Ambivalence: Law, Culture, and the Invention of a Modern Emotion

The project emerged from the discovery of a public lecture delivered in November of 1910 during which Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychologist, single-handedly transformed inchoate feelings of uncertainty into a culturally legible emotion: to equally and emphatically desire two different and incompatible objects would from that time on be termed ‘ambivalence’. Bleuler began his lecture with several case vignettes, the first of which involved institutionalised women who simultaneously wanted to stay and leave the institution. But his most dramatic example was that of “the mother who killed her child and is now laughing with her mouth in spite of her desperation.” She, he asserted, is experiencing “two conflicting but unrelated coexisting feelings; she is ambivalent.” Freud and other prominent psychologists quickly picked up the term, and it eventually spread through the Western world, divorced from its carceral and gendered context.

This research project draws on law and humanities methodologies to situate the modern emergence of ‘ambivalence’ in the context of the cultural, social, and juridical conditions that accompanied modernity. We feel ambivalent on a personal, highly subjective level: we want to go and want to stay; we both love and hate the same person. But ‘ambivalence’ was shaped by and emerged in a juridical context, a context that points to the formative role played by our social and political environments. While for many years it was felt to mark a weak, effeminate psyche, it has recently been rehabilitated. Some theorists posit that in response to modernity’s constraints, ambivalence became a form of resistance to the state, to categorisation, and to reductionism while contemporary psychologists have noted that ambivalence encourages us to be creative problem-solvers. On a meta-level, the story of ambivalence participates in the larger endeavour to denaturalise and depersonalise emotions, to shift the focus from biological determinism to social and cultural scripting. This research not only contributes to history of emotion scholarship but also suggests that ambivalence can help rather than hinder us as we attempt to make just decisions.