About Emotional Capitalism

I recently discovered the author and psychiatrist Marian Rojas Estapé, of Spanish origin and the daughter of the renowned psychiatrist Enrique Rojas. Encuentra tu persona vitamina is her third book, published in 2021. A graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at the prestigious University of Navarra in Pamplona (Spain), the author currently works at the Spanish Institute for Psychiatric Research in Madrid.

In the aforementioned work, the author provides a complex picture of the dynamics of the human psyche in the current context, in a society of constant movement. She addresses the human being of the 21st century and the challenges they face at the individual or collective mental level. The book discusses traumas and their resolution for the recalibration of energies, emphasizing the importance of cleaning and ventilating the human psyche for a Western society where mental health has become a necessity, not just a normality.

In the third chapter of the book, the author explores a very contemporary theme: the relationship between pleasure and love, at both the collective and individual mental levels. Drawing from decades of experience as a psychiatrist, she precisely points out that for new generations, sex has become a topic about which public judgments are made without any filters. Sex has completely left the realm of intimacy and privacy, and young people talk openly about it.

On the other hand, as a compensation in this dynamic, the theme of love and falling in love has moved to the other side of the barrier, into the taboo zone. Young people find it difficult to address this subject and have a hard time accepting relationships that arise from genuine feelings and emotional connections with another person.

The immediate effect: a decline in long-term relationships, marriages, and consequently, demographic changes. The marriages of the past have become obsolete because forming an emotional bond and falling in love with someone involves a risk: people are „forced” to become vulnerable, to remove their masks, and to enter into a relationship with another person who may be different from themselves. The author suggests that these are merely the effects of past wounds—abuses, aggressions, severe absences—that later influence the emotional and sexual lives of future adults.

Similarly, sociologist Eva Illouz, in her book Intimidades congeladas. Las emociones en el capitalismo (Frozen Intimacies. Emotions in Capitalism), discusses a very interesting concept, explaining that the final stage of capitalism is Emotional Capitalism. An individualistic society, like the one we live in today, focused on satisfying individual needs and selfish fulfillment, is a society that isolates its heart and emotions. In the same vein, French philosopher Roland Barthes, as early as 1977, predicted that the society of the future would easily discuss sexual issues but would struggle to address emotional, affective, and sentimental issues.

Finally, in the article The loneliness myth: what our shared stories of feeling alone reveal about why you can’t “fix” this very human experience, published in July 2024 on the online portal The Conversation, psychologist James Hillman expresses his concerns about what today might be called the „loneliness-as-pathology” perspective. He admits that „solutions” such as Prozac or even socializing in „recovery groups” may reflect the idea that loneliness should be „abolished.”

It’s interesting to observe how this entire dynamic forms a closed loop: it starts with loneliness and ends up in another lonely place. The way out of this cycle can only be decided by us.

Sources

Marian ROJAS ESTAPÉ, Encuentra tu persona vitamina, ESPASA, Barcelona 2024.

Paul KEAVENY, The loneliness myth: what our shared stories of feeling alone reveal about why you can’t “fix” this very human experience, published on The Conversation on July 2, 2024.