The
Romantic Syndrome: A Neuropsychological Perspective.
Isabel Jaén
1. Romanticism and emotional distress
Emotional unbalance is responsible for major literary
attitudes, such as the one adopted by the romantic literary movement. Let us
begin by defining this artistic trend. Romanticism, born in Germany at the end
of the eighteenth century, is associated with extreme emotional reactions,
similar to those we could find in a manic-depressive patient (1), with periods
of euphoria followed by periods of depression in which the romantic character
feels that the world is a frustrated reality, and life is a tragedy. The
depressive phases can lead to desperation and eventually to suicide. In
general, Romanticism represents the domain of those—often destructive—emotional
responses over the logic of reason, as they are portrayed in the literary
production of the time. It can also include an absence of emotion and of
motivation towards existence—tedium vitae. Such apathy may result in a suicidal
response as well.
The present paper deals with literature and we all
know that literature consists of pretending to experience some of the emotions
and attitudes described before. Those “manic-depressive” and apathetic subjects
that I am describing are just identities developed in the imagination of an
author. This author might be perfectly healthy and have absolutely nothing to
do with her characters, or she might share some common features with them (2). Interestingly,
never before in the history of literature do we find such a mysterious
connection between those “fake” hyper-emotional attitudes of literary
characters in a book and the real, unstable lives of their authors, as is in
the romantic period. I will attempt to offer a new perspective on the blurry
frontiers between life and fiction, an interesting phenomenon that literary
critics have always wondered about, by looking at literature in the context of
the minds that actually create it.
2. Neurophysiology of emotions
As Joseph LeDoux
reminds us, the mammalian system is basically emotional (3). Emotions are
usually defined by neuroscientists as behavioral responses to environmental
situations. The emotional neuro-path originated by an external stimulus travels
from the brain to the body, where physical changes take place, and back to the
cortex, where a trace of the emotional response to the particular situation
will be coded and kept as a “feeling” (4). This is exemplified by the
James-Lange model that I reproduce here:
Neurobiologically
speaking, three main systems seem to be involved in emotion (5): the amygdala,
which receives inputs from the association cortex of the temporal lobe, the
frontal cortex, the limbic system, and the olfactory system; the orbitofrontal
cortex, whose inputs come from the other regions of the frontal lobes, temporal
pole, amygdala, and limbic system; and the cingulate gyrus, and projects to the
limbic system and the frontal cortex. The amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex
seem to play important roles in the organization of emotional responses and its
translation into actions, respectively, and the cingulate gyrus is related to
motivation. Here is another view by LeDoux, who points at the amygdala as the
center of emotions, the “emotional computer” as he calls it (6).
3. Literature and the "artificiality" of emotions
According to Antonio Damasio, emotions can be
classified under two main groups: primary (innate, such as fear, anger, joy,
etc.) and secondary (drawn from experience). The latter depend on the
connections we make between “categories of objects and situations on the one
hand, and primary emotions on the other” (7). In the James-Lange model
described above, those secondary emotions would correspond to the “feelings,”
to the actual conceptualization of emotion. This “response-as-cause
and-feeling-as-result” conception of emotions assumes the pre-existence of
“physical” reactions by muscles, ANS, and the endocrine system. I believe we
can understand this primary-secondary emotion pathway in a broader sense,
keeping but modifying the James-Lange model. Carlson (8) compiles some of the
objections that this theory found in pointing at those “bodily” reactions as
the origin of emotional feelings. Interestingly, other experiments by Ekman,
Levenson, and Friesen showed that “fake” emotions, in which an emotional
response is simulated by, for example, imitating somebody else’s external
expression of emotions, could actually provoke changes in the autonomic nervous
system (9). As I mentioned before, literature mainly consists of “faking.” The
author does not necessarily need to experience strong romantic emotions to
conceptualize and portray them with incredible realism. This is what I mean by
a broader understanding of the concept of secondary emotion that should be
applied to literary studies: Literary emotion (as in the “manic-depressive” variety
we find in Romanticism) is artificially produced, intellectualized, born
already in the state of “feeling.” The romantic author carefully works and
artificially crafts her characters' behaviors and feelings. As a follower of a
particular artistic trend, let's say in this case the romantic movement, she
must first acknowledge what producing a romantic work means; that is, what are
the emotional responses, the attitudes, and the moods that she is to reflect
upon her work in order to ascribe herself inside that trend. In this sense, the
individual's cultural environment plays an important role in the expression of
what we may now call “secondary literary emotions” conferred on book characters
in order to make them consistent with the “official” paradigm of romantic
identity. In an interesting article on the “cultural framework” of emotions, Kitayama
and Markus tell us that “if we assume that the emotional experiences that
affirm the cultural frame are those that will be highlighted and emphasized [by
a given cultural group], then certain social behavior that elicits, fosters or
reflects the focal emotions should be relatively common” (10). Also, in their
work on emotion and identity, Havilland and Kahlbaugh remind us that "in
the sense that sociologists and anthropologists describe the emergence of
sociocultural structures from individual structures, there is a reverse process
in which cultural structure dictates the individual” (11).
