Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But it’s the bloody old work ethic all the same because you’re only thinking you’ll write about me. So it’s actually work, n’est-ce pas? You can fuck me and call it poetry. Pretty clever. You deceive yourself beautifully that way.” “You really are a great one for unloading two-bit analyses, aren’t you? A real television shrink.” Adrian laughed. “Look, ducks, I know about you from myself. Psychoanalysts play the same game. They’re just like writers. Everything’s at one remove, a case history, a study. Also, they’re terrified of death—just like poets. Doctors hate death: that’s why they go into medicine. And they have to stir things up all the time and keep bloody busy just to prove to themselves they’re not dead. I know your game because I play it myself. It’s not such a mystery as you think. You’re really quite transparent.” It infuriated me that he saw me more cynically than I saw myself. I always think I’m protecting myself against other people’s views of me by taking the most jaundiced view of myself possible. Then suddenly I realize that even this jaundiced view is self-flattering. When wounded, I lapse into high-school French: “Vous vous moquez de moi.” “You’re damned right I do. Look—you’re sitting here with me right now because your life is dishonest and your marriage either dead or dying or riddled with lies. The lies are of your own making. You have to bloody well save yourself. It’s your life you’re fucking up, not mine.” “I thought you said I wanted you to save me.” “You do. But I’m not going to be trapped like that. I’ll fail you in some major way and you’ll start to hate me worse than you hate your husband....” “I don’t hate my husband.” “Right. But he bores you—and that’s worse, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer. Now I was really depressed. The champagne was wearing off. “Why do you have to start converting me before you’ve even fucked me?” “Because it’s what you really want.” “Bullshit, Adrian. What I really want is to get laid. And leave my bloody mind alone.” But I knew I was lying. “Madam, if you want to get laid, then you’ll get laid.” He started the car. “I rather like calling you madam, you know.” But I had no diaphragm and he had no erection and by the time we finally made it to the pension, we were all wrung out from having gotten lost so many times. We lay on his bed and held each other. We examined each other’s nakedness with tenderness and amusement. The best thing about making love with a new man after all those years of marriage was rediscovering a man’s body. One’s husband’s body was practically like one’s own. Everything about it was known.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I felt like I’d been socked in the jaw. It was like being six and having your bicycle smashed by your supposed best friend. It was the worst betrayal I could think of. “You mean you sat there the whole time talking about freedom and unpredictability and you knew you had plans to meet Esther? I’ve never met such a hypocrite!” Adrian began laughing. “What’s so goddamned funny?” “Your fury.” “I’d like to kill you,” I screamed. “I’ll bet you would.” And with that I began swinging at him and pummeling him. He grabbed me by the wrists and held me. “I only wanted to give you something to write about,” he laughed. “You bastard!” “Doesn’t this make the perfect end to your story?” “You really are a pig.” “Come on, love, don’t take it so hard. The moral of the story is the same anyway, isn’t it?” “Your morals are like roads through the Alps. They make these hairpin turns all the time.” “I seem to have heard that somewhere before too,” he said. “Well, I’m going with you.” “Where?” “Cherbourg. We’ll just have to drive through Brittany à cinq. We’ll all have to fuck each other and not make any silly moral excuses—as you said way back in Vienna.” “Nonsense, you’re not going.” “I am too.” “You are not. I won’t permit it.” “What do you mean you won’t permit it? What kind of shit is that? You flaunted everything in front of Bennett. You encouraged me to shake up my life and go off with you and now you’re busy keeping your safe little household intact! What kind of shit do you think I’ll stand for? You were the one who sold me a bill of goods about honesty and openness and not living in a million contradictions. I’m damn well going to Cherbourg with you. I want to meet Esther and the kids and we’ll all just play it by ear.” “Absolutely not. I won’t take you. I’ll physically throw you out of the car if need be.” I looked at him in disbelief. Why was it so hard for me to believe that he would be so callous? It was clear he meant what he said. I knew he would throw me out of the car if need be. And perhaps even drive off laughing. “But don’t you care about being a hypocrite?” The tone of my voice was tinged with pleading as if I already knew I’d lost. “I refuse to upset the kids that way,” he said, “and that’s final.” “Obviously you don’t mind upsetting me.” “You’re grown up. You can take it. They can’t.”

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Nonetheless, the evidence is clear that judges are not affectless in their rulings. The next question is: should they be? Is pure reason really the best way to render a wise decision? Imagine a person who is very calmly and coolly weighing the pros and cons about whether or not another person should die. There’s not a trace of emotion in sight. Like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. I am being a bit facetious here, but this kind of dispassionate decision-making is essentially what the law instructs in the sentencing portion of criminal cases. Rather than pretend that affect is absent, it’s better to use affect wisely. