The emotions that cause disease from within when they are extreme or prolonged — the internal counterpart to the Six Pernicious Influences.
Overview
The Seven Emotions — joy (喜), anger (怒), worry (憂), pensiveness (思), grief (悲), fear (恐) and fright (驚) — are the classical internal causes (內因) of disease, set against the external climatic causes (外因) of the Six Pernicious Influences. Ordinary feeling is not pathological; an emotion becomes a cause of illness when it is extreme, sudden or long-lasting.
The idea starts in the Inner Canon as the Five Intents (五志), each paired with one of the five Zang organs through Five Phase correspondence. Su Wen ch. 5 (陰陽應象大論) gives: anger injures the Liver, joy injures the Heart, pensiveness injures the Spleen, worry injures the Lung, fear injures the Kidney. Su Wen ch. 39 (舉痛論) describes what each does to qi: anger makes qi rise, joy slackens it, grief dissipates it, fear makes it descend, fright throws it into disorder, and pensiveness knots it. (The Taisu recension reads worry for fright in that passage.)
Chen Yan's San Yin Ji Yi Bing Zheng Fang Lun (三因極一病證方論, 1174) organized all disease under three causes — internal, external, and neither — and named the seven emotions as the internal one. After the Song the term "Seven Emotions" largely replaced "Five Intents". In the late Ming, Zhang Jiebin grouped "emotional disorders" (情志病) as a category of their own in his Lei Jing (1624).
Sources: Huangdi Neijing Su Wen ch. 5 and ch. 39 (checked against the Wikisource text); Chen Yan, San Yin Ji Yi Bing Zheng Fang Lun (1174), fasc. 2; Hsiu-fen Chen, "Emotional Therapy and Talking Cures in Late Imperial China", in H. Chiang (ed.), Psychiatry and Chinese History (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), pp. 37–54.
Key Points
- Joy, anger, worry, pensiveness, grief, fear, fright
- Internal causes (內因), set against the Six Pernicious Influences (外因)
- Each emotion injures its paired organ when extreme (Su Wen ch. 5)
- Each moves qi in a characteristic way (Su Wen ch. 39)
- Formalized as seven by Chen Yan in 1174, expanding the Inner Canon's Five Intents
Clinical Significance
Emotional causes are read through their effect on qi and on the corresponding organ: anger with Liver qi rising, pensiveness with Spleen qi knotting, worry and grief with Lung qi being consumed, fear with Kidney qi sinking, and joy and fright with disturbance of the Heart and Shen.
Related Concepts
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