Of course, my friend says, he’s of his generation, they never thought about feelings.
She’s talking about an older relative whose manipulative and aggressive behaviour has upset her all her life. But I’ve heard this line often before, spoken both by members of older generations to vindicate insensitivity, and by younger people excusing it. Feelings, you’d think, were invented in the 1980s.
Like most of these historical generalisations, the dates are slippery. “We didn’t talk about these things in my day” seems to cover whatever range is convenient, and it never holds up. We find emotional competence and incompetence of all kinds in all generations, times and places. The vocabulary for expressing feelings changes, but the need and ability to do so is constant.
I think of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, about loneliness and belatedness and being away from home so long that the home you miss is no longer there; about Pearl, an English medieval elegy for a dead child; about the Emperor Hadrian’s famously untranslatable poem facing his own death. Othello is about traumatised men enacting their pain on women, Hamlet about grief and depression and daddy issues. Would anyone seriously claim that Yeats or Joyce or Beckett, and perhaps more importantly their readers, didn’t think about emotion?
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If it seems obvious to say that one of the concerns of art across millenniums is the expression of feeling, let’s add that reflection on what is now called “mental health”, by which people usually mean mental illness, is also at least as old as writing.
It was Wordsworth, writing two centuries before Freud, who said ‘the child is father to the man’, and he was influenced by the French philosopher Rousseau, to whom the philosophical and political importance of infant care was obvious
Dante’s Inferno famously begins with a midlife crisis: in the middle of the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood. That poem walks in the footprints of Virgil’s Aeneid, about a different descent from health and happiness into a hellscape and back up. People have been losing their minds, and fearing and talking and reading about losing their minds, for good reasons and no discernible reasons for a very long time.
You can remind anyone who tells you that mental health is a millennial invention that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a long disquisition on what we would now call depression, was published in 1621. The idea that mental illness is a primarily medical issue is culturally and historically specific. The first doctors working in 18th-century asylums for the insane were there to care for patients’ physical health, not to heal their minds; it was only after the “Enlightenment” that anyone attempted to imagine minds and bodies to be separable.
Before that, despair, melancholy, mania and addiction were more likely to find spiritual or community responses, sometimes more cruel and sometimes kinder than later medical treatment. But they occurred, and there were words for them and conversations about them, and sufferers mattered.
It should also be obvious that there have been loving, emotionally competent parents in every era, and also unloving and incompetent parents. Again, the vocabulary changes – plenty of my generation were raised in very loving and secure homes where no one ever said “I love you” – but the desire and ability to raise happy kids is not a modern phenomenon.
Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) is as much a childcare manual as a book about politics, offering guidance on the upbringing of boys born to lead (admittedly happiness isn’t a high priority, but certain kinds of fulfilment are). Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, published in Venice in 1528 and rapidly translated across Europe, is also devoted to the care and education of the children of the elite.
It was Wordsworth, writing two centuries before Freud, who said “the child is father to the man”, and he was influenced by the French philosopher Rousseau, to whom the philosophical and political importance of infant care was obvious. Humans have known, certainly for centuries and probably for as long as we’ve known anything, that how you treat babies and small children shapes their whole lives and their children’s lives.
My oldest friend, now in her 80s, sometimes marvels at the sophistication of younger generations’ analyses of emotions. Her deepest feelings are far from words. But she was one of my models of motherhood, and she’s surprised and saddened to hear of grandparents and parents who don’t enjoy children’s individuality, don’t celebrate young curiosity and passion, but rather seek to mould and control. As in most areas of life, what you do matters more than what you say, and good, loving, respectful relationships are not a recent invention.
