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.

About the Author

The late Teresa Brennan was Schmidt Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Florida Atlantic University. Her books include Exhausting Modernity: Ground for a New Modernity and The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity.

Reviews

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.

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Book Information
ISBN 9780801488627
Author Teresa Brennan
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g