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2. Unconscious Feelings and Emotional Mistranslations

As may be detected in the preceding analysis, “feeling” is a very complex term, especially since people with the strongest feelings seem least capable of articulating, or even experiencing them. O’Connor often divides emotion and feeling as two disparate categories of mental phenomena. Emotion in O’Connor’s interpretations designates gratifying feelings specifically tailored to please the mind. She expresses such an idea in a letter to Hester, “I guess by emotion you mean something like our deepest psychological needs” (HB102). On more than one occasion,O’Connor rejects emotion and relates it to sentimentalism.

The term “feeling,” on the contrary, oftentimes attracts O’Connor. Fascinated by Greek tragedies and visual perceptions, O’Connor attaches great importance to feelings. She affirms the importance of felt experience as early as in A Prayer Journal, wherein she articulates her longing to “feel” (35). Siding with Conrad, the modernist she admired, O’Connor agrees that the writer achieves his task through heightening the readers’ affective sensitivity. Stressing the senses throughout her essays and letters, she argues in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” that “the beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses” (MM67). In another essay, she writes that “the first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched” (MM91). Indeed, O’Connor not only remains allegiant to such an aesthetic stance in fiction writing, but also endows some of her characters with an exaggerated yet semi-conscious obsession with sensual experiences.

But feelings are always ambiguous in O’Connor’s work. Despite the radical passions of her protagonists, they have a very confused understanding of their feeling states. In fact, these characters can be so uncomfortably obfuscated by their unconscious feelings that they readily project their undesired feelings onto a doubling figure, who can carry the enormous emotions to the point of explosion. The double in O’Connor’s fiction is just one example I shall explore of the characters’ emotional confusion. What I would stress here is that O’Connor’s melancholic protagonists strikingly lack an understanding of their own feelings, although some scholarly attempts at expounding affects in O’Connor have been made with fruitful results. For instance, James Charles McCullagh has discussed the oedipal guilt of Hazel Motes in Wise Blood(51), Carol Shloss has examined the hidden anxiety of O’Connor’s country women characters, and Claire Kahane has conducted a perceptive psychoanalytic study of rage in O’Connor.

These emotional conflicts in O’Connor’s textual world, in fact, are true of O’Connor the author, too, perhaps even to the extent that she too is unable to recognize feelings themselves. James Mellard has pointed out that in her letters, O’Connor misunderstands her own emotions and offers self-defensive interpretations of her fiction, especially in regard to her fear of sexual desire. O’Connor “disavowed psychoanalysis”, Mellard explains, “because in her own unconscious it touched fears- cloaked through a pervasive méconnaissance-regarding sex, gender, desire, and identity” (Beyond Lacan2006, 107). Mellard argues that O’Connor exhibits what Lacan calls “méconnaissance” in her endeavor to remain aloof to the “dominant culture of psychoanalysis” (Beyond Lacan114) in her age of literary modernism. In Lacanian theory of the mirror stage, the infant, through identification with his reflection in the mirror, attains an ego image which deceives him into believing in the totality and autonomy of his fragmented body; and the formation of this illusionarily independent ego identity is summarized as méconnaissance (Lacan 79). This “concept is absolutely central to psychoanalysis,” Mellard says, because “it suggests that what we think we know may also contain an unconscious dimension we do not perceive”. (Beyond Lacan113) Méconnaissancecan also be called as misrecognition, and it can be used in the study of O’Connor to signify the subject’s misperception of his feeling states. As Mellard claims, misrecognition on O’Connor’s part goes so far that “she does not understand herself – . . . her orientation exhibits ways she is divided against herself” (Beyond Lacan114).

But whether or not O’Connor “knows herself” well, her interest in the unconscious, in her published fiction, drafts, correspondence and essays, is manifest. Despite her fluctuating attitudes (sometimes rejection, while other times amounting to reserved consent) to Freudian psychoanalysis, O’Connor more than once talks about the inevitable operation of the unconscious for the fiction writer. For example, she writes to Hester, “But the writer doesn’t have to understand, only produce” (HB180). Given the noticeable similarity between O’Connor and some of her creations, such as Joy/Hulga, it is really candid for her to admit in a formal essay, that one of the reasons “Good Country People,” which features a disabled intellectual and her disillusioned “date,” “produces a shock for the reader…is that it produced a shock for the writer.” Continuing to contemplate on her writing experience, she says, “fiction writing is something in which the whole personality takes part - the conscious as well as the unconscious mind” (HB100-01). In a letter to another friend, she writes: “I really have quite a respect for Freud when he isn’t made into a philosopher” (HB491). O’Connor is also aware of the conflicting motives and desires in the individual. For instance, she thinks Hazel Motes’ submission to Jesus, after extensive revolt, exemplifies a necessary mental struggle inextricable to true freedom: “Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think it usually does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man” (MM115).