4. Fictional-real emotions: the loop
Nevertheless, it would be a far too simplistic
theorization to talk about literature as just a group of authors creating
characters with emotional responses that follow the agenda of a particular
trend. Our romantic writers happen to be human beings as well, able not only to
fake and write but also to actually feel emotions “in their own flesh.” Let us
also remember that the romantic trend is not limited to the production of works
of art only. It is a broader movement that contains a particular attitude
toward the world; this attitude reaches the author herself, and it is precisely
here where we find the curious phenomenon of romantic writers imitating the
emotional responses of their characters and creating a kind of parallel life
with them, which many times ends up with tragic results, just as it happened in
their books. There are the examples of Heinrich Von Kleist (Germany), who
killed himself at 34, or Larra (Spain), who committed suicide at 28, among many
others. We can say that, in the mind of the romantic author, the James-Lange
pathway works bidirectionally, creating an interesting loop: The romantic man
is able to produce the romantic negative emotion artificially, and he can be
absorbed by it to the point of actually developing the same behavioral
responses that the fictional characters have, in this case the suicidal
impulse.
5. The contextual factor
The view of the romantic man immersed in the Romantic
Movement, shaping his own life according to the trend’s requirements, could be
supported by the schema theory. For theorists like Neisser, Johnson, or
Gillespie (12), we tend to perceive the world according to the categorization
we have made of it.
In this schema development, the individual’s context
plays an important role. By looking at this context, we might be able to
explain a little bit better the emotionally unbalanced behavior that makes the
romantic author the imitator of his/her own fiction. As a human being immersed
in a social environment, the romantic author finds himself living specific historical
events. For the romantic man, those events are particularly related to radical
behavioral responses such as revolutions. The romantic period (going from the
end of the eighteenth century to approximately the mid 1800s, depending on the
country) corresponds to a general social agitation. Having the French
revolution of 1789 as a breakthrough example to imitate, many countries begin
to claim independence from their colonizers (case of Argentina, Peru, Greece,
Serbia, etc.) or to stand up for their rights as members of a marginalized
sector of society. 1848 is an especially significant year: We find revolutions
in different points of Europe (Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Parma, Poland,
Prague, etc.). These revolts are performed by different social groups (workers,
bourgeoisie, students, etc). 1848 is also the year in which Karl Marx delivers
his Communist manifesto. In this atmosphere of social convulsion and radical
response to injustice, the romantic man has the opportunity of living the
extreme emotions he will be talking about. It is very difficult then to
determine what comes first, the strong emotional response in an immediate
radicalized environment or the artificial categorization of those emotions as
dictated by the fashionable literary trend that the romantic authors intend to
follow.
