Mental Health

The mental health field has continued to work with impaired theories of health and illness. Instead of continuing to consider mind processes as brain dysfunction, as if they were physiological troubles, we need to consider these in psychological terms to obtain useful answers. Our mental processes comprise subsets of emotion and cognition processes. Probably the theories about emotion have been the more seriously handicapped of the two basic psychological theory areas.
Two emotion theories were quite influential in the history of mental health studies. From our current view we see them as scientific blunders. Freud's theory of anxiety set the stage for a long continuing emphasis on anxiety as the fundamental emotion. Although other emotions were studied and considered in psychoanalysis, anxiety remained the major focus as the significant emotion. Later, efforts by Tomkins used ideas derivative of Darwin and James to put the basic function of emotion in the arena of communication, thus not considering its significance as a central mental process. Emotion, along with cognition, should have been considered a central issue. Instead, healthy growth of emotion theory was stunted by the powerful influence of the affect theory viewpoints of Freud and Tomkins and, astonishingly, the effective omission of affect from behavioral and cognitive theories. It is because the twin processes of emotion and cognition are so important to a theory of health and illness that the consequences of the use of impaired theories are so unfortunate.
Thus, failure to comprehend the healthy processes and functional utility of emotion, or the pathological processes of muting, emotion potentiation, and storm--all unnoticed decade after decade--meant that they unfortunately were unavailable for understanding and helping people. These psychological processes, discernible to some people and invisible to others, are not generally noticed even decades after their discovery and are not yet generally absorbed into the thinking of theorists or practitioners. A theoretical contribution encompassing the dual mind, which now enables the field to answer old questions more ably and to raise and answer new questions, must first catch the attention of sufficient workers to be studied and recognized for what it is.
Various special theories had been devised to deal with small portions of emotion process, such as discharge or signal, or some particular emotion such as anxiety or anger. Special theories were constructed relating to diagnostic entities as if they were specific emotions, as with depression and phobia. The differing premises of these several special theories precluded assembling and integrating them to construct a general theory of affect or illness. The incompatibility of the various premises in efforts at such combinations assured that no matter how complex the aggregation of special and partial theories became, they provided little helpful information about human life. No extended dialectic could be persuasive.