by Thérèse Woodcock
As we have seen from the exposition of Protosystem Thinking, the nature of its working is very powerfully bound up with the emotions. The question may now be properly asked
Why do we have emotions?
What function does emotion serve within the total psyche?
What do we mean by emotional development?
To answer these questions, I would like to suggest that we look at two aspects of what we generally mean by emotions. One is DESIRES; the other is FEELINGS.
Today, I can only touch upon these two aspects briefly. But I hope to give you a sufficient idea, for you to go thinking about them for yourself.
I would like to take DESIRES first
Desire is what Lowenfeld, when speaking about children, called ‘the wish life of the child’. Now the wish life of the child is not fundamentally different from that of an adult and is intrinsic to the psychic life of people. It is Desire which sustains us towards the goal of survival and continuity, the psychic aspect of which is immortality; it is the energy, the E, of Desire which takes us forward, through our lives. Perhaps this is why we often hear people say ‘She died because she no longer wished to live.; In ordinary life, we would probably know it as Motivation.
Of the number of desires mentioned by Lowenfeld in relation to the child, I will now only speak of three: that of the Desire for Knowledge, the Desire for Power, and the Desire To Be Looked At. I will also be including one of my own: the Desire for Relationships.
(1) First then is CURIOSITY, the Desire to Know, which is the basic energy behind the drive to know through patterning. Without curiosity we would be living in chaos. Curiosity is the hallmark of our Desire to Know, it is the primary requisite for maximising our adaptive potential. So this Desire for Knowledge is essential for our survival.