6. Love, stress, drug addiction, and the neurochemistry of emotions
“Intimately” speaking, interpersonal relationships
during the Romanticism are marked by a strong sensitivity and often uncontrollable
passions. Is this another product of the radical attitude? Is it just the kind
of behavior that is being promoted from literature and that everybody ends up
adopting as a conduct guideline? Our romantic men will very often fall in love
with the wrong person, a situation that will lead them to frustration. This
frustration can well be part of the depressive phase of the mania illness we
talked about at the beginning of the paper, and it can be followed by a period
of euphoria, maybe motivated by some kind of ephemeral hope in the difficult
situation of the romantic individual, and then, in turn, followed by another
decrease in mood, motivation, energy, psychomotor activity, etc (13). In the
romantic man, the negative phase of the cycle tends to last longer than the
positive euphoria one. This maintenance of a negative emotion of frustration
and/or desperation in the romantic subject can be parallel to a stress
situation in which the continuous release of hormones like epinephrine as well
as the increased activity of the autonomic nervous system can lead to damage of
overall health. Had the romantic subject inhabited the 1950s, it would have
been treated with the infallible remedy called prefrontal lobotomy, which would
have certainly alleviated his symptoms of emotional distress, but would have
reduced him to a selfish, irresponsible individual (something that the romantic
man had already been accused of being) due to the damage inflicted on the
frontal lobes.
Perceiving the world as an adverse habitat can be
particularly disastrous for the romantic man’s immunological system, since doing
so impairs the system’s functions, making the organism much more vulnerable to
any kind of illness. This can explain the high vulnerability of the romantic
man to the nineteenth century illness tuberculosis, also known as the romantic
illness, which killed poets like John Keats (at 26) and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
(at 34).
Another common emotion present in the romantic
individual is the complete apathy toward existence, which almost resembles a
“lack of emotion.” The lack of emotional response is defined by psychologists
as a stand-by situation that occurs between emotions. Damasio calls this state
“background feeling,” and Lazarus (14) precisely equates it to the concept of
“mood.” In contrast to the “brief emotional phenomena that arise in particular
adaptational encounters with the environment,” (15) “mood” would be a longer
temporal state. As we said before, apathy can also lead to extreme behavioral
responses such as self-annihilation. This is also a particularly common
phenomenon at the end of the nineteenth century, when we find the so-called mal
de fin de siècle. “Inability to experience emotion related to concepts that
ordinarily evoke emotion (16)” can be due to ventromedial lesions, whereas a
genetic transmission factor has been identified in “manic-depressive illness.”
Still, a biological cause for BD, shared by so many romantic men and women at
the same time during a particular historical period, seems to be a strange case
to make.
At this point, let us have a look at the
neurochemistry of emotions. Neurochemically speaking, a variety of
neurotransmitters seem to be involved in emotional mechanisms. Excitatory
glutamate and inhibitory GABA are among the most important, and are the first
to have evolved in the human brain, according to Jaak Panksepp (17). Glutamate
seems to play an important role in basic motor plans for many emotions and in
psychic processes related to fear, whereas GABA would have to do with the
control of anxiety. Other neurotransmitters such as epinephrine, norepinephrine,
and dopamine (catecholamines) seem to be important in affect situations. In his
essay Panksepp posits that “human positive emotionality has been related to
heightened dopamine activity, and different forms of depression might result
from depletions of individual cathecholamine systems or from serotonine.”
