What Do Emotions Mean? Aquinas, Descartes, and Modern Mental Health Care

While philosophical debates about emotion are far from the minds of most mental health practitioners, modern mental health care practices display a wide variety of philosophical views on emotion.   For example, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and its “third-wave” descendants tend to conceptualize emotions as intrinsically linked to evaluation and motivation, and meaningful for engaging the world.  Symptom-focused psychopharmacology tends to conceptualize emotions as feelings of bodily states that may not “mean” anything.  In this seminar we will examine how these rival practical philosophies of emotion are prefigured in complex ways in the work of two medieval and early modern thinkers:  René Descartes, whose Passions of the Soul anticipated a mechanistic approach to psychology, and Thomas Aquinas, whose treatment of the passions in the Summa theologiae situated the passions as (mostly) embodied indicators of the subject’s love.  These two accounts of emotion, each rooted in particular Christian theological commitments, can help us to understand important philosophical and theological contours of modern mental health care.

Warren Kinghorn MD, ThD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center; Esther Colliflower Associate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral and Moral Theology at Duke Divinity School; co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School; and a staff psychiatrist at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.  His current teaching and scholarship centers on the way that Christian faith communities engage questions of mental health and mental illness. He has also written on the moral dimensions of combat trauma, on the philosophy of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the role of the therapeutic alliance in psychiatric medication prescribing.  He is a co-author of the recently published Prescribing Together:  A Relational Guide to Psychopharmacology (American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2021

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