The dramatisation of emotions in practice and theory: emotion work and emotion roles in a therapeutic community.

Abstract

It is suggested that feelings, both as inner sensation and as external display, should be viewed as socially constructed objects. Just as reality and the self are constructed and reconstructed through a process of social interaction, so feelings are understood through interpretive frames, influenced by biography and cultural meaning systems, as well as situational and interactional factors. Therapeutic organisations, typically focused on emotions. provide a setting for the analysis of these processes. In particular, the concept of catharsis demonstrates the culturally constituted roles guiding the experience and the display of feeling, and the role of others in the construction of emotion. Three therapy sessions in a holistic therapeutic community for schizophrenics are examined, in which catharsis was expected yet different emotion performances were given. By combining a cultural and dramaturgical perspective, a typology of emotion roles is developed, and the way in which feelings create and maintain the social order is demonstrated.