Euphoria

Euphoria is what anima feels like, which makes it a reading rather than a thing in its own right. Marsh puts the causal order carefully and against the prevailing account. Euphoria is the response to anima, and it is anima that triggers the emotion-controlling hormones rather than the hormones initiating the process, so scientists treating the body as a mechanist object confuse the message with the messenger when they take chemicals to be the cause. Regulating hormones therefore requires understanding what triggers them. The split between primary and secondary euphoria carries most of the framework's weight. Primary euphoria comes from connection to primary anima, requires conscious engagement and is produced rather than taken. Secondary euphoria comes from anima extracted from another source, which means somebody loses, and it is available without engagement. Both feel like euphoria from the inside, which is exactly the difficulty. The rush most people know on the achievement of a child, a student or a teammate is secondary euphoria, and so is what an audience takes from watching suffering. Marsh treats primary and secondary euphoria as the prime determinants of human behaviour and the root of all emotions, which is why so much of her account of cruelty runs through supply rather than through character. Ridicule and contempt directed at artists and entertainers has no explanation, she wrote, unless something is being obtained from people who access primary anima.

Euphoria in medicine and psychiatry is a symptom, an intense wellbeing that is expected in mania and in intoxication and treated as suspect elsewhere. Neuroscience accounts for it through dopamine and endogenous opioid signalling in reward pathways, which is precisely the account Marsh inverts. Positive psychology studies happiness and flow without using the word much, and philosophy has hedonic theories of wellbeing reaching back to Epicurus. Marsh's usage is unusually broad, covering ordinary joy rather than pathological elevation, and unusually causal, since making euphoria the perception of an external quantity rather than a brain state is a claim neuroscience would reject and one that carries most of her framework on its back.