Sublime

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is considered the godfather of flow psychology.16 In the years between 1970 and 1990, while first a professor in the University of Chicago psychology department and later its chairman, Csikszentmihalyi conducted a worldwide inquiry into flow and optimal performance. It was through this research that he determined that flow

As psychologist and philosopher William James explained: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”