Emotions Are Not Inner States Projected Outward but World-Events That Pass Through Bodies Differently Configured by Culture

The title of this volume—In the Mind, in the Body, in the World—is not a list of three locations but a refusal to let emotions be confined to any one of them. Cairns and Virág’s introduction stakes a position that runs against both naïve universalism and strong cultural relativism: emotions are “not just events in the brain or body; they are also events in the world,” yet their worldly character does not make them infinitely plastic or culturally incommensurable. The volume’s core theoretical move draws on psychological constructionism and enactivism to argue that appraisal and bodily feeling are “constitutively interdependent”—that evaluating the world and responding emotionally to it are not sequential operations but a single organismic activity. This is not news to phenomenologists, but what makes the claim potent here is its deployment across two radically different medical and philosophical traditions. When the interior of the body is conceptualized differently—when the Greeks imagine unintelligent humors sloshing through cavities while the Chinese imagine viscera exercising intelligent agency—the very structure of emotional experience shifts. The volume thus demonstrates empirically what James Hillman argued mythologically: that “the psyche is not in me; I am in the psyche,” and that emotions are not private affects to be analyzed away but, as Hillman put it, “echoes of the world’s soul, presentations of qualities in the world informing our bodies and spirits how to be.” Cairns and Virág reach the same shore from the opposite direction—not through archetypal amplification but through meticulous philological and medical comparison.

The Chinese Concept of Qing Exposes What Western Emotion Theory Cannot See About Its Own Assumptions

One of the volume’s most consequential contributions lies in its sustained analysis of the classical Chinese term qing 情. As Cairns and Virág detail, qing possesses “a remarkably wide semantic range” encompassing emotions, feelings, passions, inborn dispositions, genuine reality, and “the true nature of things.” This is not mere polysemy; it reflects a conceptual architecture in which emotional responsiveness and ontological fidelity are not separate categories. To feel correctly is to perceive what is real. This stands in stark contrast to the Greek pathē tradition, where emotions are prototypically characterized by “phenomenological passivity”—things that happen to us, disturbances of normative cognitive functioning. The volume does not romanticize the Chinese position or demonize the Greek; rather, it uses each to illuminate the blind spots of the other. The Greek emphasis on passivity underwrites the entire Western therapeutic tradition from the Stoics through Freud: emotions are disruptions to be managed, sublimated, or eradicated. The Chinese emphasis on qing as disclosive of reality aligns more closely with what Curie Virág, in her earlier work The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy, identified as an ethical epistemology in which proper feeling is a mode of knowing. For readers of depth psychology, this resonates powerfully with Hillman’s insistence in The Myth of Analysis that “psychological creativity concerns the soul as opus”—that the point is not to rid oneself of feeling but to attend to what feeling reveals about the world’s claims on us.

Cross-Cultural Comparison as Practiced Here Is Not Relativism but a Method for Recovering What Each Tradition Has Repressed

The volume’s methodological architecture deserves attention as an achievement in its own right. Cairns and Virág paired each classicist with a sinologist, requiring sustained mutual engagement rather than parallel monologues. This format directly addresses what Geoffrey Lloyd, in his afterword, identifies as the perennial failure of comparative projects: “the two disciplines operate in parallel rather than learning from each other.” The pairings—Singer with Fraser on emotion therapy, Hsu with Kazantzidis on medical embodiment, Perkins with Graver on Mengzi and Stoic cultivation—generate genuine friction. Kazantzidis’s comparison of the Hippocratic Corpus and the Su wen is exemplary: he shows that the Hippocratics, despite their speculative audacity about the body’s interior, remain “acutely concerned with material stuff that is actually there,” while the Su wen “constantly invokes and deploys the theory of the invisible five agents.” Elisabeth Hsu’s contribution deepens this by demonstrating that the Chinese concept of gan ying (resonance) and Merleau-Ponty’s “bodily reciprocity” converge on the same phenomenological insight—that perception is always already affectively charged, that “the perceived thing ‘takes hold’ of the perceiver.” This is not a facile claim of identity across traditions; Hsu and Kazantzidis are careful to note that what counts as “common ground” must itself be interrogated. But the convergence is real, and it points toward what the volume’s introduction calls a “richer menu of conceptual resources” that no single tradition can generate alone.

The Body Is Not Biology’s Constant but Culture’s Variable—and This Changes Everything About How We Read Emotional Suffering

Perhaps the most radical implication of this volume for contemporary depth psychology lies in its insistence that “the body” is “not a biological and physiological constant but rather a cross-culturally variable domain that—within the limits of actual physiology—is itself substantially constructed by discourse, theory, folk-models, and metaphorical systems.” This means that when a Greek patient’s anger is understood as “a boiling of the blood or warm substance surrounding the heart” (Aristotle, De anima 1.1), and when a Chinese patient’s anger is understood as a “state of mind” of the liver exercising intelligent agency, these are not merely different descriptions of the same event but different constitutions of experience itself. The Hippocratic near-absence of psychotherapy—physicians treating the physical cause rather than addressing emotions directly—follows logically from a body whose organs lack mental faculties. The Chinese medical integration of emotional and somatic treatment follows from a body whose viscera are, in Hsu’s phrase, “subtle ‘matter-agencies.’” For anyone working in somatic psychology, trauma studies, or psychoanalytic traditions influenced by Winnicott’s psyche-soma or Reich’s character armor, this volume provides indispensable historical depth. It demonstrates that the contemporary effort to reunify mind and body in therapeutic practice is not recovering a lost unity but choosing among historically specific configurations—each of which forecloses certain possibilities while opening others. No other single volume maps these configurations with such comparative precision across two foundational civilizations, making it essential reading for anyone who suspects that the Western therapeutic tradition’s difficulties with the body are not accidental but structural.