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once expressed, “Sensitivity to one’s intuitive and passionate responses, and awareness of the range of human experience, is therefore not only an inevitable but a desirable part of the judicial process, an aspect more to be nurtured than feared.” The key is emotional granularity: having a wide and deep range of concepts (emotion, physical, or otherwise) to make sense of the onslaught of bodily sensations that are the hazards of the job.57 Consider, for example, a judge faced with a defendant like James Holmes, who murdered twelve moviegoers and injured seventy more during a midnight screening of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. Such a judge might reasonably construct an experience of anger, but that feeling alone could be problematic; anger could prompt the judge to punish the defendant too harshly for the sake of retribution, threatening the moral order that the trial is founded on. To balance his view, some legal scholars argue, the judge could try to cultivate empathy for the defendant, who perhaps is insane or a victim of some sort himself. Anger is a form of ignorance; in this case, ignorance of the defendant’s perspective. Holmes clearly struggled with serious mental illness for years. He tried to kill himself for the first time when he was eleven years old, and has attempted suicide several times in jail. Empathy is extremely difficult to cultivate for someone who opens fire on innocents in a movie theater. Even remembering that the defendant is a human being, no matter how severe or gruesome the crime, might be a struggle at times, but this is when empathy might be most important. It may prevent a judge from going too far in punishing the offender during sentencing, and help to ensure the morality of penal decision-making and retributive justice. This is the type of emotional granularity that makes for wise use of emotion in the courtroom.58

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “And the next day on the news they were interviewing a guy who was on the lower deck of the freeway and they were like, ‘What will you take with you from this experience?’ And he goes, ‘When I got out of my car, there was a brain jiggling on the ground. A whole brain, jiggling like a Jell-O mold.’” “People die all the time, Reva.” “But isn’t that just horrific? A brain jiggling on the ground like Jell-O?” “Sounds made up.” “And the newscaster was silent. Speechless. So the guy goes, ‘ You wanted to know. You asked. So I’m telling you. That’s what I saw.’” “Please, Reva, just stop.” “Well, I’m not saying that would happen here.” “That didn’t happen anywhere. Brains don’t pop out of people’s heads and jiggle.” “I guess there were aftershocks.” I turned up the volume on the radio and rolled my window down. “You know what I mean, though? Things could be worse,” Reva shouted. “Things can always be worse,” I shouted back. I rolled the window back up. “I’m a very safe driver,” Reva said. We were quiet for the rest of the ride, the car filling with the smell of cinnamon gum. I already regretted that I’d agreed to let Reva sleep over. Finally, we crossed the bridge and drove up the FDR. The road was slushy. Traffic was very slow. By the time we got to my block, it was half past ten. We got lucky with parking, fitting into a spot right in front of the bodega. “I just want to pick up a couple things,” I told Reva. She didn’t protest. Inside, the Egyptians were playing cards behind the counter. There was a display of cheap champagne set up on a stack of boxes by the cases of beer and soda. I watched Reva eye the display, then open the freezer and lean in, struggling to excavate something stuck in the ice. I got my two coffees. Reva paid. “Is she your sister?” the Egyptian asked Reva, nodding in my direction as I sucked down my first coffee. It was extra burnt, and the cream I’d used had soured so that squishy strands of curd got caught on my teeth. I didn’t care. “No, she’s my friend,” Reva replied with some hostility. “You think we look alike?” “You could be sisters,” said the Egyptian. “Thank you,” Reva said dryly. When we got to my building on East Eighty-fourth, the doorman put down his newspaper to say “Happy New Year.” In the elevator, Reva said, “Those guys at the corner store, do they look at you funny?” “Don’t be racist.” Reva held my coffees while I unlocked the door. Inside my apartment, the television was on mute, flashing large bare breasts. “I’ve got to pee,” said Reva, dropping her gym bag. “I thought you hated porn.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I don’t want to mess up my relationship with her over some lawsuit. Maybe you shouldn’t take it.” “Do you think it could hurt me to take it? Or hurt the baby?” “You care about hurting the baby?” “I don’t want to kill it while it’s still inside of me,” she said. I rolled my eyes, took the bottle from where she’d left it on the coffee table, shook one out. “I’ll take one, too.” I opened my mouth, threw the pill back. I swallowed. “Fine,” Reva said, and pulled a Diet 7UP from her purse. She placed the Infermiterol onto her tongue like Holy Communion and sucked down half the can. “What do we do now?” I didn’t answer. I just sat down on the sofa and flipped through the channels until I found one that wasn’t covering the inauguration. Reva moved from the armchair to sit next to me to watch TV. “Saved by the Bell!” Reva said. We sat and watched together, Reva chatting every now and then. “I don’t feel anything, do you?” and then, “Why bother having a kid when the world’s just going to hell anyway?” and then, “I hate Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. She’s so trailer park. You know she’s only five foot five? I knew a girl who looked like her in middle school. Jocelyn. She wore dangly earrings before anyone else.” And then, “Can I ask you something? I’ve been sitting on it for a while. Just don’t get angry. But I need to ask you. I wouldn’t be a good friend otherwise.” “Go ahead, Reva. Ask me anything.” • • • WHEN I WOKE UP three days later, I was still at home, on the sofa, in my fur coat. The TV was off and Reva was gone. I got up and drank water from the kitchen sink. Either Reva or I had taken out the trash. It was strangely quiet and clean in the apartment. And there was a yellow Post-it note left for me on the refrigerator. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life! xoxo” I had no idea what I’d said to inspire Reva to leave me such a patronizing note of encouragement. Maybe I’d made a pact with her in my blackout: “Let’s be happy! Let’s live every day like it’s our last!” Barf. I got up and snatched the note off the fridge and crumpled it in my fist. That made me feel a little better. I ate a cup of vanilla Stonyfield yogurt that I hadn’t remembered buying. I decided to take a few Xanax, just to calm myself down. But when I opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, my pills were gone. Each and every bottle had disappeared. My stomach dropped. I went slightly deaf. “Hello?” Reva had taken my pills, of course.