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Ruth Leys (born August 31, 1939) is a British-born historian of science. She is noted for her works on trauma, guilt and shame, Holocaust memory, and affect theory. She is the Henry Wiesenfeld Professor Emerita of Humanities and Academy Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Leys earned her B.A. degree in the field of Physiology, Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford University, and her Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard University. In 1975, she moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland where she held various positions, culminating in her appointment as Professor in the Humanities Center. In 2006 she was appointed to the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Chair of the Humanities. She retired in 2014 and lives in Baltimore with her husband, the art historian, art critic, and poet, Michael Fried.
Leys’ work focuses on the history of the human sciences, from the late 19th-century to the present, with a special focus on the history of 20th and 21st-century psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and the cognitive sciences. Early in her career she undertook the organisation of the very large archive of the correspondence and the personal and institutional papers of the Swiss-American psychiatrist Adolf Meyer. This work led Leys to focus her attention not only on the history of certain European scientific discoveries, such as the reflex concept, the topic of her dissertation, but on American developments as well.
Leys has described her approach as a historian as “genealogical,” in the sense given that term by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. [1] This means that she does not try to present crucial episodes in the history of the topics she is examining in a linear manner, or as part of continuously unfolding historical developments. Rather, she aims to show that those episodes have had both an eruptive character, as if the problems involved were occurring for the first time, and also a recurrent character, because each episode repeats the same difficulties and contradictions that had troubled conceptualisations from the start. [2]
Thus, in her book Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), [3] Leys traces the development of the theorisation of the concept of trauma from its origins in late 19th-century theories of hysteria through its various reformulations as shell shock, war neurosis, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She emphasises that throughout its long history the conceptualisation of trauma has experienced the recurrence of certain persistent, unresolved conceptual and empirical difficulties. These difficulties have concerned the role attributed to ‘imitation’ or identification in the trauma victim’s experience of shock. In particular, she analyses the continuous tension or oscillation in the theorisation of trauma between two competing accounts. Leys argues that, on the one hand, victims of trauma have been conceptualised as so swept up in the scene of violence that they blindly and unconsciously imitate or identify with the aggressor, to the point that they are later unable describe or bear witness to what they have seen and experienced. On the other hand, victims of trauma have also been conceptualized differently, as suffering in a mode that allows them to remain spectators who can see and represent to themselves and others what was happening and hence can testify to their experience. The result of the second approach is to deny the idea that victims of trauma are complicitous with the traumatic violence, and to establish instead a strict dichotomy between the victim and the aggressor. Leys also suggests that the concept of trauma has been structured historically in such a way as to invite resolution in favor of one or other of these competing accounts but to ultimately defeat each attempt at resolution. The figures whose work she critically in this framework include Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Abram Kardiner among the early trauma theorists, but also the more recent theorists and trauma specialists such as Bessel van der Kolk and Cathy Caruth.
Leys has subsequently published books on related topics such as the history of approaches to notions of survivor guilt and shame in the context of World Wars I and II and the Holocaust; [4] the history of approaches to the emotions since WW II; [5] the history of the concept of newborn imitation; [6] and the history of claims concerning the unconscious influence of words or other stimuli (primes) in activating automatic actions. [7] In each case, she tends to identify certain stubborn conceptual conundrums within approaches to these topics, conundrums that constantly threaten to undermine the coherence of dominant approaches. She has described her approach as not only genealogical but as histories of the present. She attaches special significance to the issue of intentionality in the human sciences and the difficulty cognitive science faces when it tries to operationalise intention and meaning.
Another aspect of Leys’ work is her interest in is the fact that certain iconic experiments in the human sciences have turned out be not only poorly designed but have failed to replicate. [8] She argues that we are living in a time of crisis in the psychological sciences owing to inability of researchers to reproduce many of the most influential experiments in the field. Leys frequently hones in on such moments of crisis in order to examine the cracks in the theoretical and research paradigms that can be seen to have haunted those fields all along. Thus in her work on approaches to emotion, she pays close attention to a famous experiment on American and Japanese responses to stressful films that turned out to be misleadingly reported; [2] similarly, her account of the genealogy of the claim that human infants are born with an inbuilt capacity to imitate certain facial movements of adults takes as its starting point iconic experiments on the topic that have been shown to be unreplicable; [9] and her book on the history of priming research likewise takes as its starting-point a failed replication of a famous experiment ostensibly demonstrating the unconscious influence of words connoting old age on the speed with which the experimental subjects walked on leaving the laboratory. [7]
Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.
Guilt is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse, regret, as well as shame.
Shame is an unpleasant self-conscious emotion often associated with negative self-evaluation; motivation to quit; and feelings of pain, exposure, distrust, powerlessness, and worthlessness.
Appeal to emotion or argumentum ad passiones is an informal fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence. This kind of appeal to emotion is irrelevant to or distracting from the facts of the argument and encompasses several logical fallacies, including appeal to consequences, appeal to fear, appeal to flattery, appeal to pity, appeal to ridicule, appeal to spite, and wishful thinking.
