Visceral Pleasures and Pains

The chapter deals with the nineteenth-century scientific view of the direct connection between affect and visceral-physiological processes. At the point in the history of science when the visceral basis for emotions attracted sustained attention of the medical community, the borderline between physical and emotional pain practically collapsed. The discourse on the physiology of emotions not only contributed to the expansion of the field of emotions beyond its existing vocabulary but also transformed the concept of the viscera: numerous processes on the visceral level were henceforth reinterpreted in terms of emotions. One of the consequences of this development was the physiologists’ marginalisation of the spoken word, the overt gesture, and other exteriorisations of feeling.