These contrasting unconscious motives of Hazel Motes may mirror O’Connor’s own contrasting unconscious feelings. On the one hand, in her letters and essays, O’Connor does exhibit a general tendency to evade certain feelings she considers intruding and debilitating, such as sadness, grief, anxiety and fear, even though they together represent a genuine feeling state mostly associated with a sense of melancholy. Yet, while O’Connor does not address these “negative” feelings in her letters and essays, she seldom fails to transfer them into her dramatic fiction. For example, she keeps a tone of emotional objectivity when briefly reminiscing about her late father to Hester – (reminiscing is something she rarely does); but a sense of bereavement is often discernable in the human actors and actresses in her fictional work. This latent grief is especially potent in the figure of Enoch Emory of Wise Blood, who more than once voices comical sadness after being separated from his father, though that absent man, we are told, abused and neglected his teenage son. Francis Tarwater’s feelings toward old Tarwater, in The Violent Bear it Away (1960), also powerfully illustrate such a complex melancholy consisting of love and hate toward a deceased parental figure.

Like Enoch Emory and Francis Tarwater, the key to O’Connor’s handling of feelings, as shown in her letters, is either to repress them, or infinitely exaggerate them so as to render them apparently invalid. O’Connor scholar Frederick Asals understands the devastating consequence of comprehending feelings one does not desire to confront in O’Connor’s fiction, and his insight is true of O’Connor the author as well. In discussing “doubles” in O’Connor’s fiction, he writes in 1982:

they (the doubles) seem to embody a kind of knowledge the protagonists have lost touch with…as if they are in contact with a mysterious country the more rational and ‘civilized’ have never visited. They seem to demand recognition from the bemused intellectuals and genteel matrons they face: ‘Know me,’ they appear to threaten, ‘or be destroyed’; or, even more terrifying, ‘Know me andbe destroyed.’ (117)

It is this last phrase my dissertation focuses on, and the next stage of my argument is that to avoid the catastrophe of being mentally destroyed, O’Connor’s characters often resort to emotional “misrecognition” of the self and others. I would also argue that the contents of such an emotional misrecognition on O’Connor’s part primarily involve unconscious feelings related to melancholy, instead of what Mellard claims to be O’Connor’s fear of sexual desire. O’Connor’s feeling of abandonment, owing to an inherited and incurable illness, as Mellard himself also says, is vital to her characters, and reflected in her quote of Christ’s cry to the Father prior to His crucifixion. Whatever their primary context, O’Connor’s latent feelings of anxieties and loss are projected onto her literary doubles, the most famous one being Hazel Motes of Wise Blood, who is also made, in Mellard’s words, to experience his creator’s physical pain, “guilt and punishment, transgression, abandonment” (127). In the end of the novel, and after an excruciating journey together with Hazel, to Mellard, O’Connor is finally empowered enough to be able to conquer “her fear that in the disease-as-punishment God had renounced her” (Mellard 127).

However, I would call such a precarious “redemption,” which oftentimes helps O’Connor to dispel shades of melancholic insecurity, fear and rage, to be an “emotional mistranslation.” She “sainted” Hazel Motes, in Mellard’s words, to “somehow” reduce her own feelings of loss and fear (128). This sort of emotional manifestation of redemption, as we have again seen in O’Connor’s letters, is a display of pride and triumph vehemently resistant to feeling of loss, a configuration which piles up in O’Connor’s fiction as well.

In order for me to explain further my idea of “emotional misrecognition” or “emotional mistranslation” in relation to melancholy, a few additional historical references are useful. Historically, the terms instinct, emotion, feeling, and affect are not totally overlapping, even when describing the same mental phenomenon of melancholy. In Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psycho-Analysis(1983), instinct refers to “a hereditary behaviour pattern peculiar to an animal species…unfolding in accordance with a temporal scheme which is generally resistant to change and apparently geared to a purpose” (214). Aristotle defines emotion as “that which leads one’s condition to become so transformed that his judgment is affected, and which is accompanied by pleasure and pain” (1380). Charles Darwin proposes in The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) that bodily expressions of emotions like fear and rage are common among humans and animals, and that these unlearned expression are innate in origin. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C. Solomon summarize Darwin’s three general principles of the formation of emotional expressions in this book as follows:

