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What Our Tears Are Trying to Tell Us

Man welling up

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like.
—after Goethe

In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.

‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.

Crocodile Tears

Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.

What I Remember from Med School

Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.

Existential Tears

When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.

Social Tears

Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.

Healthy Tears

In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.

Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.

Crying as a Way of Knowing

Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.

Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.

Thirty years, gone like that.

We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?

What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.

We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.

Because without us, how on earth will they cope?

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A Psychiatrist’s Three-Step Test for Self-Deception

Woman looking into mirror.
Can you trust what you see?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Some time after the publication of Hide and Seek, I received a letter from a reader, asking:

Are common, ordinary things like seeing the bright side, a silver lining, or an opportunity in misfortune just feeble rationalisations to help us live in a comfortable illusion? Your example about ‘sweet lemons’, a rejected love interest explained away as a blessing in disguise doesn’t feel to me as an illusory or self-deceptive belief. If a cancer patient is glad that they can respect life more fully after getting sick, surely they’re not just dwelling in self-deception and rationalising away things, clinging to some mistaken belief.

Could you clear things up a little about the murky world of self-deception? It’s true that someone rejected for a job opening might say that they’re ‘keeping doors open’, that they got ‘life experience’ or that setbacks are a part of life, and this would allow them to feel better, but I’ve never considered this to be some sort of self-deception.

I replied: 

That’s a very good question. How do we know when we’re deceiving ourselves, rather than learning or growing from our experiences, or just making the best out of a bad situation? By its very nature, self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth, or the external, objective truth.

That a belief comforts us does not make it false; that it pains us does not make it true. What matters is whether we arrived at the belief because it fits the facts, or because we need the facts to fit the belief.

To establish the direction of fit between your beliefs and the world, here are three tests you can apply.

1. Feel It

First, trust your intuition, and ask yourself: ‘What does it feel like to react in the way that I’m reacting?’ Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Am I taking the welfare of others into consideration, or is it just all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or am I left feeling small, anxious, and a little ashamed?

2. Test It

Try to falsify the belief—that is, to prove yourself wrong. Self-deception doesn’t ‘add up’ in the grand scheme and can often be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the belief or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Ask others for their opinion. If they challenge or disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The nature of your reaction and its congruity can speak volumes about the character of your motives.

3. Project It

Finally, project the belief into the future and consider where it is likely to lead. Truth is constructive and adaptive, whereas lies are destructive or self-defeating. So how useful is the thought or reaction going to be for you? Are you just covering up an irrational fear to get by, or creating a solid foundation for the future? Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line?

Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make you free?

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In Defence of the Cinderella Specialty

A Mazarine blue butterly
Psychiatry derives from the Greek psyche (butterfly or soul) and iatros (healing), and means ‘healing of the soul’. In Greek myth, Psyche’s lover was none other than Eros.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In my experience, most medical students enjoy learning about mental illness and talking to mentally ill people, who often have a refreshing knack for saying things exactly how they are. In a fit of inspiration, some students—particularly the more intelligent, creative, or quirky ones—confide that psychiatry is the only specialty that gives them the time and material to think about themselves, other people, and life in general.

They also like the lifestyle (in the UK): an hour for each patient, ‘special interest’ days, protected time for teaching, light on calls from home, and guaranteed career progression. In medicine they might triage yet another anonymous case of asthma, chest pain, or pulmonary oedema. In surgery they might do knee replacement upon knee replacement, up until the day they retire or collapse. But in psychiatry there can be no factory line, no standard procedure, and no mindless protocol: each patient is unique, and each patient has something unique to return to the psychiatrist.

I often come across those same students again, months or sometimes years later. After the smiles and the niceties, it transpires that they are no longer so interested in psychiatry. So what happened?

The students are never too sure, but I think I have an idea.

When I was a medical student in London, an American firm offered me a highly paid job as a strategy consultant in their Paris office, opposite the British embassy and the Elysée Palace. So I gladly left medicine and the many inconveniences of working in (and increasingly ‘for’) the National Health Service.

I had a great time in Paris, but the job itself turned out to be more about dealing with personality disorders than about having brilliant ideas. I quit after six months and freelanced as an English tutor to high-flying executives, bankers, venture capitalists, and that sort.

As my clients already spoke working English and merely wanted to improve their fluency, all I had to do was to make conversation with them. My lessons often turned into something akin to psychotherapy, as I realised that I could make them open their hearts and minds simply by listening to them. Although they seemed to have everything in life, they were deeply unhappy, and had rarely stopped to ask themselves why.

I wanted to find out why, so I decided to return to the UK, do my house jobs (internships), and specialise in psychiatry. I had always been far too ‘ambitious’ to consider psychiatry, but by then it had become abundantly clear that I didn’t want to pursue a career that didn’t allow me to think and feel, and to relate to others and to the world in a genuine and meaningful way. There are not many such jobs, but psychiatry—along with general practice, teaching, academia, and the clergy—is certainly one of them, and even, arguably, their archetypal form.

In short, I wanted to get paid to talk to people, read books, and study life—and it felt like robbery.

The following year while going about my house jobs I put up with all sorts of abuse from my colleagues in medicine and surgery. One of the other house officers (interns), by then a good buddy, took me aside one day and said with an alcoholic mixture of concern and disdain: ‘Why do you want to go into psychiatry? You’re a good doctor. Can’t you see you’re wasting your talents?’

It became very clear, first, that the stigma that people with a mental disorder are made to feel also extends to the doctors who look after them; and, second, that this stigma emanates most strongly from the medical profession itself, mired as it is in middle-class preoccupations and prejudices and, as a whole, far too grounded in neurosis not to be terrified of psychosis.

