Talk: Messy Feelings and the Magic of Tidying Up

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend the public talk:

Rhodri Hayward, Queen Mary, University of London

Messy Feelings and the Magic of Tidying Up

Walk into the self-help section of any bookstore in the United States or the United Kingdom, and it quickly becomes clear that over the last five years, the popular understanding of selfhood and emotion has undergone a marked and dramatic transformation. Where once the shelves were filled with volumes informing readers that the path to self-mastery could be found through a profound confrontation with memory and personal history, today’s stock suggests that self-transcendence can be achieved through more mundane means: by adopting new systems of personal organization or embracing ‘the magic of tidying up’. The tidy house, we are informed, will allow us to live lives free from stress and anxiety and instead experience moments of ‘flow’ - a new form of affective temporality characterized by productive serenity. This new popular concern with material organization as a key to emotional management is echoed in the recent academic embrace of what has been called the ‘new materialism’ - in which philosophers and critics such as Jane Bennett and Michelle Bastian argue for the agency of mundane things in the making of our identities, feelings, relationships and societies.

The talk will examine the historical roots of this new perspective and consider the challenge that it offers to psychoanalysis and other idealist approaches in the history of emotions. It is the keynote for the workshop Excess? Images of Body, Health, Morality and Emotions across the Media.

Rhodri Hayward is a Reader in the History of Medicine at Queen Mary, University of London and a co-founder of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. He has published on the history of dreams, Pentecostalism, demonology, cybernetics, and the relations between psychiatry and primary care. His current research examines the rise and political implications of psychiatric epidemiology in modern Britain. His book, Resisting History: Popular Religion and the Invention of the Unconscious, was published by Manchester University Press in 2007 and The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care by Bloomsbury in 2014. With Felicity Callard, Angus Nicholls and Chris Renwick he edits the journal, History of the Human Sciences.