SOME COMMENTS ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS.

This article comments on the sociology of the emotions. Sociology certainly has something to say about the emotions but the paper by Stevi Jackson aims to show that sociology has everything to say. The social constructionist conception of emotions proffered by Jackson gives priority to cognition. The paradox of Jackson's argument and the danger of the sociology of the emotions is that the emotions will be reduced to ideas, they will have no autonomy from the rational world with which they co-exist. A relationship will bring emotional satisfactions and dissatisfactions in more or less equal measure. What is interesting on a sociological level is why such ideals should develop, on a psychological level, what is interesting is the way in which individuals cope with the reality. People need at least a year before they can find a level of confidence that enables them to talk about their feelings in a comparatively uninhibited way. Beyond this, it is easy to make mistakes about feelings, a psychotherapeutic training lasts a minimum of three years, often twice that time, and one of the few things that end up is the extraordinary difficulty in distinguishing between one's own emotions and those of others.