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  If you’re a newcomer to construction, then ideas like “emotion concepts” and “emotion perceptions” and “facial configurations” are probably not second nature for you yet. To really understand emotions—in a way that is consistent with contemporary knowledge of evolution and neuroscience—you have to give up some deeply ingrained ways of thinking. To help you along that path, in the next chapter I give you some practice with construction. We’ll take a close look at a famous scientific finding about emotion that many people consider a fact, and which propelled the classical view into a dominant position in psychology for five decades. We’ll unpack it from the perspective of construction and watch certainty transform into doubt. Strap on your seatbelt. 6 How the Brain Makes Emotions H ave you ever wanted to punch your boss? I would never advocate workplace violence, of course, and many bosses are terrific work partners. But sometimes we are blessed with supervisors who personify the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.” Suppose you have such a boss, and he’s been handing you extra projects for almost a year. You’ve been expecting a promotion for all your good work, but he has just informed you that the promotion went to someone else. How would you feel? If you live in a Western culture, you’d likely feel angry. Your brain would issue numerous predictions of “Anger” simultaneously. One prediction might be to pound your fist on the desk and yell at your boss. Another is to stand up and walk slowly across the room toward your boss, leaning in menacingly to whisper, “You will regret this.” Or you could sit quietly in your chair as you scheme to undermine your boss’s career. 1 These diverse predictions of “Anger” have similarities, such as the boss, the lost promotion, and the common goal to exact vengeance. They also have plenty of differences, because yelling, whispering, and silence require different sensory and motor predictions. Your action also is different in each case (pounding, leaning, sitting), so your inner-body changes are different, as are the consequences for your body budget, and therefore the interoceptive and affective consequences are different as well. Ultimately, through a process we’ll discuss shortly, your brain selects a winning instance of “Anger” that best fits your goal in this particular situation. The winning in stance determines how you behave and what you experience. This process is categorization. The scenario with your boss could play out differently, however.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I was curious if Reva would respond to it the same way I had. “What are these?” “Samples.” “Samples? Is that legal?” “Yes, Reva, of course it’s legal.” “But what is this, In-fer-mit-er-ol?” She looked at the box and tore it open. “It’s a numbing aid,” I answered. “Sounds good. I’ll try anything. Do you think Ken still might love me?” “No.” I watched her face flash with fury, then cool. She shook out a pill and held it in the palm of her hand. Was her face at a deviant angle? Was everyone’s? Were my eyes crooked? Reva bent over and picked a hair elastic up off the floor. “Can I borrow this?” I nodded. She put the pill down and fixed her hair. “Maybe I could look it up when I get home. In-fer-mit—” “Jesus. It’s fine, Reva. And you can’t look it up,” I said, although I’d never tried. “It’s not on the market yet. Psychiatrists always have samples. The drug companies send them. That’s how it works.” “Does she ever get Topamax samples? Skinny pills?” “Reva, please.” “So you’re saying it’s safe.” “Of course it’s safe. My doctor gave me it.” “What does it feel like?” “I can’t really say,” I said, which was the truth. “Hmmm.” I couldn’t be honest with Reva. If I’d admitted to having blackouts, she would have wanted to discuss it endlessly. I couldn’t stand the prospect of watching her shake her head in horrified awe, then try to hold my hand. “Tell me everything!” she’d cry, salivating. Poor Reva. She might actually have thought I was capable of sharing things. “Friends forever?” She’d want us to make some sacred pact. She always wanted to make pacts. “Let’s make a pact to have brunch at least twice a month. Let’s promise to go for a walk through Central Park every Saturday. Let’s have a daily call-time. Will you swear to take a ski trip this year? It burns so many calories.” “Reva,” I said. “It’s a sleeping pill. Take it and go to sleep. Give yourself a break from your Ken obsession.” “It’s not an obsession. It’s a medical procedure. I’ve never had an abortion before. Have you?” “Do you want to feel better or not?” “Well, yeah.” “Don’t leave the house after you take it. And don’t tell anyone about it.” “Why? Because you think they’re illegal? Because you think your doctor is some kind of drug dealer?” “God, no. Because Dr. Tuttle gave the Infermiterol to me, not you. People aren’t supposed to share medications. If you have a heart attack, it would trace back to her.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Negotiations began this week between Hollywood’s screenwriters and production executives, trying to head off a possible strike that could result in a TV-film shutdown and in thousands of writers having no business in show business. The tremendous impact of such a strike would be felt most profoundly in television, where viewers could be left watching virtually nothing with a script.” That didn’t sound so bad. Was the Benadryl working? Then I noticed that there was another Post-it note affixed to the top of the broken VCR. The horror of that thing! Probably another trite message from Reva encouraging me to “live life to the fullest,” I expected. I got up and plucked it off. Trite it was: “Everything you can imagine is real.