Interestingly, some of these catecholamine systems seem to be critical to the
rewarding effects of drugs like cocaine. In his article, Drevets precisely
mentions the similarity between the “bipolar course of manic-depressive
illness” and that of cocaine dependence, in which euphoria of the reuptake is
followed by depression and ahedonia in the withdrawal state. Drug use is a very
common practice in the romantic artist. Cocaine was first extracted from coca
leaves around 1855 and, by 1880, is chewed by race walkers to improve their
performance. Cocaine might have been used with the same recreating purposes by
the fin de siècle’s artists, along
with other drugs like opium (used among nineteenth century English literary and
creative personalities Thomas de Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and
Dickens) and might have been a factor contributing to the spread of the
"manic-depressive romantic disorder" symptoms of Romanticism. Let us
remember also that some other non-drug addictions are able to produce a similar
effect to the one occasioned by cocaine on the release of dopamine. Such is the
case of “life events that might be reinforcing to a given individual’s
behaviors” (18). Undoubtedly, the most important life event for the romantic
subject is “love.” As portrayed in literature, the idealized lover’s affection
constitutes the romantic man’s more important addiction, and its deprivation
can certainly cause a withdrawal syndrome leading to continuous dysphoria and,
thus, to the stress and fragile immunological condition that we were describing
before. Obviously, this connection is just a hypothesis. Trying to look for a
direct biological cause for romantic emotional impairment is not a complete
methodology to approaching the romantic “character-author emotional parallel”
phenomenon, which probably responds to a variety of different factors, some
cultural, as we have seen, some biological. The idea of the Romantic man’s
creating and believing in an artificial emotion that he can “physically” suffer
from is not unlikely, though. As people like Johnson remind us (19), the body
is inserted in the mind just as the mind is inserted in the body, and our
neural network is a system of ascending and descending pathways traveling from
our body to our cortex, which sends and receives information constantly.
7. Conclusion
In conclusion, we can say that the “romantic” world
makes the romantic author behave and write in a romantic way and that this
romantic way of feeling and writing about the world contributes to shaping this
particular literary period as romantic. In this sense, literature and life
maintain a circular relationship, just as the one we have established for intellectualized-lived
emotion on the basis of the James and Lange model: Literature influences life,
and life influences literature. This idea also fits well with recent cognitive
theory themes such as Einrich’s “creative loop” (20), in which we are shown how
our brain is shaped by our surrounding environment just as our environment is
shaped by our brain.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
(1) As
described by Wayne C. Drevets in "Mania.” Fundamental Neuroscience.
Ed. Zigmond, Bloom, Landis, Robert, Squire. San Diego: Academic Press, 1999.
(2) I
believe that there is always inevitably a certain degree of autobiographical
information—more or less obviously shown—in every work of literature.
(3)
Joseph LeDoux. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious underpinnings of
Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
(4) See
Antonio Damasio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994. Page 38.
(5) I
am following Neil R. Carlson. The Physiology of Behavior. Boston: Allyn
and Bacon, 1998, for both the James-Lange model and the description on the
neurophysiology of emotions.
(6)
Joseph LeDoux. “Emotional Networks in the Brain”. Handbook of Emotions. Ed.
Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Havilland. New York: The Guilford Press, 1993.
(7) See
Damasio’s Descartes’s Error, page 134.
(8) In
his Physiology of Behavior.
(9) See
Carlson, page 344.
(10)
Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus. “Introduction to Cultural Psychology
and Emotion Research.” Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual
Influence. Ed. Shinobu Kitayama and H.R. Markus. Washington: American
Psychological Association, 1994.
(11)
Jeannete M. Havilland and Patricia Kahlbaugh. “Emotion and Identity.” Handbook
of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Havilland. New York: The
Guilford Press, 1993.
(12)
Key studies in schema theory are Ulric Neisser. Cognition and Reality:
Principles and Omplications of Cognitive Pschology. San Francisco: W.H.
Freeman, 1976 and Mark Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of
Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. See also
chapter 5 in Dianne Gillespie. The Mind’s We. Contextualism in
Cognitive Psychology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 1992.
(13) I
follow Drevets here.
(14)
Richard Lazarus. “The Stable and the Unstable in Emotion.” The Nature of
Emotion. Ed. Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
(15)
See Lazarus, page 82.
(16)
See Drevets.
(17) I
am following for this section Jaak Panksepp. “Neurochemical Control of Moods
and Emotions: Amino Acids to Neuropeptides.” Handbook of Emotions. Ed.
Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Havilland. New York: The Guilford Press, 1993.
(18)
See George F. Koob. “Drug Reward and Addiction,” in Fundamental Neuroscience.
Page 1276.
(19) In
The Body in the Mind. See note 12.
(20)
Erich Harth. The Creative Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind. Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
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