Q: I am trying to find the source of the expression “emotional baggage,” but references seem few and far between. Any pointing in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
A: As far as we can tell, the expression first appeared in the early 20th century, though the noun “baggage” had been used earlier in a similar way with other modifiers.
The Oxford English Dictionary says “baggage” has been used figuratively since the late 19th century to mean “beliefs, knowledge, experiences, or habits conceived of as something one carries around; (in later use) esp. characteristics of this type which are considered undesirable or inappropriate in a new situation.”
The dictionary adds that the noun appears “frequently with modifying word, as cultural baggage, emotional baggage, intellectual baggage, etc.” The earliest OED citation has “intellectual” as the modifier:
“His instructors practically impelled him to temporarily divest himself of his intellectual baggage, but … what the student acquired as a child would rarely … be absolutely lost” (The Times, London, Jan. 9, 1886).
The earliest example we’ve found for “emotional baggage” is from The House of Defence (1906), a novel by E. F. Benson:
“But all the emotional baggage, that she had consistently thrown away all her life, seemed to her to be coming back now, returned to her by some dreadful dead-letter office.”
The OED’s only example for “emotional baggage” is from a much later book: “Babies … have not yet accumulated all the ‘emotional baggage’ which some adults carry around” (Teach Yourself Aromatherapy, 1996, by Denise Whichello Brown).
Although the expression is quite common now, we know of only one standard dictionary that has an entry for it.
Collins online defines it as “the feelings you have about your past and the things that have happened to you, which often have a negative effect on your behaviour and attitudes.”
However, several other standard dictionaries have definitions for “baggage” used in a similar sense, and include “emotional baggage” examples.
Dictionary.com, for instance, has this example: “neurotic conflicts that arise from struggling with too much emotional baggage.”
Since the late 20th century, the verb “unpack” has been used with “emotional baggage” in the sense of to clear up unresolved emotional issues.
Here’s an example: “5 Steps to Unpacking Your Emotional Baggage” (a headline from Psychology Today, Aug. 1, 2022).
In fact, the verb “unpack” has been used in similar constructions since the early 17th century.
The OED says “unpack” is used this way in “figurative and in figurative contexts, esp. with reference to the releasing of one’s emotions.”
The earliest Oxford citation is from the 1604 second quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this expanded passage, Hamlet laments that he hasn’t yet avenged the murder of his father:
Why what an Asse am I, this is most braue,
That I the sonne of a deere [father] murthered,
Prompted to my reuenge by heauen and hell,
Must like a whore vnpacke my hart with words.
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