Some emotional expressions originally arise because they are useful in dealing with the emotion-arousing situation; they thus have survival value. Others are simply the opposite of those useful emotional behaviors associated with an opposite emotion. And yet others, such as trembling, are simply a result of the physiological changes that occur during emotional experiences. (Calhoun and Solomon 115)

Echoing Darwin’s theory, William James argues in The Principles of Psychology (1890) that somatic responses upon an external stimulus precede our mental perception of this bodily state, and that emotion is the last product of a series of physiological changes. He claims: “The bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion” (2: 449). James’s theory of emotion, combined with the thesis of C. G. Lange, who similarly prioritizes the physiological side of emotion, extends into the famous James-Lange theory.

However, this theory met with severe challenge in the 1960s, when modern mainstream psychology of emotion began to attach more importance to cognition, holding that mental evaluation is indispensable to the formation of emotion. Some contemporary philosophers with a special interest in affect still agree with such a cognitive emphasis on affect. For example, Teresa Brennan (2004) stresses the thematic distinctiveness of feelings; she argues, “feelings includes something more than sensory information insofar as they suppose a unified interpretation of that information” (The Transmission of Affects5).

Various schools have categorized emotions into different groups -- not merely serving as afterthoughts and verbal judgment of emotional experience, but as attributes of characteristic physical and psychological responses to an emotional stimulus. Sylvan Tomkins lists interest, surprise, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame and anguish as eight basic prefabricated emotions (185); Paul Ekman shortens the list to six basic emotions, comprised of surprise, happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness, whose facial expressions are universal (326); Robert Plutchik proposes eight basic emotions, including joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, anger, anticipation and disgust; Jaap Panksepp, judging from the consequent behaviors of electrical stimulations of animal brains, concludes that there are “four basic emotional response patterns: panic, rage, expectancy, and fear” (LeDoux 113).

According to Antonio Damasio (1994), there are three kinds of feelings: feelings of basic universal emotions, feelings of subtle universal emotions, and background feelings. “The first variety is based on emotions, the most universal of which are Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, and correspond to profiles of body state response which are largely preorganized in the James sense” (Descartes’ Error149). The second category of feelings is more complex:

A second variety of feeling is based on emotions that are subtle variations of the five mentioned above: euphoria and ecstasy are variations of happiness; melancholy and wistfulness are variations of sadness; panic and shyness are variations of fear. This second variety of feelings is tuned by experience, when subtler shades of cognitive state are connected to subtler variations of emotional body state. It is the connection between an intricate cognitive content and a variation on a preorganized body-state profile that allow us to experience shades of remorse, embarrassment, Schadenfreude, vindication, and so on. (Descartes’ Error149-50)

Clearly, to Damasio, cognition, apart from biological disposition, is important to the forming of a variety of feelings. Also, I would stress that although secondary emotions can derive from basic universal emotions, there is nevertheless a “genuine,” differentiating emotional spectrum covering substrates of varying intensities. For example, the spectrum of happiness is physiologically and physically dissimilar from the spectrum of anger.

Freud had generally argued there is no such thing as unconscious affect; only when affect was conjoined with an “idea” was it meaningful. Laplanche and Pontalis define the Freudian affect as a “qualitative expression of the quantity of instinctual energy and of its fluctuations” (13), meaning that only when a certain “quantity” of energy was built up would that energy manifest itself in “qualitative” form, such as the expression of emotion. As André Green (1973) puts it: “The affect denotes the element of energy in this representation endowed with a quantity and a quality, lined to the ideational representative, but capable of being dissociated in the unconscious” (70). In other words, generally Freud does suggest a distinction between ideas and affects, a distinction that can correspond to one between emotions (the more obvious outward manifestation) and feelings.1

The difficulties associated with “affect” largely involve its controversial unconscious facet. Freud, throughout his career, tends to deny the existence of unconscious affect. He insists that whereas generalized emotions and ideas can both stay in the unconscious subsequent to repression, affect has no place in the unconscious, but must be inhibited, displaced and transformed (in other words displayed) at the conscious level. In other words, affect only exhibits itself at the conscious level. It becomes conscious through association with an idea. Thus, only those affects paired with ideas can be clearly perceived as feelings.

