DISSMELL

 “Dissmell”

If we go through life not thinking much about our emotions, which is the ax I am continuingly grinding, then it is for certain we do not think about our five senses much. Our senses are our sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. These are the portals by which we experience everything.  Each is a type of “feeling” that we are not meant to notice so much as they are to seamlessly integrate us into our every moment. Stimuli enter through these portals. We know of the famous that lack in significant ways some of their senses but have yet succeeded. One of the most famous is Helen Keller. Born a normal infant  she lost both sight and hearing at the age of 19 months  and so form that age she could only know the world through touch, taste and smell.

Silvan Tomkins teaches us that we become “conscious” of something only when we first “feel” something about it. And by “feel” he means something “emotional.”  But yet we “feel” through our senses. All senses share a type of feeling in that they are based on nerve endings reaching out and interpreting the world. So taste is a type of feeling as is smell but then we have to “feel” something about those feelings. We can be interested in a touch, or fearful of it or disgusted by it, so too a smell.

All this is by way of introducing you, for the first time, or yet again, to “feeling” as was discovered by Silvan Tomkins.  That feeling he calls “innate” or  a “born with” emotional network he  first observed in  his newborn son and then by studying the anatomy of the human face in detail and taking thousands of pictures and video taping thousands of hours of the face.  In this process he observed what no one else seemed to have observed and that was a new expression and that was the head drawn back and the upper lip drawn symmetrically curled up as we see here which he called “dissmell:”

                                                                           From "Shame and Pride," Nathanson p.123

  

Originally, along with Paul Ekman, Tomkins thought “contempt” covered disgust and dismell but then decided “dismell” was a unique entity.

Disgust and dissmell then go hand and hand and would seem to have their origins deep in the reptilian brain. It is well known that we are naturally protected from most poisonous food due to our sense of smell and of course taste and smell do a great job of saving us not only form other poisonous food but from  rotten and spoiled food.

This all sounds pretty benign and in fact efficient, useful and beneficial and  is. There is a big downside, however, as the system is to tell us what is  “disgusting” and “dismelling”  as time went along we started to generalize, abstract and project into the future and anticipate what would be dismelling and disgusting to us and thus be began to make errors. This is the case with all of our emotions. It is the case with say, anger; we can start to get angry at all kinds of things that in the end make no sense. With “dismesll” and “disgust” it is a bit more complicated and interwoven with our senses. Focusing on the sense of smell and emotion of “dismell” we are  reminded that we have, then, the sense of smell and that to experience that  we have to “feel” some emotion about it but one of our emotions is directly related to the sense of smell and that is “dismell”, “to get away form a smell.” We don’t have an emotion related to “to get away form” touch or to get away from seeing something. Of course all of these “to get away form” would come under “disgust” or “fear” maybe “what I see is disgusting.” But “dismell” is directly related to “smell” and “disgust” is directly related to taste when we are talking about food. 

To try and be clear I am simply saying “dissemll” and “disgust” would seem to have a special place in our emotional network as they are specially anchored having  roots not only in our senses but also in our hunger drive and yet having their own unique facial expression.

All emotion, however, in humans, has been generalized in “thought” we can apply all emotion to anything or anyone.  We can, that is, treat another person “as if they smell bad’” or "taste bad." We can also have come to have thought of ourselves as smelling bad. This is a quite common problem in general medicine. People become convinced that they smell bad. There are, of course, real physical problems that do cause body odor but then there are situations where there is no problem other than the patient convincing themselves that they have an odor.

All of this becomes much more complicated as we are so unawares of the concept of “shame.” It being this vague and poorly understood concept that we are just now becoming articulate about. But until which time that we are better at recognizing shame and even when we do it will just be a beginning to untangle the linkage that builds up among shame, dissmell and disgust.

Brian Lynch

Brian Lynch
Shame and Humiliation

http://www.squidoo.com/thinking-feeling-doing (Summary of Principles used in these posts.)

http://www.brianlynchmd.com

Tomkins, Silvan S.: Affect Imagery Consciousness NY: SPringer Publishing Company, 1963.

Shame and Pride : Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self by Donald L. Nathanson Paperback (March 1994)