— Pablo Picasso.” But it was not Reva’s handwriting. It took me a moment to place it. It was Ping Xi’s. I ran to the toilet. My puke came up as sour, milk-flavored syrup. A little splashed up into my face. I saw a swirl of neon pink as the two Benadryl I’d swallowed plunked down into the water. A few days earlier, I might have tried to fish them out, but they had mostly dissolved anyway. Let them go, I told myself. Besides, two Benadryl were a joke. Like blowing a snot rocket at a forest fire. Like trying to tame a lion by sending it a postcard. I flushed and sat down on the cold tile. The room spun for a moment, the floor bobbed up and down like the deck of a ship rising in a swell. I felt sick. I needed something. Without it, I’d go crazy. I’d die, I believed. I turned up the ringer on my phone so it would be as loud as possible when Reva called. I stood up slowly. I brushed my teeth. My face in the mirror was red and wet with sweat. This was anger. This was bitter fear. I sat back down on the sofa and stared at the TV screen and put my feet up on the coffee table. I crumpled the idiotic Post-it Ping Xi had left me. Then I put it on my tongue and let it dissolve slowly as my mouth filled with spit. Sybil was playing on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I was determined to remain calm. I chewed and swallowed the soggy paper bit by bit. “Sally Field is bulimic,” Reva would have told me had she been in the room. “She’s been candid about it. Jane Fonda, too. But everybody knows that. Remember her thighs in those exercise videos? They were not natural.” “Oh, shut up, Reva.” “I love you.” Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  When I saw him walk into the hospital waiting room, I went to the bathroom and vomited. Then I drove home and told a friend, who was at my house delivering frozen lasagna. She drove me right back to the hospital and made me tell a social worker, who told the doctors, who barred the man from the hospital room. Across the hospital, far away from Cathy in the ICU, Becky screamed at me from her hospital bed. Even at twenty, even while injured, she felt caught between the divisions in her family. Her whole body was in a brace and each word made her body tense with pain, but she still yelled at me. “How could you tell everyone our business? How could you do that to Mom and Dad? How could you? You never know when to shut up!” My mother stood in the corner of the room, looking at me as Becky yelled. Maybe another sister was in the room, too. All I remember is their silence as Becky screamed, her voice strong despite her pain. I walked out of the room and shut the door. I could hear her still as I backed into the hallway. No one ever spoke of it again. Two months later, I found myself on the floor of my living room, facedown and crying. I heaved and felt my ribs push into the oak floors. I was angry beyond belief, but I had nowhere to put that anger. The shelves of my heart were full. I walked down the block to a women’s shelter in my neighborhood and signed up for a class. I had met the director once at a church I attended. The class advertised itself to women in the church as life-changing—that phrase was written on the cover of all the materials and used by women who’d taken the class. The class itself was almost silly, forcing us to write letters to our past selves, repeating affirmations to each other, holding a baby doll and pretending it was us. But the mantra of the class is “feelings are for feeling,” which was exactly what I needed. Because I needed to find a place to feel angry. Now, I facilitate that class on Tuesday nights, listening as women bring their own anger. It follows them in through the door. Where can I put this? they want to know. Where can I set it down? I pat the cushions next to me. Put it here. The Proverbs in the Old Testament advise that it is better to live in a desert or on a roof than in the same home with an angry and contentious woman. My mother recited this verse to my sisters and me when we would yell and scream against injustices—our shorts were too short, our voices too loud, slips must be worn under dresses, dishes must be done while our brothers played. The words were used to silence us.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  At the same time that your brain is modeling your world, the outside world helps to wire your brain. When you’re an infant, awash in sensory input, the outside world seeds your earliest concepts, as your brain hardwires itself to the realities of the physical world around you. That’s how babies’ brains become wired to recognize human faces. As your brain develops and you begin learning words, your brain hardwires itself to the social world, and you begin creating purely mental concepts like “Things That Can Protect You from Stinging Insects” and “Sadness.” These concepts from your culture appear to be in the outside world, but they are constructions of your conceptual system. In this view, culture is not some gauzy, amorphous vapor that surrounds you. It helped to wire your brain, and you behave in certain ways that wire the brains of the next generation. For example, if a culture dictates that people with certain skin colors are less worthwhile, this social reality has a physical effect on the group: they have lower salaries and their children have poorer nutrition and living conditions. These factors change the structure of their children’s brains for the worse, making school harder and increasing the odds that the children will earn lower salaries in the future.1 Your constructions aren’t arbitrary—your brain (and the mind it creates) must keep in touch with the bits of reality that count in order to keep your body alive and healthy. Construction cannot make a solid wall unsolid (unless you have mutant superpowers), but you can redraw countries, redefine marriage, and decide who’s worthwhile and who isn’t. Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment, and other members of your culture construct that environment with you. It takes more than one brain to create a mind. The theory of constructed emotion also leads to a whole new way of thinking about personal responsibility. Suppose you’re angry with your boss and lash out impulsively, slamming your fist on his desk and calling him an idiot. Where the classical view might attribute some blame to a hypothetical anger circuit, partially absolving you of responsibility, construction extends the notion of responsibility beyond the moment of harm. Your brain is predictive, not reactive. Its core systems are constantly trying to guess what’s coming next so you can survive. Therefore your actions, and the predictions that launched those actions, are shaped by all your past experiences (as concepts) that led up to that moment. You slam that desk because your brain predicted an instance of anger, using your concept of “Anger,” and your past experience (whether direct, or from movies or books, etc.) includes an action of slamming the desk in a similar situation.