by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

PERFORMING FEELINGS

I wonder where feelings come from: do they express an authentic interiority or do they reflect social convention? Do they drive belief or follow belief?

After each new global, national, or local outrage, patients rage and weep. A sampling of common statements that could be traced to many incidents:

“I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t actually process.”
“I hate this country.”
“I don’t feel safe. What’s next?”
“This is the end of liberal democracy. It’s utterly depressing.”

Then, the issue is essentially dropped.

The outpouring of emotions seems genuine and I feel moved by the anguish and outrage. I believe that my patients register broader sociopolitical events as deeply, personally upsetting.

Yet the affect display often feels performative, even compulsory: as a good liberal, one must feel devastated by the issue at hand—for as long as everyone on social media is similarly affected.

Subjective truth holds a particular inviolability, especially in therapy, perhaps for the simple reason that it is so often discounted in everyday life.

However, the absolute authority often awarded to lived experience in current discourse has become extreme: “Well, it’s just how I feel, it’s my truth, so no comment, please.” “I define my reality.” Notoriously fallible and limited, subjective perception is regarded as a truth that cannot be questioned.

The truth of “lived experience” is, in fact, always highly conditioned. Part of psychoanalytic treatment involves unpacking the ways we have internalized the social order, approaching some sort of authenticity, despite our external conditioning. Psychoanalysis offers a personal relationship through which one can develop one’s subjective experience with a kind of check—a dialogue that mediates emotional reactivity.

Today, personal, emotional experience appears ever more crudely responsive to collective sentiments. Thoughts and feelings reflexively repeat memes and soundbites and imposed ideologies, without the personal, mediating relationships necessary for development. Isolated selves react directly to the machinations of mass society.

The intense emotions expressed in response to mass events feel real—and of course if it feels real, it is real—but these feelings often don’t develop, in part because they are in some sense prefabricated and reactive. In a society at once omnipresent and barren, the powerful feelings generated by our difficult and often overwhelming world have nowhere to go; conversations about thorny, nuanced issues stall at the level of raw emotion.

Neoliberalism as an organizing political order is gone, but we are not yet sure what is replacing it. So, too, the new forms of subjectivity appearing here and there are fundamentally opaque, and in need of further explanation. For now, we therapists can at least document the shift honestly, without bringing our own morals or politics to bear.