Molecules of Emotion

I first came across Pert’s work due to a fairly throwaway reference in Tom Myers’ manual of movement anatomy, Anatomy Trains. As the biological basis of emotion has long interested me, but I have not previously found anything of real value on the subject, and, undeterred by some negative reviews on Amazon (though overall it is well rated), I decided to take a look.

My first surprise was that the book had been written in 1997! That it took me fifteen years even to hear about it, despite an interest in the subject, is astonishing. That the original research goes back to the 1970’s is even more so.

The book has been criticized as too autobiographical with not enough hard science take-aways. It is true that it is autobiographical, and doubtless I also hoped to understand more of the subject at the end of it than I do, though I did learn quite a bit. However, it is also very well written and, except for the last couple of chapters which disappoint, as hard to put down as a good detective novel. So the entertainment value and the broader insight into how the neuropharmacological research community works more than compensated for this failing, and in fact I do not know if there was, at the time of writing, more to be said on the subject than is contained in the book. I do have a couple of more recent books on similar subjects lined up for reading, so check this space.

Where I would fault the book, however, is its tendancy to wild generalization, containing as it does a wide range of claims about body-mind interactions with no effort to discriminate between them. As such, it is more suggestive than authoritative. Certainly, Pert’s work lends weight to the validity claims of many non-pharmacological therapies. A picture emerges from the book as to why these therapies may be successful, and I have no doubt that broadly she is on the right lines. However, there are so many gaps in explaining how these bodymind linkages work that there is really nothing in the book that counts as an explanation. The only things on which she sheds real light are the action of psychedelics and a treatment for AIDS based on blocking the CCR5 receptor, used by the virus, with a molecule based on an endogenous ligand, which still today is struggling to gain official acceptance. The view that the brain is not merely a neurological but also an endocrine organ is doubtless, by now at least, well established, but even the links she shows between emotions and the immune system, which are persuasive at the conceptual level, are difficult to disentangle. Lastly, Pert’s meanderings into alternative and new age therapies tend more to discredit than buttress her thesis – and I say this as someone with plenty of sympathy for some of these therapies.

I did take from the book a real sense of the biochemical unity of life. It is extraordinary that the “molecules of emotion” are so widely distributed in nature, with analogues even in plants. Plus she quotes approvingly Reich and Lowen, which is courageous enough, though whether her research actually provides support for the idea of somatically stored emotions is not clear.

Although it is not intended, and does not function, as a textbook, Pert is a relatively unknown but important scientific pioneer and her work deserves to be read for this reason as well as for its broader sociological interest.