Christine mentions in her most recent posting, "sometimes, 'improving' a mood by not allowing a 'bad mood' to exist doesn't work. Sometimes you just need to feel whatever it is you're feeling...People are able to feel a terrible, beautiful, wide range of emotion, so why should we try to pretend otherwise?"
Well, Christine, I'm wholly in agreement with you on this one. When I'm sad, I don't want to listen to a song or watch a movie with a bunch of happy people making jokes; I want to hear an angry song or see a sappy movie with situations I can relate to my own situation, and then cry or scream or do whatever I must in order to experience what I'm feeling, get over it, and move on. Likewise, I tend to stay away from sad art forms when I'm happy; because, it is true, art has the power to completely shift our emotions and take us from a state of utter ecstasy to outright unrest.
As Wartenberg mentions when explaining Sigmund Freud's philosophy, "Feeling a deep need to express unconscious thoughts and emotions, artists create works that...are really the fulfillment of concealed wishes." Freud points out that as humans in such a conservative society, we are always taught and pushed to hold in our thoughts and emotions, repressing those which would, in typical society, be considered humiliating or embarrassing. With art, however, with "the essential ars poetica," we are able to find a place of comfort where we can freely reveal our "innermost secrets," where we can express ourselves (or at least see others express the emotions/thoughts we ourselves are feeling/thinking) "without reproach or shame."
So, my question to all of you, is it better to repress our emotions for the sake of societal standards, or should we express ourselves freely through the medium of art?
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