 574-596.

Blackman, L. (2008). The Body: The Key Concepts. Oxford and New York: Berg.Blackman, L. (2008b: in press). ‘Affect, Relationality and the “Problem of

Personality”’. Theory, Culture and Society. Blackman, L. and V. Walkerdine (2001). Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and

Media Studies. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.Borch, C. (2006). ‘The Exclusion of the Crowd. The Destiny of a Sociological

Figure of the Irrational’. European Journal of Social Theory. Vol. 9(1): 83-102.Bourke, J. (2005). Fear: A Cultural History. London and New York: Virago

Press.Brennan, T. (2004). The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell

University Press.Cantril, H. (1940). Invasion from Mars. A Study in the Psychology of Panic.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.Chertok, L. and I. Stengers (1992). A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis

as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan. Stanford, California: StanfordUniversity Press.

Connolly, W. E. (2001). Neuropolitics. Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis,London: University of Minnesota Press.

Connor, S. (2004). The Book of Skin. London: Reaktion Books.Csordas, T. (2002). Body, Meaning, Healing. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Damascio, A.R. (2000). The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the

Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

London: John Murray. Despret, V. (2004). Our Emotional Makeup. Ethnopsychology and Selfhood. New

York: Other Press. Ellenburger, H.F. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and

Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.Forgas, J.P. (2000) (ed). Feeling and Thinking. The Role of Affect in Social

Cognition. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town SA:Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.Foucault, M. (2003). Abnormal. New York: Picador.Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition,

Vol. XIX. London: Hogarth Press. Gallese, V. (2006). ‘Intentional Attunement: A neurophysiological perspective

on social cognition’. Brain Research. 1079. pp15-24.Gauntlett, D. and A. Hill (1999). TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday

Life. London and New York: Routledge. Goleman, D. (1996). Emotional Intelligence. Why it can Matter more than IQ.

London: Bloomsbury.Gough, B. and M. McFadden (2001). Critical Social Psychology: An Introduction.

Basingstoke: Palgrave.

feeling F.I.N.E 47

Hacking, I. (1995). Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences ofMemory. Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press.

Hatfield, E., J.T. Cacioppo, and R.L. Rapson (1994). Emotional Contagion.Cambridge, New York, Paris: Cambridge University Press.

Hochschild, A. (1993). The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Homeand Work. Stanford, CA: University of California Press.

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: HenryHolt and Company.

Jones, E.E. and H.B. Gerard (1967). Foundations of Social Psychology. New York,London, Sydney: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Kremor, J., N. Sheely, J. Reilly, K. Trew, and O. Muldoon (2003). Applying SocialPsychology. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.

Latour, B. (2004). ‘How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimensionsof Science Studies’. Body and Society. Vol. 10(2/3): 205-230.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Le Bon, G. (1922). The Crowd: A study of the popular mind. London: T. FisherUnwin.

Lewis, M.D. (2002). ‘The Dialogical Brain. Contributions of EmotionalNeurobiology to understanding the Dialogical Self ’. Theory and Psychology12(2): 150-187.

Leys, R. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press.

Lindesmith, A. and A. Strauss (1956). Social Psychology. New York: Holt,Rinehart and Winston.

Littlewood, R. (1996). ‘Reason and Necessity in the Specification of theMultiple Self ’. Occasional Paper No. 43. Royal Anthropological Institute ofGreat Britain and Ireland.

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durhamand London: Duke University Press.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York:Harper and Row.

Mol, A. (1998). ‘Lived Reality and the Multiplicity of Norms: A CriticalTribute to George Canguilhem’. Economy and Society. 27: 274-284.

Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham andLondon: Duke University Press.

Moscovici, S. (1985). The Age of the Crowd. A Historical Treatise on MassPsychology. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne andSydney: Cambridge University Press.

McDougall, H. (1910). An Introduction to Social Psychology. London:Methuen.

McDougall, H. (1920). Group Mind. A Sketch of the Principles of CollectivePsychology with some attempt to apply them to the interpretation of National Lifeand Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Orr, J. (2006). Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. New York: DukeUniversity Press.


Osbourne, T. (1992). ‘Medicine and Epistemology’. History of the HumanSciences. 5(2): 63-93.

Rose, N. (1985). The Psychological Complex. Psychology, Politics and Society inEngland 1869-1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Rose, N. (1996). Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ross, E.A. (1909). Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book. New York:The Macmillan Company.

Sidis, B. (1898). The Psychology of Suggestion. A Research into the SubconsciousNature of Man and Society. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

Smiles, S. (1864). Self-Help. With Illustrations of Character and Conduct. London:John Murray, Albemarle Street.

Smith, R. (1992). Inhibition. History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind andBrain. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press.

Stenner, P. (1993). ‘Discoursing Jealousy’ in E. Burman and I. Parker (eds).Discourse Analytic Research: Repertoires and Readings of Texts in Action.London: Routledge.

Tarde, G. (1903). The Laws of Imitation. London: Henry Holt and Company.Thrift, N. (2000). ‘Still life in nearly present time: the object of nature’. Body

and Society, Vol 6: 34-57.Thrift, N. (2004). ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’.

Geografiska Annaler 86B(1): 55-76.Wilson, E. (2004). Psychosomatic. Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham

and London: Duke University Press.

feeling F.I.N.E 49

blackman feeling fine-1

Documents