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Kitzbichler, Manfred G., Richard N. A. Henson, Marie L. Smith, Pradeep J. Nathan, and Edward T. Bullmore. 2011. “Cognitive Effort Drives Workspace Configuration of Human Brain Functional Networks.” Journal of Neuroscience 31 (22): 8259–8270. Klatzky, Roberta L., James W. Pellegrino, Brian P. McCloskey, and Sally Doherty. 1989. “Can You Squeeze a Tomato? The Role of Motor Representations in Semantic Sensibility Judgments.” Journal of Memory and Language 28 (1): 56–77. Kleckner, I. R., J. Zhang, A. Touroutoglou, L. Chanes, C. Xia, W. K. Simmons, B. C. Dickerson, and L. F. Barrett. Under review. “Evidence for a Large-Scale Brain System Supporting Interoception in Humans.” Klüver, Heinrich, and Paul C. Bucy. 1939. “Preliminary Analysis of Functions of the Temporal Lobes in Monkeys.” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 42: 979–1000. Kober, H., L. F. Barrett, J. Joseph, E. Bliss-Moreau, K. Lindquist, and T. D. Wager. 2008. “Functional Grouping and Cortical-Subcortical Interactions in Emotion: A Meta-Analysis of Neuroimaging Studies.” Neuroimage 42 (2): 998–1031. Koch, Kristin, Judith McLean, Ronen Segev, Michael A. Freed, Michael J. Berry, Vijay Balasubramanian, and Peter Sterling. 2006. “How Much the Eye Tells the Brain.” Current Biology 16 (14): 1428–1434. Kohut, Andrew. 2015. “Despite Lower Crime Rates, Support for Gun Rights Increases.” Pew Research Center, April 17. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/17/despite-lower-crime-rates-support-for-gun-rights-increases. Kolodny, Andrew, David T. Courtwright, Catherine S. Hwang, Peter Kreiner, John L. Eadie, Thomas W. Clark, and G. Caleb Alexander. 2015. “The Prescription Opioid and Heroin Crisis: A Public Health Approach to an Epidemic of Addiction.” Annual Review of Public Health 36: 559–574. Koopman, Frieda A., Susanne P. Stoof, Rainer H. Straub, Marjolein A. van Maanen, Margriet J. Vervoordeldonk, and Paul P. Tak. 2011. “Restoring the Balance of the Autonomic Nervous System as an Innovative Approach to the Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis.” Molecular Medicine 17 (9): 937–948. Kopchia, Karen L., Harvey J. Altman, and Randall L. Commissaris. 1992. “Effects of Lesions of the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala on Anxiety-Like Behaviors in the Rat.” Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior 43 (2): 453–461. Kostović, I., and M. Judaš. 2015. “Embryonic and Fetal Development of the Human Cerebral Cortex.” In Brain Mapping, An Encyclopedic Reference, Volume 2: Anatomy and Physiology, Systems, edited by Arthur W. Toga, 167–175. San Diego: Academic Press. Kragel, Philip A., and Kevin S. LaBar. 2013. “Multivariate Pattern Classification Reveals Autonomic and Experiential Representations of Discrete Emotions.” Emotion 13 (4): 681–690. Kreibig, S. D. 2010. “Autonomic Nervous System Activity in Emotion: A Review.” Biological Psychology 84 (3): 394–421. Kring, A. M., and A. H. Gordon. 1998. “Sex Differences in Emotion: Expression, Experience, and Physiology.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (3): 686–703. Krugman, Paul. 2014. “The Dismal Science: ‘Seven Bad Ideas’ by Jeff Madrick.” New York Times, September 25. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/seven-bad-ideas-by-jeff-madrick.html. Kuhl, Patricia K. 2007. “Is Speech Learning ‘Gated’ by the Social Brain?” Developmental Science 10 (1): 110–120. ———. 2014. “Early Language Learning and the Social Brain.” Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 79: 211–220. Kuhl, Patricia, and Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola. 2008. “Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 31: 511–534.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The sullen essence of squareness. That was, when I thought about it, what I had against most analysts. They were such unquestioning acceptors of the social order. Their mildly leftist political views, their signing of peace petitions and decorating their offices with prints of Guernica were just camouflage. When it came to the crucial issues: the family, the position of women, the flow of cash from patient to doctor, they were reactionaries. As rigidly self-serving as the Social Darwinists of the Victorian Era. “But women are always the power behind the throne,” my last analyst had said when I tried to explain how dishonest I felt for always using seductiveness to get what I wanted from men. It was just a few weeks before the trip to Vienna that we had our final blow-up. I’d never quite trusted Kolner anyway, but I’d kept on going to see him on the assumption that that was my problem. “But don’t you see,” I shouted from the couch, “that’s just the trouble! Women using sex appeal to manipulate men and suppressing their rage and never being open and honest—” But Dr. Kolner could only see anything which vaguely smacked of Women’s Lib as a neurotic problem. Any protestation against conventional female behavior had to be “phallic” and “aggressive.” We had haggled over these issues for a long time, but it was his “power behind the throne” pitch which finally showed me how I’d been taken. “I don’t believe what you believe,” I yelled, “and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m struggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by. I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards. I also don’t think you understand a thing about women.” “Maybe you don’t understand what it means to be a woman,” he countered. “Oh God. Now you’re using the final ploy. Don’t you see that men have always defined femininity as a means of keeping women in line? Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a woman? Are you a woman? Why shouldn’t I listen to myself for once? And to other women? I talk to them. They tell me about themselves—and a damned lot of them feel exactly the way I do—even if it doesn’t get the Good Housekeeping Seal of the American Psychoanalytic.” We went back and forth like that for a while, both of us shouting. I was hating myself for sounding so damned much like some sort of tract and for being forced into simplemindedly polarized positions. I knew I was neglecting the subtleties. I knew that there were other analysts—my German analyst, for instance—who didn’t pull this misogynous routine.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Negotiations began this week between Hollywood’s screenwriters and production executives, trying to head off a possible strike that could result in a TV-film shutdown and in thousands of writers having no business in show business. The tremendous impact of such a strike would be felt most profoundly in television, where viewers could be left watching virtually nothing with a script.” That didn’t sound so bad. Was the Benadryl working? Then I noticed that there was another Post-it note affixed to the top of the broken VCR. The horror of that thing! Probably another trite message from Reva encouraging me to “live life to the fullest,” I expected. I got up and plucked it off. Trite it was: “Everything you can imagine is real.— Pablo Picasso.” But it was not Reva’s handwriting. It took me a moment to place it. It was Ping Xi’s. I ran to the toilet. My puke came up as sour, milk-flavored syrup. A little splashed up into my face. I saw a swirl of neon pink as the two Benadryl I’d swallowed plunked down into the water. A few days earlier, I might have tried to fish them out, but they had mostly dissolved anyway. Let them go, I told myself. Besides, two Benadryl were a joke. Like blowing a snot rocket at a forest fire. Like trying to tame a lion by sending it a postcard. I flushed and sat down on the cold tile. The room spun for a moment, the floor bobbed up and down like the deck of a ship rising in a swell. I felt sick. I needed something. Without it, I’d go crazy. I’d die, I believed. I turned up the ringer on my phone so it would be as loud as possible when Reva called. I stood up slowly. I brushed my teeth. My face in the mirror was red and wet with sweat. This was anger. This was bitter fear. I sat back down on the sofa and stared at the TV screen and put my feet up on the coffee table. I crumpled the idiotic Post-it Ping Xi had left me. Then I put it on my tongue and let it dissolve slowly as my mouth filled with spit. Sybil was playing on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I was determined to remain calm. I chewed and swallowed the soggy paper bit by bit. “Sally Field is bulimic,” Reva would have told me had she been in the room. “She’s been candid about it. Jane Fonda, too. But everybody knows that. Remember her thighs in those exercise videos? They were not natural.” “Oh, shut up, Reva.” “I love you.” Maybe she did, and that’s why I hated her.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all. And if I don’t kill you myself, then Pierre will. Do you understand?” There ensued a long and ear-splitting discussion of autobiography versus fiction, in which I mentioned Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Boswell, Proust, and James Joyce—all apparently to no avail. “You can damned well publish your filthy books posthumously,” Randy screeched, “if they contain a word about any character who ever remotely resembles me!” “And I assume that you are going to kill me so as not to delay publication.” “I mean after we die, not after you die.” “Is that an invitation to a beheading?” “Stuff your literary allusions up your ass. You think you’re so goddamned clever don’t you? Just because you were a grub and a grind and did well in school. Just because you’re ambitious and go fucking around with creepy intellectuals and phonies. I had as much talent to write as you and you know it, only I wouldn’t stoop to revealing myself in public the way you do. I wouldn’t want people to know my secret fantasies. I’m not a stinking exhibitionist like you, that’s all…. Now get the hell out of here! Get out! Do you hear me?” “This happens to be Jude’s and Daddy’s house—not yours.” “Get out! You’ve already given me a splitting headache!” Holding her temples, Randy ran into the bathroom. It was the old psychosomatic sidestep. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You’ve given me a splitting headache! You’ve given me indigestion! You’ve given me crotch rot! You’ve given me auditory hallucinations! You’ve given me a heart attack! You’ve given me cancer! Randy emerged from the bathroom with a pained look on her face. She had pulled herself together. Now she was trying to be tolerant. “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said. “Hah.” “No, really. It’s just that you’re still my little sister and I really think you’ve gotten off on the wrong track! I mean you really ought to stop writing and have a baby. You’ll find it so much more fulfilling than writing….” “Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.” “What do you mean?” “Look, Randy, it may seem absurd to someone with nine children, but I really don’t miss having children. I mean I love your kids and Chloe’s and Lalah’s, but I’m really happy with my work for the moment and I don’t want any more fulfillment just now. It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it…now that I can finally do it…I’m really raring to go.