What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence is the quality that enables us to confront with patience, insight and imagination the many problems that we face in our affective relationship with ourselves and with others. The term may sound odd. We are used to referring to intelligence as a general quality, without unpicking a particular variety a person might possess – and therefore we do not tend to highlight the value of a distinctive sort of intelligence which currently does not enjoy the prestige it should. Every sort of intelligence signals an ability to navigate well around a particular set of challenges: mathematical, linguistic, technical, commercial…When we say that someone is clever but add that they have made a mess of their personal lives; or that they have acquired a fortune but are restless and sad or that they are powerful but intolerant and unimaginative, we are pointing to a deficit in what deserves to be called Emotional Intelligence.

In social life, we can feel the presence of Emotional Intelligence in a sensitivity to the moods of others and in a readiness to grasp the surprising things that may be going on for them beneath the surface. Emotional Intelligence recognizes a role for interpretation and knows that a fiery outburst might be a disguised plea for help, that a political rant may be provoked by hunger and that concealed within a forceful jolliness may be a sorrow that has been sentimentally disavowed. In relation to ourselves, Emotional Intelligence shows up in a skepticism around our emotions, especially those of love, desire, anger, envy, anxiety and professional ambition. The Emotionally Intelligent refuse to trust their first impulses or the wisdom of their feelings. They know that hatred may mask love, that anger may be a cover for sadness and that we are prone to huge and costly inaccuracies in whom we desire and what we seek. Emotional Intelligence is also what distinguishes those who are crushed by failure from those who know how to greet the troubles of existence with a melancholy and at points darkly humorous resilience. The Emotionally Intelligent appreciate the role of well-handled pessimism within the overall economy of a good life.

Emotional Intelligence isn’t an inborn talent. It’s the result of education, specifically in how to interpret ourselves, where our emotions arise from, how our childhoods influence us and how we might best navigate our fears and wishes. In the utopia, it would be routine to be taught Emotional Intelligence from the youngest age, before we had had the opportunity to make too many mistakes. It is because we have - until now - not taken Emotional Education seriously enough that our species has grown ever more technically adept while retaining the level of wisdom of our earliest days, with catastrophic results. We are evolved monkeys with nuclear weapons. It appears that the fate of civilization now depends on our capacity to master the mechanisms of Emotional Education before it is too late. Emotional Education extends far beyond formal education as we have conceived of it to date. Though it should ideally include specialized courses in every year of school or college, Emotional Education is more than something that should take place in classrooms at the hands of teachers and come to a halt around the age of twenty-one. 

The central vehicle for the transfer of Emotional Intelligence is culture, from its highest to its most popular level. Culture is the field that can ritualize and consistently promote the absorption of wisdom. The 'lessons' of culture might be embedded in a tragedy or a TV series, a pop song or a novel, a work of architecture or a YouTube film. We can envisage the entire apparatus of culture as a subtle mechanism designed to point us towards greater emotional intelligence. We will never progress as a species and will indeed grow into ever greater technologically armed menaces to ourselves, until we have accepted the challenges and opportunities of properly educating our selves in Emotional Intelligence. Our Technical Intelligence is great of course. It's led us to tame nature and conquer this planet. But a wiser, saner future for the race must depend on a capacity to master and then seductively teach the rudiments of Emotional Intelligence - while there is still time.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Heinz Hartmann Ego Psychology and the Mechanisms of Adaptation

  Heinz Hartmann devoted considerable time to the study of the Ego's Defenses and their functions from the perspective of the Adaptation. However, he seems not to have expanded on the defenses explained by Freud. The ego mobilizes defenses to protect itself from four types of dangers including conflicts among: ·          The id, ego, and super ego conflict. ·          Conflict in interpersonal relations. ·          Conflict in social norms. ·          Conflict in response to trauma. Mechanism of Adaptation: Heinz Hartmann described the "Mechanisms of Adaptation" that are more or less firmly established in the ego of an adult and always run to the same course unconsciously, just as Anna Freud describes the "Defense Mechanisms". These mechanisms are established in the ego to defend against un-described or disturbin...
Read more

Basic Concepts in Experimental Psychology

  Perception                Perception can be defined as our recognition and interpretation of sensory   information. Perception also includes how we respond to the information. We can think of perception as a process where we take in sensory information from our environment and use that information in order to interact with our environment. Perception allows us to take the sensory information in and make it into something meaningful. Cognition Cognition is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension. These processes include thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem-solving. These are higher-level functions of the brain and encompass language, imagination, perception, and planning. The earliest definition of cognition was presented in the first textbook on cognitive psychology published in 1967. According to Neisser, cognition is "those processes by which the sensory input i...
Read more

Assessment techniques by George Kelly

 The Interview Kelly’s primary assessment technique was the interview. As he put it, “If you don’t know what is going on in a person’s mind, ask him; he may tell you!” (1958, p. 330). Adopting what he called a “credulous attitude,” Kelly accepted the client’s words at face value, believing this was the best way to determine the person’s constructs. He also recognized that a person might deliberately lie or distort the reported version of events. However, what the client said must be respected, even if not always fully believed. Self-Characterization Sketches: Another technique used to assess a construct system is to have the person write a self characterization sketch. Kelly’s instructions to the client were as follows. “I want you to write a character sketch of [client’s name] just as if he were the principal character in a play. Write it as it might be written by a friend who knew him very intimately and very sympathetically, perhaps better than anyone ever really could know h...
Read more