This chapter focuses on increasing flexibility in self- and emotion-patterns, suggesting a process-oriented and patient-oriented perspective on psychopathology and psychotherapy. Such an approach can take into account the notions of affective atmosphere and the importance of external environmental factors, including social processes, in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. The notion of a self-pattern as a dynamical gestalt allows for a systematic approach to understanding and treating such disorders. Specifically, it allows us to zoom in on the affective factors that include emotions, constituted as their own dynamical patterns, to discover the connections among the various features of self-pattern, and the pervasiveness of the affective in everyday life.

Affect makes us vulnerable to attention capture. William Burroughs explored the aesthetic functions of playing with and capturing attention through his comic routines, his writing and his performances. This chapter shows how the outrageousness of Burroughs’ routines and his iconic performances in “Chappaqua,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “The Black Rider” break down defensiveness through laughter and expose the enablers and drivers of addiction, challenging us to rethink our vulnerabilities in the face of drugs, social institutions, and new forms of media. His comic routines and performances reveal the social drivers of addiction, such as the health system’s involvement in the opioid crisis and the War on Drugs’ investment in social control, and anticipate the capture and resale of attention leading to the contemporary “attention economy,” the profits of surveillance capitalism and engineered addiction to social media.

Emotions and motivation are tied intimately together. Some motivations are based in emotions: fear, anger, and disgust. In other cases, though not forming their bases, emotion strongly interact with motivation; for example, disgust can strongly interact with sexual and feeding motivations. The chapter asks – what are the general properties of emotion and what do all emotions have in common? Emotions serve functionally coherent roles in behaviour, conscious experience, cognition, and the organization of the body’s physiology. The chapter draws a distinction between emotion, affect, and mood. It discusses specific action tendencies and Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The chapter places central importance upon affective neuroscience. It reviews the evidence for seven basic affective systems as postulated by Jaak Panksepp: seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, panic/grief, and play. Links are described between these basic emotional systems and high-level cognition.

This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.

Ngugi wa Thiongo’s third novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), is a significant text in his novelistic oeuvre in that it is different to what he wrote both before and after it. A Grain of Wheat can be read as an affective pause in which both past and present have a resonance, but the novel also does something altogether different in creating an archive of feeling around the moment of Uhuru. This cultural pause leading up to Uhuru allows Ngugi to trace the trajectories of the past in the present, and the present into the future, through utilising motifs of betrayal, collective imaginary, reconciliation and sacrifice, for instance, which will eventually become permanent features of both the national archive and his later novels. Ngugi reflects the notion of futurity in reading the national archive of Uhuru as harbouring a nascent anti-foundational discourse marked by the very betrayals and redemptions that this novel surfaces through the affective economies of political struggle. The ideological trajectory in Ngugi’s later works can be traced to his depiction of Uhuru at this time with its attendant ambivalences, betrayals and redemptions. In effect, this novel can be read as forming a foundational context to Ngugi’s post-independence imaginative archive.

This explores the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) as an example of entanglements of spirituality and psychopathology, and looks at ‘spiritually significant voices’ (identified by those who hear them as having spiritual/religious significance). Some have proposed making a differential diagnosis between ‘genuine’ spiritual experiences and mental illness, but the criteria for making such distinctions can be controversial and misleading, based on a false presupposition that the two are mutually exclusive. Research shows that patients identify some experiences as both part of an illness and spiritually significant. Patients with a psychiatric diagnosis are often subjected to epistemic injustice, wherein their claim to know things (e.g. spiritually) is discredited owing to prejudice associated with their diagnosis. A case study explores entanglement of spirituality with AVHs and considers implications for assessment/treatment. Voices of this kind may be meaningful for those who hear them, whether or not associated with a diagnosis, and affirmation of this and patients’ positive spiritual coping, where possible, can be a positive factor in promoting recovery.

This chapter is concerned with the question of what whiteness means today. Looking both at history and at Christian nationalism allows us to see that for much of its history, whiteness in the US meant respectable family values. European immigrants were promised the privilege of whiteness for the cost of assimilation, for leaving ethnic markers of clothing and language behind and assimilating into white cultural norms around family and gender roles. While today we tend to discuss respectability politics around people of color attempting to challenge racial stereotypes by practicing white middle-class norms, this discussion shows that Christian nationalism also functions to defend respectability in the form of sexual and familial norms. This commitment to defending respectability is a product of the history of US nationalism and perpetuates a politics of whiteness without ever needing to explicitly say so.

Ulpian’s successors followed his lead in imagining a world without legal politics. To articulate their vision, they constructed a law of government: a body of law devoted to the administration of cities, and to criminal punishment. It focused on questions of public order and administration, and sought to eliminate the scope of, if not the need for, collective participation. It was concerned to limit the jurisdiction of governors, who might become enmeshed in local political systems. Within this system, jurists reserved the capacity for affective judgment for emperors alone. This is the vision of law that would be taken up over the long course of Late Antiquity: only the emperor would be permitted affect and discretion; all others were construed as responsible to the law itself. Together, jurists and the emperors created a vision of law that was radically opposed to the society upon which it was enacted.

In Chapter 3 knowledge from sociocultural psychology is integrated with other disciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and neuro psychology, and outside psychology such as sociology, visual studies, and philosophy, to tackle the power of images to influence our seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.

Philosophical and conceptual understandings of time underpin Bowen’s writing, and often these are expressed through experiments with form and narrative. Focusing on Bowen’s novels, this chapter examines how her characters are shown in scalar relation to bigger historical moments or developments, even while the writer holds on to the primacy and singularity of individual experience. It discusses the relationship between history and affect or individual feeling through three interrelated narrative tropes: the temporality of loss, typically broached through themes of adolescence and innocence lost; textual time, or the ‘multitemporal’ qualities of words and letters; and time capsules, or the irruption of the past into the present or future, particularly as a felt experience of wartime. Reading Bowen in context not only emphasises the important issues of her time; it also illuminates the reader’s relationship to her time, and how one might feel and understand intimate attachments to the world in contemporary times.