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  The legal system’s second assumption behind the heat-of-passion defense is that “cognitive control” in the brain is synonymous with rational thought, deliberate actions, and free will. For you to be considered culpable, it is not enough that you performed a harmful action (known by the legal term actus reus). You also had to mean it. You caused harm of your own free will with a guilty mind (mens rea). Emotions, on the other hand, are seen as rapid, automatically triggered reactions spewing from your ancient, inner beast. The human mind is considered a battleground for reason and emotion, so when you fail to exercise sufficient cognitive discipline, emotions are said to burst forth to hijack your behavior. They interfere with your choice of action, and therefore make you less culpable. This narrative of emotion as the primitive part of human nature, to be controlled by the more advanced and uniquely human rational parts, is the “triune brain” myth (chapter 4) whose roots go all the way back to Plato. The distinction between emotion and cognition hinges on their alleged separation in the brain, with one regulating the other. Your emotional amygdala spies an open cash register, but then, as the story goes, you rationally consider your likelihood of jail time, which causes your prefrontal cortex to slam on the brakes and stop your arm from dipping into the drawer. But as you’ve learned by now, thinking and feeling are not distinct in the brain. Your desire for easy cash and your decision to pass it up are both constructed across your entire brain by interacting networks. Whenever you carry out an action—whether it feels automatic, like recognizing an object as a gun, or more deliberate, like aiming one—your brain is always a whirlwind of parallel predictions that compete with one another to determine your actions and your experience. At different times, you have different experiences of agency. Emotion sometimes can feel uncontrollable, like a burst of anger that arrives without warning, but you can also act in anger with intent, methodically plotting someone’s demise. In addition, non-emotions like memories or ideas can pop into your head unbidden. And yet we never hear of defendants who commit murder “in a fit of thinking.” You can even work yourself up deliberately into a frothing anger. Accused mass murderer Dylann Roof, who shot nine people in a Bible study meeting in South Carolina in June 2015, appeared to cultivate his anger toward African Americans deliberately for many months before the day he walked into that church. Roof said that he almost didn’t go through with his plan because everyone was so nice to him, and he appeared to work himself up to the heinous deed in the meeting, uttering repeated phrases like “I have to do it” and “You have to go.”

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Your brain is predictive, not reactive. Its core systems are constantly trying to guess what’s coming next so you can survive. Therefore your actions, and the predictions that launched those actions, are shaped by all your past experiences (as concepts) that led up to that moment. You slam that desk because your brain predicted an instance of anger, using your concept of “Anger,” and your past experience (whether direct, or from movies or books, etc.) includes an action of slamming the desk in a similar situation. Your control network, you may recall, constantly shapes the course of your predictions and prediction error to help select among multiple actions, whether you experience yourself as in control or not. This network can only work with the concepts that you’ve got. So the question of responsibility becomes, Are you responsible for your concepts? Not all of them, certainly. When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts. 2 As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. No particular conflict is predetermined by evolution. Con flicts persist due to social circumstances that wire the brains of the individuals who participate. Someone must take responsibility to change these circumstances and concepts. Who’s going to do it, if not the people themselves? To make this point, a scientific study provides some preliminary hope. Researchers trained a group of Israelis to think about various negative events, such as Palestinians’ launching rockets and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, and recategorize them as less negative.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I confess. To beat her up in the street, there and then, as an honest vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A mounting fury was suffocating me—not because I had any particular fondness for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover’s name. I repeated my question; but she kept up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing plans for an immediate divorce. “Mais qui est-ce?” I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small café and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after all those years I still see him quite clearly—a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were thousands of them plying that fool’s trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist ordered wine; and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on talking—into me rather than to me; she poured words into this dignified receptacle with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her. And every now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid lover. The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his careful French, he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. “I think,” he said, “she will like Jean Christophe?” Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  It is a long list, but also, it is not so long. Looking at it now, you wonder, isn’t there more to you than that? SOMETIMES PEOPLE TELL YOU THAT YOU’RE LUCKY THAT YOU have sons so they won’t have to deal with all this crap. It’s true that your kids, by virtue of both being boys, will be in a privileged position, but the idea that they “won’t have to deal” with rape culture makes you shudder. You very much want them to “deal with” rape culture the way one “deals with” a cockroach problem. Sometimes you think about what you’ll tell them and come up surprisingly blank. It’s the words that fail you, not the ideas. The ideas are there. Though you aren’t sure exactly what you’ll say, these are the things you want them to know: It’s not okay to hit the girl you like. And it’s not okay to hit the girl you love. The world around you tells women that they should always nod politely no matter what they’re feeling inside. Don’t ever take a polite nod for an answer. Wait for her to yell it: “Yes!” Not everyone gets sex when they want it. Not everyone gets love when they want it. This is true for men and women. A relationship is not your reward for being a nice guy, no matter what the movies tell you. Birth control is your job, too. Don’t ever use an insult for a woman that you wouldn’t use for a man. Say “jerk” or “shithead” or “asshole.” Don’t say “bitch” or “whore” or “slut.” If you say “asshole,” you’re