Queen Mary History of Emotions

The Sound of Water: Tear Bottles

“I take things out of boxes, but need boxes to put them back in”
A light dabble with a search engine on the subject of “tear bottles” will lead you to a world of assertions, often by online shops, about the historical use of “tear bottles” in the mourning rituals of Romans, Greeks and Victorians with stories of how tears were collected in small, stoppered, glass bottles as a sign of respect and grief.
They’ve featured in opera designs and art installations and there are at least a couple of references to collected or collecting tears in the Bible including Psalm 56:8 where God is being addressed:
Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?
John Gill’s mid eighteenth century Exposition of Whole Bible unpicks this with another assertion about the “tear bottle” in the psalm being an allusion “to “lachrymatories”, or tear bottles, in which surviving relatives dropped their tears for their deceased friends, and buried them with their ashes, or in their urns; some of which tear bottles are still to be seen in the cabinets of the curious.”
In other translations and versions it’s not a bottle into which God’s collecting tears but a wineskin. In others he’s just writing them down on his scroll.
Nevertheless, the idea of the tear bottle remains a powerful one and a way of thinking about tears and emotion.
One aspect of Clare Whistler’s residency was her interviews with academics and others at QMUL about tear-bottles. She asked people to imagine a receptacle for their tears and also to collect their tears in a small book. She created poems from their answers and I have used some of these poems in the podcast. I wanted to show how Clare’s project mixed the professional investigation with the more personal reflection.
We also hear Jennifer Wallis, Chris Millard and Thomas Dixon, from the Centre for the History of Emotions talk about tears in their research: the internally liquefying inmates of a 19th Century Asylum; Neil Kessel’s social experiments in the 1960’s with sales of large quantities of aspirin to weeping women and Hogarth’s Enthusiasm Delineated. Alongside this, Paul Roberts, Head of the Roman Collections at the British Museum, shows me some beautiful, tear-shaped glass bottles from the British Museum’s stores and there are some specially commissioned musical tears created by the composer Jonathan Dove.
Produced by Natalie Steed

Psychic Driving. Test #1. Museum of the Normal.

Recorded as part of the "Museum of the Normal" event hosted by the "Living With Feeling" project of QMUL at the Barts Pathology Museum in November 2016. See: http://bit.ly/2jWQRdR

Interview With Thomas Dixon

An interview about the history of emotions with Thomas Dixon, conducted in Melbourne in November 2016, edited and published originally by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

SAD at Thirty

Sad at Thirty - produced for QMUL Centre for the History of Emotions by Natalie Steed
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
Emily Dickinson
This podcast was commissioned by Tilli Tansey, Professor of the History of Modern Medical Sciences at QMUL, and Thomas Dixon, Director of the QMUL Centre for the History of Emotions. The piece responds to the Witness Seminar, organised by Tilli Tansey, to mark the 30th anniversary of the first publication about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in 1984.
I interviewed Norman Rosenthal, the researcher who first wrote about the disorder as well as Jennifer Eastwood and Helen Hanson who are both sufferers of the disorder and who are involved in SADA (Seasonal Affective Disorder Association).
Thomas Dixon and Tilli Tansey discuss their collaboration on this Witness Seminar and reflect on some of the ideas it provoked. In this podcast I wanted to reflect the story of Seasonal Affective Disorder as told in the Witness Seminar but also to try and communicate something of what it might be like to experience the disorder.
Helen Hanson, the current Chair of SADA, describes how she feels her experience of SAD has influenced her work as an artist and conjures an extraordinary image of experiencing the dwindling of light on winter afternoons as “the hour of the wolf”.
Natalie Steed

The Politics of Wellbeing

This podcast features an interview with Lord Richard Layard, LSE economist, 'happiness tsar' and a driving force in the politics of wellbeing over the last decade; and with William Davies, senior lecturer at Goldsmith's, and author of The Happiness Industry. We discuss how academics can influence public policy, how governments, universities and companies can improve wellbeing, and whether there are aspects of the 'wellbeing movement' that are illiberal, reductive or creepy. For good background to this discussion, check out Oliver Burkeman's long-read article on the 'therapy wars' between Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and psychoanalysis:https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/07/therapy-wars-revenge-of-freud-cognitive-behavioural-therapy
Acronyms used in the discussion:
IAPT: Improving Access for Psychological Therapies, an NHS talking therapy service which Layard helped introduce
Will's book The Happiness Industry available here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00WFYBGY8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Richard's book Thrive (co-authored with David Clark) available here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thrive-Power-Evidence-Based-Psychological-Therapies-ebook/dp/B00JX5RCWW
CBT: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a short-term therapy for emotional disorders now freely available in the NHS
NICE: National Institute for Care and Health Excellence
For more from the Centre, check out our blog: https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/

Geoff Dyer on peak experiences

This is an interview with the writer Geoff Dyer about peak experiences and places of numinous power. We discuss peak experiences reached through drugs, nature, love and ping-pong. Is 'peaking' a secular replacement for religion, or is there a risk the pursuit of peaks turns life into an extended gap-year?
Interviewer: Jules Evans
The Living With Feeling podcast comes from the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London
Check out our blog here:
https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/