Review of Luptons The Emotional Self

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# 1020
“Discourse Studies”
Book Reviews
Charls Pearson
Discourse Studies 1999; 1; 375
DOI: 10.1177/1461445699001003006
The online version of this article can be found at:

http://dis.sagepub.com
DEBORAH LUPTON, The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration. (London: Sage), 1998, vii + 195 pp,
$24.95 (pbk), $74.50 (hbk)
The purpose of this book is to explore ways in which emotion plays a central role in contributing to our
sense of self, rather than to define what emotions are, or to construct a grand theoretical account of how
emotions are experienced. The discussion focuses on the emotional self in the context of western societies –
principally Anglophone and western European countries – at the end of the 20 th century. Lupton treats emotions
from a sociological, cultural, and anthropological viewpoint, rather than from a psychological, physiological, or
semiotic viewpoint. Her theoretical approach falls within the ‘emotions as social constructions’ framework as
she has outlined it. She is interested in the lived experience and social relational dimension of emotion.
Lupton acknowledges that discourse plays a vital role in constructing and shaping emotions, but asserts that
it is important not to slip into ‘discourse determinism’. The extra-discursive, or the interaction of sensual
embodiment with sociocultural processes and the influence of the unconscious in emotional experience also
require incorporation into an understanding of the ontology of the emotional self.
Chapter One. ‘Thinking Through Emotion: Theoretical Perspectives’, is essentially the summary of a
literature search on theory of emotion and presents a useful classification of many such theories, but it fails to
include any semiotic theories. Lupton breaks these down into ‘emotions as inherent’ and ‘emotions as socially
constructed’ categories with a further breakdown into some nine categories of theories of emotion. She does an
excellent job of analyzing and summarizing the theoretical literature. However, she uses long and cumbrous
words and phrases such as ‘sociology of the body’, ‘sociology of the emotions’, ‘socio-cultural meaning and
representation’, ‘social interaction and bodily experience’, etc., instead of simple words such as ‘semiotics’,
semiosis’ and ‘sign structure’.
If Chapter One is the strongest chapter of the book, Chapter Two is the weakest. Titled ‘Recounting
Emotion: Everyday Discourses’, it reports the results of a series of interviews (it would be neither fair nor
accurate to call this an experiment) the author conducted with 41 lay people, asking what they thought about
their emotions. Irrelevance of this chapter for the book’s purpose aside, it seems to me that Lupton confuses the
concepts of ‘emotion’, ‘emotionality’, ‘control of emotions’, and ‘expression of emotion’ with each other
throughout the chapter. The following figure should help to distinguish between these concepts (see Figure 1).
Chapter Three, ‘Emotions, Bodies, Selves’, is another excellent literature search, directed this time to
concerns of the body and self and their relations to emotion and emotionality. Lupton’s two major constructs in
Pearson: “Review of Lupton” Page 2 of 3
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this chapter are ‘negative discourses on emotion’ that position emotion as dangerous, disruptive, or humiliating,
and that portray emotionality as evidence of lack of self-control, and ‘positive discourses on emotion’ that
represent emotion as authentic evidence of humanity, selfhood, and the proper basis of judgment and morality.
Figure 1.
Chapter Four is titled, ‘The “Emotional Woman” and the “Unemotional Man”’. It focuses on the emotions
of gender as related to selfhood, by treating the symbolic and psychodynamic aspects of representations of the
feminine body as being more fluid and less contained than that of the masculine body. This depends on a
mechanistic metaphor of emotion as a fluid and the body as a container and interpreting selfhood as a
mechanical process whereby the body contains the emotional fluid. Lupton combines the material of the two
literature searches reported in Chapters One and Three, and sorts out their gender aspects. She thereby arrives at
several useful hypotheses for initiating exploration of the emotions of gender as related to selfhood. For
instance, she claims that there is now a convergence between notions of ideal masculinities and femininities in
relation to emotionality.
Chapter Five is titled ‘Emotions, Things and Places’. In a manner similar to that of Chapter Four, it
focuses on the emotions of self as related to its location and possessions. The chapter begins with a general
discussion of the role played by emotion in the consumption of commodities and then focuses more specifically
on ‘appropriation’, by which an object becomes an extension of the self via everyday use. Lupton argues that
the investment of emotion in objects is often an outcome of appropriation. She then discusses the ways in which
objects serve as the mediators of emotion, and the emotions that are associated with particular places, especially
in relation to the cultural means of ‘home’.
Lupton reiterates her conclusions in a postscript and comments on the complexity of the concept of the
‘emotional self’ in general. Indeed, emotional and self, each being signs, are each complex structures in
themselves with their logical conjunction even more so. All the more reason to discard the simplistic
mechanistic model of ‘self’, ‘body’, and ‘emotion’ and adopt the semiotic model to help untangle the various
strands of meaning and structure in each of these concepts. It would not be fair, however, to charge this as a
fault against the book, since it was never Lupton’s purpose to develop an overarching theory of emotion, only to
point out some of the important aspects of the relation between emotion and self-hood; this she does very well.
The Emotional Self will be useful to all investigators of emotionality, selfhood, personality, and semiotics.
Pearson: “Review of Lupton” Page 3 of 3
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Charls Pearson
American Semiotics Research Institute; Atlanta, USA

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