criticizing her parking skills. If you say “bitch,” you’re criticizing her gender. Here are some phrases you will need to know. Practice them in the mirror until they come as easy as songs you know by heart: “Do you want to?” “That’s not funny, man.” “Does that feel good?” “I like you, but I think we’re both a little drunk. Here’s my number. Let’s get together another time.” YOUR COUSIN TEXTS YOU OUT OF THE BLUE TO SAY, “I JUST GOT raped at the bank.” “Oh my God,” you respond. “Are you okay?” Your brain goes turbo. You are trying to imagine which hospital she’s at, if she’s likely to press charges, why she’s reaching out to you and what you can possibly do to make this any less devastating. The flashing ellipsis appears on your phone to signal that she’s typing. Then it turns to words that you struggle to focus on: “Yeah. I deposited my check in the wrong account so I’ve been overspending on my debit card. I got like $175 in fees.” You watch for the ellipsis, but it doesn’t appear. After a moment you realize this is the whole story. By “I got raped” she meant “I got charged bank fees for overdrawing my account.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Sitting in a room and writing poetry?” “Well why not? What makes it any worse than having nine kids?” She looked at me with contempt. “You don’t know a thing about having kids.” “And you don’t know a thing about writing.” I was really disgusted with myself for sounding so infantile. Randy always made me feel like five again. “But you’d love having kids,” she persisted, “you really would.” “For God’s sake, you’re probably right! But you’re enough of an Ethel Kennedy for one family—why the hell do we need any more? And why should I do it if I have so many doubts about it? Why should I force myself? For whose good? Yours? Mine? The nonexistent kids? It’s not as if the human race is about to die out if I don’t have kids!” “But aren’t you even curious to have the experience?” “I guess...but the curiosity isn’t exactly killing me. Besides, I have time....” “You’re almost thirty. You don’t have as much time as you think.” “Oh, God,” I said, “you really can’t stand anyone to do anything but what you’ve done. Why do I have to copy your life and your mistakes? Can’t I even make my own damned mistakes?” “What mistakes?” “Like bringing up your children to think they’re Catholics, like lying about your religion, like denying who you are...” “I’ll kill you!” Randy shrieked, coming at me with her arms raised. I ducked into the hall closet as I had so many times in childhood. There were days when Randy used to beat me up regularly. (At least if I have kids I’ll never make the mistake of having more than one. Being an only child is supposed to be such a psychological hardship, but it was all I ever wished for as a child.) “PIERRE!” I heard Randy screaming outside the door. I turned the lock and pulled the light cord. Then I backed into my mother’s sable coat (smelling of old Joy and stale Diorissimo) and sat beneath it cross-legged among the boots. Above me were two more racks of coats going up high into the ceiling. Old fur coats, English children’s coats with leather leggings, ski parkas, rain capes, trench coats, autographed slickers from our camp days, school blazers with name tapes in the necks and forgotten skate keys in the pockets, velvet evening coats, brocade coats, polo coats, mink coats...thirty-five years of changing fashions and four grown daughters...thirty-five years of buying and spending and raising kids and screaming...and what did my mother have to show for it? Her sable, her mink, and her resentment? “Isadora!” It was Pierre now. He rapped at the door. I sat on the floor and rocked my knees. I had no intention of getting up.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She pulled into the parking lot, got in line. “Do you visit them? Your parents’ graves?” she asked. Reva mistook my sigh of frustration for an expulsion of buried sadness. She turned to me with a high whining, “Mmm!” frowning in sympathy, and leaned on the horn by accident. It honked like a wounded coyote. She gasped. The person in the car ahead of us gave her the finger. “Oh, God. Sorry!” she yelled, and honked again in apology. She looked at me. “There’s food at home. There’s coffee, everything.” “All I want is coffee from McDonald’s. That’s all I ask. I came all this way.” Reva put the car into park. We waited. “I can’t even tell you how disturbing it was at the crematorium. It’s the last place you want to be when you’re in mourning. They give you all this literature about how they burn the bodies, like I really need to know. And in one of the pamphlets, they describe how they cremate dead babies in these little individual ‘metal pans.’ That’s what they call them—‘metal pans.’ I can’t stop thinking about that. ‘Pans.’ It’s so gross. Like they’re making personal pan pizzas. Isn’t that just awful? Doesn’t that make you sick?” The car ahead pulled forward. I motioned for Reva to drive up to the intercom. “Two large coffees, extra sugar, extra cream,” I said and pointed to Reva to repeat the order. She did, and ordered herself an Oreo McFlurry. “You can sleep over if you want,” Reva said, driving up to the first window. “It’s New Year’s Eve, you know.” “I have plans in the city.” Reva knew I was lying. I looked at her, daring her to challenge me, but she just smiled and passed my debit card to the woman in the window. “I wish I had plans in the city,” Reva said. We pulled up to the next window and Reva handed me my coffees. The lids smelled like cheap perfume and burnt hamburger. “I can call you a cab back to the station after the reception,” Reva went on, her voice high and phony as she spooned her McFlurry into her mouth. “Ken is coming, I think,” she said. “And a few other people from work. Do you want to stay for dinner at least?” Speaking with her mouth full was another thing I couldn’t stand about Reva. “I need a nap first,” I said. “Then I’ll see how I feel.” Reva was quiet for a while, cold white puffs of air rising up off her tongue as she licked the long plastic spoon. The heating was way up. I was sweating under the fur. She stuck the McFlurry cup between her knees and continued to drive and eat. “You can take a nap in my room,” she said. “It should be quiet down there.