The Transmission of Affect
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Author: Teresa Brennan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0801488621
ISBN 13: 978-0801488627
The idea that one can soak up someone else's depression or anxiety or sense the tension in a room is familiar. Indeed, phrases that capture this notion abound in the popular vernacular: "negative energy," "dumping," "you could cut the tension with a knife." The Transmission of Affect deals with the belief that the emotions and energies of one person or group can be absorbed by or can enter directly into another.
The ability to borrow or share states of mind, once historically and culturally assumed, is now pathologized, as Teresa Brennan shows in relation to affective transfer in psychiatric clinics and the prevalence of psychogenic illness in contemporary life. To neglect the mechanism by which affect is transmitted, the author claims, has serious consequences for science and medical research.
Brennan's theory of affect is based on constant communication between individuals and their physical and social environments. Her important book details the relationships among affect, energy, and "new maladies of the soul," including attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, codependency, and fibromyalgia.
Review
"Brennan challenges what she views as a uniquely Western myth, that individuals are discrete and self-contained, with affect driven primarily from endogenous sources. Instead, she argues, humans absorb emotions that originate from others and that influence their very physiology and experience. This argument challenges the boundaries that are often assumed to exist between the self and the environment, between subject and object."
(
Choice)
Review
"In this rich and provocative book, Teresa Brennan has developed an alternative theory of affect that challenges any notion of self-contained individuals. Her theory of the transmission of affect insists on a constant communication between individuals and their environments, with social pressure acting at the intersection of the social and the material to bring together mind and matter through energetics. A well-thought-out and clearly argued treatise that gives credence to some popular ideas about energy, The Transmission of Affect will shake up many of the ideas that are in vogue in the academic establishment―part of the reason that it is such an exciting book."
(Kelly Oliver, Stony Brook University, author of
Witnessing: Beyond Recognition)
"It is truly exciting to read something so far beyond the usual scholarly projects: the scope of this highly original book is quite revolutionary and the erudition and historical research by which Teresa Brennan advances her argument are impressive."
(Linda Martín Alcoff, Syracuse University)
"The Transmission of Affect is subtle, innovative, and trenchant. It provokes fresh questions about the relations of mind and body and it proposes original answers. Teresa Brennan's charged and lucid prose makes us understand our experiences in new ways."
(Gillian Beer, author of
Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction)
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