Through an unusual love story between an old homosexual couple, who just decided to fight jealousy together, Baha Tevfik rewrote the rules of love in Love, Egoism (Aşk, Hodbinî): ‘Now I understand that real love starts after the age of 80, a type of love that is beyond lust, passion and jealousy...” His childhood friend and one of the first authors who wrote short stories about Darwinism, Ömer Seyfettin, told the story of a monkey afflicted with love sickness. When the poor monkey starves itself to death for its young womanizer owner, he concludes: ‘Animals tend to be affected by some irrational emotions deeply’. Pathological love was a popular subject as well as a burning problem in this era according to Nazım Şakir, the author of Pathological Love (Aşk-ı Marazî). One of the most cutting edge perspectives to love came from psychology whose authoritative voice in emotional matters was heard most clearly in Baha Tevfik’s studies, which this paper deals with primarily. Starting with the stigmatization of emotions at the medical school in the late 19th century by ‘materialist circles’ ending with Baha Tevfik’s use of ‘self control’ as a new method of cognitive psychology in 1910, this paper treats a selection of understudied psychological writings in relation to the late Ottoman intellectual currents. Hitherto we don’t know much about the changing discourses of what to feel and how to feel in the second constitutional era, except for the dominance of nationalist/war literature. How do we make sense of the rising interest in the rhetoric of self-control? What was ‘the main reason’ for ‘materialist circles’ to stigmatize emotions? Can we think of one particular dominant ideology coloring all intellectual productions? Baha Tevfik was an outcast who openly criticized nationalism and praised anarchism in the time of rising nationalism and state control. He was once called ‘a fantasizer with great potential but no purpose’ by Ömer Seyfettin as someone who had just found his life purpose in Turkish nationalism. This paper suggests looking closely to the process of defining, understanding and shaping ‘the Ottoman individual’ as part of the process of medicalizations of emotions and the liberal and -to some extent - individual centered spirit of the post 1908 period with a complex web of motivations and opinions. This complexity can be best seen in intellectual history of medicine wherein political and ideological dominant trends did not necessarily play primary role.