Early childhood emotional tones persist as abstract templates applied throughout life

Evidence

JF: Well, dreams are a very important component. I realised that it is not simply the image you present yourself with, in a dream, which is important – it’s also the emotional tone of the scene. You can see a cloud, but this will be accompanied by a sense of wonder or by a sense of dread, and it is that accompaniment which determines its meaning. … The employment of these images and tones are some of the things that everyone shares, aren’t they? They’re composed of bits of unique personal events and references and memories, such as longings that you might have had when you’re a child. … When your parents are away even for an hour it feel as though it goes on forever and you really deeply miss them – and the abstraction, the tone component of that just carries on through life. Gets applied to different situations. These longings – and all other emotional parts of the spectrum – join the repertoire of tones we carry and apply. Some moments last forever. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 434

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a striking theory of emotional memory: that feelings get abstracted from their original scenes and re-applied. Worth chasing how this maps onto actual psychology research on affective schemas or transference.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense and paradigm-shifting for anyone working with nostalgia, longing, or the persistence of childhood feeling-states — the claim that loss-of-parents becomes a deployable abstraction re-frames the whole hauntology project as working with inherited ‘tone-repertoires’.
• XREF: connects to: Childhood emotional tones get reapplied to adult situations — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 436; Lack of love in early childhood causes lifelong affective insecurity — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 278; Childhood experiences with parents can predict later political behavior — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 342 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Childhood emotional tones get reapplied to adult situations #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 436
• Phobic objects are overdetermined by infantile affect and resist rational correction #exemplifies (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 589
• Lack of love in early childhood causes lifelong affective insecurity #qualifies (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 278
• Childhood experiences with parents can predict later political behavior #exemplifies (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 342