However, as other psychoanalysts have noted, the phenomenon of unconscious affects (i.e. feelings that are unconsciously felt) is widespread in the clinical setting. In his book coauthored with Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience(2013), Adrian Johnston points out that “feelings are never immediate, straightforward phenomena, but involve, in the subjectivities of speaking beings, metalevels shaping the feel of feelings” (90). Moreover, to Johnston, Freud himself accepted unconscious affects at times. His major metapsychological texts show that he “himself repeatedly and markedly vacillates apropos the question of whether or not (and, if so, how) affects can be (and sometimes are) unconscious in a meaningful analytic manner” (75). Such a question takes an urgency in the context of writers like O’Connor who aim precisely to convey feelings far beyond conscious expression.

According to Johnston, the primary feature of Freudian theory of affects lies in the divergence between what Laplanche and Pontalis sum up as affect and idea, which “parallels the broader fundamental dichotomy between energy and structure” in Freud (102); we can even phrase this as a distinction between quantity and quality. In other words, while affect to Freud is usually expressed as qualitatively disparate feelings in connection with ideas, such as happiness and anger, paradoxically, affect can also designate a more vague economic energy unit capable of freely associating with various ideational representations. Green summarizes Freud’s attempt at theorizing affect in “Project for A Scientific Psychology” (1895) as follows: “The problem of the affect is so closely bound up with the relations between quantity (quota of affect) and quality (the subjective aspect)” (28). Prioritizing the quantitative aspect of affect, Green asserts that Freud’s “avowed aim of the ‘Project’ is to consider psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of material particles. The consideration of quality is subordinate to this” (28). Yet while Freud’s effort to “quantify” mental processes were not his most lasting legacy, these efforts can be seen as useful for us in some ways.

One such way involves the concept of “strangulated affect” developed by Freud and Breuer inStudies on Hysteria(1895). Freud later abandoned the model of hypnotic catharsis and replaced what was thought to be remembrances on the part of the hysteric with a theory of fantasy fulfillment, but in his early career, he identified hysteria as a manifestation of mental disorders caused by trauma. To be more specific, Breuer and Freud propose in “Preliminary Communication” that hysteria is a peculiar expression of remembrance accompanied by affect not adequately discharged when the traumatic event occurs. If a traumatic event that provoked affects was not followed by an energetic reaction either with actions or words, and if its memory cannot fit into the symbolic network of association in the mind, the event turns into an isolated mental representation. As they explain it, “If the reaction is suppressed the affect remains bound up with the memory. An insult which has been repaid, albeit verbally, will be remembered differently from one that had to be accepted” (11). “Those memories which have become the precipitating causes of hysterical phenomena have been preserved with an astonishing freshness and retained their full affective emphasis over a long period of time” (12).

In other words, memory of the traumatic event which is repressed or even forgotten becomes latent like a foreign body beyond the reach of consciousness; moreover, the memory trace is capable of invading the organism’s normal functioning. As Breuer and Freud famously claim, hysterics “suffer for the most part from reminiscences” (11). The hysteric’s mind can only relive the affect, that has not been abreacted at the original traumatic scene, via drastic somatic symptoms such as local paralysis and hallucinations. As a result, the hysterical symptoms are a coded repetition of original trauma staged in the flesh. They are the patient’s displaced endeavor at comprehending unresolved emotional conflicts that evade the hysteric’s conscious understanding.

As Breuer and Freud suggest, affect is indispensable to the analysis of hysteria (and I believe such a view is also applicable to the exploration of melancholy engaged in by O’Connor). According to Breuer and Freud, under the state of hypnosis and the therapist’s intervention, the hysteric could remember the event with verbalization, rekindle and release the “trapped” unconscious affects bound up with the past event, thereby placing the readjusted ideational presentation into the normal psychic linkage by way of “associative correction.” (19) One possible outcome of this method is a more acceptable rematch between old ideas and new affects, provided that both affects and ideas are fluid and capable of renewed associations. This psychotherapy is related by Breuer and Freud to “abreaction,” wherein unconscious affects are awakened and discharged. Abreaction also helps to unravel the unpleasant tie between unconscious affects and ideas in the hysteric. Its liberating effect can be linked with the literary term “catharsis,” wherein original emotion is retranslated and gets a further reconstruction via the verbal interactions and emotional tie between performer and audience or, in psychiatric terms, the hysteric and the therapist. Related to bowel movements, catharsis in Aristotle’s Poeticsdepicts “the freeing effect of watching a tragedy, vicariously letting out emotions that would otherwise accumulate and cause pressure” (Rachel Bowlby, “Introduction,” xii). Moreover, in both Breuer’s rendition of his famous patient, Anna O.’s symptoms, and Aristotelian aesthetics, timing is crucial. The translation of emotions occurs right after the mimetic moment of indirectly reliving an episode of one’s past life; by re-experiencing past affects, the patient can put an end to his mental problems. The cathartic therapeutic method, similar to “chimney sweeping” proposed by Anna O., who reportedly relieved her troubling memories in her “private theater,” seems to provide a temporary affective translation that renders the patient’s inhibited feelings known to himself.

