Séminaire - Emotional Landscapes Through Turkey’s Past and Present

 

In the early twentieth century, intellectuals across the globe grappled with profound existential inquiries regarding the nature of their emotional lives and the restoration of human dignity in an increasingly dehumanizing world. Within the context of the waning Ottoman Empire, while certain medical practitioners sought to pathologize emotions through a materialist lens, others drew upon religious and conservative paradigms to reclaim a sense of dignity rooted in emotional experience. The emergence of a new literary genre—psychological novels—profoundly influenced the youth of that era, igniting a compulsive drive to explore the underlying motivations behind emotions, passions, and desires, as articulated by Halide Edip. These deeply personal existential questions were inextricably linked to the political, economic, and social transformations occurring at the time. This paper aims to elucidate the burgeoning interest in modern psychology and emotional discourse in the late Ottoman Empire, contextualizing it within the broader political and economic landscape. It will provide an overview of the prevailing emotional narratives and the discourses surrounding them, which were significantly shaped by rising anxieties surrounding productivity and individualism amidst the nascent formation of a capitalist state in the late Ottoman context.