Of course, it is simply not true that psychiatry is ‘a waste of talent’. The term ‘psychiatry’ was first used in 1808, in a paper by Johann Christian Reil. Reil argued for the urgent creation of a medical specialty to be called ‘psychiatry’, and contended that only the cream of physicians would have the qualities required to join it. Psychiatrists needed to have not only an understanding of the body, but also proper learning and culture.

Indeed, a psychiatrist can change a person’s entire outlook with a single sentence, so long as he can find the right words at the right time. No protocols, no high-tech equipment or expensive drugs, no pain or side-effects, and no complications or follow-up.

Now that is talent, and one so great that I can only ever aim at it. And each time I fail, I always have medicine to fall back upon.

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A History of the Orgy

Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.
Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why orgies are no longer what they were.

Civilisation depends upon restraint. We are expected to play our allotted roles, respect boundaries, control our appetites, and maintain a coherent sense of self. Yet, across cultures and throughout history, people have sought occasions on which to let it all go: to drink, dance, disguise themselves, and disappear into the crowd. The Ancient Greeks personified this tendency towards dissolution in Dionysus, and in the nineteenth century Nietzsche referred to it as the Dionysian. But the impulse is older even than Dionysus—and, of course, far from dead.

Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow contains the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind. Displeased with the mounting rebelliousness of mankind, the ageing Sun God Ra sends his daughter Hathor to wreak revenge. Hathor takes the form of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet and rampages up and down the Valley of the Nile, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the brink of extinction, Ra takes pity, and floods the fields with beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the beer for blood, Sekhmet drinks to intoxication and falls asleep—to arise once again in the benign form of Hathor, goddess of joy, love, and fertility.

To commemorate this episode, the Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness in mid-August, to coincide with the swelling of the Nile. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums—mirroring the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, which had an important religious dimension and took place in and around temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.

Ancient Greece

The word ‘orgy’, which derives, ultimately, from the Greek orgion (‘sacred rite’), entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘a licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between multiple people. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of Ancient Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed, above all, at ecstatic union with the divine. The modern sense of ‘orgy’ retains only the licence, without the transcendence.

Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus—and most fervently venerated around the time of the vernal equinox.

Let me paint you a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and… well, not much else. Closing the rear is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity.

Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze has been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, standing in for the god, are hunted down, torn apart with bare hands, and eaten raw with the blood still warm and dripping.

This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognises it as a primal and universal force:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.

By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites, the orgy kept it in check, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it sublimed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.

The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break: like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.

Ancient Rome

The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome and beyond. In 186 BCE, the Senate severely restricted it through the Senatorial Decree concerning the Bacchanalia (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus). According to the historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many choosing instead to commit suicide.

Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually morphed into the tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as to fold into him. As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilise the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. This sort of ‘depravity’ also featured in other religious festivals such as the Lupercalia, which included naked noblemen coursing through the streets and whipping willing noblewomen with strips of goatskin.

The reign of Constantius II (337–361 CE) marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the now Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the tumult of the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to do away with it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, to this day, involves reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.

But one doesn’t have to wait for Carnival to have an orgy. In the summer of 2017, as reported in the Italian press, the police broke up a drug-fuelled gay orgy at the Vatican—the problem from the police’s perspective being more with the drugs than with the sex.

Mediaeval Europe

May Day celebrations across Europe and North America have their origins in the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In mediaeval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields for wanton sex, avowedly to ‘fertilise the land’.

In the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the puritan Philip Stubbs inveighed against these practices:

What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slobbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in the dances … I have heard it creditably reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.

In 1644, the Puritans outlawed Maypoles in England, with the Long Parliament’s ordinance damning them as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’.

Ecstasy

‘Ecstasy’ [ex stasis] literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein himself called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and all true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’.

More than ever before, modern society emphasises the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, may no longer even recognise the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.

Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world.

Man, said Balzac, dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.

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Synonyms, or Opposites?

Socrates at his trial
Socrates: humble, but not always modest.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If you are brilliant and know that you are brilliant, is it arrogant to say so? And if you pretend that you are not, is that humility—or merely modesty?

‘Modesty’ and ‘humility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are actually very different concepts.

‘Modesty’ derives from the Latin modus, ‘measure’ or ‘manner’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Uriah Heep is characterised by his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in an attempt to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and moral. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

Indeed, modesty can sometimes be a subtle form of vanity or advantage-seeking. By conspicuously understating some trait or achievement, we may be inviting others to contradict and praise us, or to like us better. The ego has not disappeared; it has merely become more cunning.

‘Humility’, like ‘humiliation’, derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Unlike mere modesty, true humility derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a spore on a crumb of cheese.

Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself superior or inferior to another, nor does it concern itself with what other specks of dust might or might not think.

Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself.

In sum, to be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or small, and attack us in turn.

Because genuinely humble people often have a great deal to be modest about, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty, or simply give up the game.

Humble people do not, as is often thought, have a low opinion of themselves. Instead, they have an accurate opinion of themselves, and, probably, of us as well. They neither elevate nor diminish themselves, but seek to see themselves and everything else for what they truly are. Erasmus (d. 1536) could not have put it more pithily when he said, ‘Humility is truth.’

If humility is truth, modesty is often a lie—so that the two can sometimes come into conflict. Modesty may require us to gloss over the truth to spare the feelings of others; humility, on the other hand, may demand that we speak the truth. Whereas Uriah Heep was modest without being humble, Socrates was humble without always being modest.

The Case of Socrates

In 399 BCE, at the age of seventy, Socrates was indicted for impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’.

At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates addressed the jurors, saying:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chaerephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the priestess of Apollo replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ 

Was Socrates lacking in humility before the jurors? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he deliberately put on a brazen display because he wanted to die, because he understood that by dying a martyr his teachings would be preserved for posterity.

Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant.

The more arrogant someone is, the more modesty they require from others.

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