The concept of attachment and detachment between unconscious affects and ideas in “Studies on Hysteria” is furthered developed by Freud in his later work. He applies this notion to neurotic patients, and then to ordinary people in general. In “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense” (1894), an essay written one year after “Studies on Hysteria,” Freud writes that the obsessional neurotic tends to dissociate an idea from affect. Much like a free energetic component, affect is detached and displaced from its original ideational representation, and then it attaches itself to another idea, thus forming “false connection.” Freely flowing in associative networks of the obsessional neurotic, affect travels along trains of thoughts and gives rise to a “mismatch” with the idea it sticks to. As Johnston notes, such a form of “affect” is like a “proverbial lump in the carpet woven of the psyche’s interconnected ideational threads” (103). As such, the obsessional neurotic ends up obsessed with “false feelings” directed toward a different object.

Freud’s conceptualization of affect’s “free association” is fully developed in “The Unconscious” (1915). In this essay, Freud argues that affect and idea, after repression and detachment, undergo vicissitudes of different fates. He reiterates the postulate that when affect joins a “substitutive idea,” it can be transformed into an emotional manifestation of the new idea in the consciousness. As he says, “The development of affect can then proceed from this conscious substitute, and the nature of that substitute determines the qualitative character of the affect” (182). Hence, affect, regardless of its being conscious or unconscious, can result in different ideational representations with a certain inherent thematic affinity, although they can never be associated with one idea sufficiently to enable neurosis or psychosis to be cured.

The sense that affect, once displayed, can be divorced from the conditions that gave rise to it is what I mean by “emotional mistranslation.” A similar notion is proposed by Adrian Johnston who postulates a term of “misfelt feeling.” Johnston notes that “by virtue of the psyche’s defensive means of achieving a self-regulated homeostatic equilibrium in terms of affect, there inevitably are absences of translations or distorting mistranslations within and between emotions, feelings-had, and feelings-known” (Johnston & Malabou 169). Of course, Johnston does not shun the fact that his theory inevitably depends on a somewhat “essentialist” stance in regard to emotions and feelings:

A perhaps controversial aspect of my notion of misfelt feelings is its clearly implied claim that there is a truth to certain feelings at odds with what the first-person conscious awareness of the feeling subject takes these feelings really to be and be about. In other words, this concept of mine commits me to the thesis that feelings actually can be other than what they’re (mis)taken to be by the person having them, that people can be in error about their emotional lives. However disconnecting and counterintuitive this initially might be to some readers, it’s a fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis. (Johnston & Malabou 86)

To Johnston, the subject’s consciously registered feelings can be different from the nature of his actual feeling states, in line with his affective disposition. In other words, the subject’s perception and understanding of certain feeling and emotion states is likely to deviate from what these affective states inform him about his real physiological and mental conditions.

Within a Freudian framework, we can say the mismatch between affects and ideas may lead to an “inaccurate” appraisal of the causes of some feeling states, which may further distort our exploration of an emotional experience disguised by our unconsciousness. Misrecognizing the idea that causes a feeling state has been noticed by philosopher Amelie Rorty, who also “makes a distinction between the apparent cause of an emotion (the stimuli immediately available and consciously perceived) and the actual cause” (“Explaining Emotions” 65). Moreover, the upshot of emotional mistranslations can be an important misidentification of the nature of a feeling due to an intimidating idea’s inability to fully access consciousness.

More detailed examples of emotional mistranslation can be added. The neuropsychologist Joseph LeDoux, in explaining the misappraisal of one’s emotional feeling, offers an example common in daily life: a father may convince himself that he is angry with his children because they were misbehaving, but the real cause of his outburst might have been his frustration at work, which might be further coupled by his childhood memories of being similarly mistreated (66). Repressed sadness under unusual circumstances can transform into aggressivity against people who were irrelevant to the original emotional arousal. Finally, as Freud informs us, some feelings, such as anxiety, may seem unmotivated, occurring to the subject without the stimulation of any objects. Such affects, without pairing with ideas, would never be registered in the subject’s cognizance. They can at best be felt as unmotivated and objectless sensations.