Psychological projection is a defence mechanism of alterity concerning "inside" content mistaken to be coming from the "outside" Other. It forms the basis of empathy by the projection of personal experiences to understand someone else's subjective world. In its malignant forms, it is a defense mechanism in which the ego defends itself against disowned and highly negative parts of the self by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others, breeding misunderstanding and causing untold interpersonal damage. Projection incorporates blame shifting and can manifest as shame dumping. Projection has been described as an early phase of introjection.
Ethnolinguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural behavior of the people who speak those languages.
Martha Nussbaum is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department.
Affect theory is a theory that seeks to organize affects, sometimes used interchangeably with emotions or subjectively experienced feelings, into discrete categories and to typify their physiological, social, interpersonal, and internalized manifestations. The conversation about affect theory has been taken up in psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, medicine, interpersonal communication, literary theory, critical theory, media studies, and gender studies, among other fields. Hence, affect theory is defined in different ways, depending on the discipline.
Affective science is the scientific study of emotion or affect. This includes the study of emotion elicitation, emotional experience and the recognition of emotions in others. Of particular relevance are the nature of feeling, mood, emotionally-driven behaviour, decision-making, attention and self-regulation, as well as the underlying physiology and neuroscience of the emotions.
Ruth R. Faden is an American scientist, academic, and founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. She was the Berman Institute's Director from 1995 until 2016, and the inaugural Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director from 2014 to 2016. Faden is the inaugural Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics.
Discrete emotion theory is the claim that there is a small number of core emotions. For example, Silvan Tomkins concluded that there are nine basic affects which correspond with what we come to know as emotions: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, dissmell and disgust. More recently, Carroll Izard at the University of Delaware factor analytically delineated 12 discrete emotions labeled: Interest, Joy, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Self-Hostility, Fear, Shame, Shyness, and Guilt.
Emotion classification, the means by which one may distinguish or contrast one emotion from another, is a contested issue in emotion research and in affective science. Researchers have approached the classification of emotions from one of two fundamental viewpoints:
The self-discrepancy theory states that individuals compare their "actual" self to internalized standards or the "ideal/ought self". Inconsistencies between "actual", "ideal" and "ought" are associated with emotional discomforts. Self-discrepancy is the gap between two of these self-representations that leads to negative emotions.
Moral development focuses on the emergence, change, and understanding of morality from infancy through adulthood. The theory states that morality develops across a lifespan in a variety of ways and is influenced by an individual's experiences and behavior when faced with moral issues through different periods of physical and cognitive development. Morality concerns an individual's reforming sense of what is right and wrong; it is for this reason that young children have different moral judgment and character than that of a grown adult. Morality in itself is often a synonym for "rightness" or "goodness." It also refers to a specific code of conduct that is derived from one's culture, religion, or personal philosophy that guides one's actions, behaviors, and thoughts.
Social emotions are emotions that depend upon the thoughts, feelings or actions of other people, "as experienced, recalled, anticipated or imagined at first hand". Examples are embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride. In contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. Therefore, the development of social emotions is tightly linked with the development of social cognition, the ability to imagine other people's mental states, which generally develops in adolescence. Studies have found that children as young as 2 to 3 years of age can express emotions resembling guilt and remorse. However, while five-year-old children are able to imagine situations in which basic emotions would be felt, the ability to describe situations in which social emotions might be experienced does not appear until seven years of age.
Paul Raymond Gilbert is a British clinical psychologist. Gilbert is the founder of compassion focused therapy (CFT), compassionate mind training (CMT) and the author of books such as The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life's Challenges and Overcoming Depression.
A moral injury is an injury to an individual's moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression on the part of themselves or others. It produces profound feelings of guilt or shame, moral disorientation, and societal alienation. In some cases it may cause a sense of betrayal and anger toward colleagues, commanders, the organization, politics, or society at large.
Ann Luja Cvetkovich is a Professor and former Director of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017. She has published three books: Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). She has also co-edited Articulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) with Douglas Kellner, as well as Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds. Furthermore, Cvetkovich has co-edited a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments" with Ann Pellegrini. She is also a former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Annamarie Jagose.
Moral emotions are a variety of social emotions that are involved in forming and communicating moral judgments and decisions, and in motivating behavioral responses to one's own and others' moral behavior. As defined by Jonathan Haidt, moral emotions "are linked to the interests or welfare either of a society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent". A person may not always have clear words to articulate, yet simultaneously knows it to be true.
Helen Block Lewis was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Her work pioneered the study of the differences between guilt and shame. She founded the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology, taught at universities, was the psychoanalysis division president of the American Psychological Association, and wrote several books. Her books include Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, Psychic War in Men and Women, Freud and Modern Psychology volume 1 and 2, Sex and the Superego, and The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation.
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