A Note on Soft and Hard Qualities

“Soft” and “hard” are universal expressive qualities that inform all our experience. We sense their interplay in the margin of our awareness throughout our lifetime. Their varying dissociations and interpenetrations color and texture our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and actions. They permeate objects of concern at every level of our existence and are subtly woven into the atmosphere of subjectivity as such. Without them our psychophysical existence would be more bland and dimensionless.

This theme is given a distilled representation in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, the Tai-chi-tu. But even this most coherent symbol of polarity-in-unity is too geometric to do justice to the subtle, interpenetrating flow of these qualities in moment-to-moment living. To be sure, hard and soft often do set each other off. They may oppose or complement each other in rather clearly distinguishable ways: viz., the erect penis and adaptable vagina, hard-headedness/soft-heartedness (or vice-versa), and the like. But even (especially?) in sexual intercourse it becomes most difficult to know clearly where the softness and where the hardness, as they melt into and permeate one another, ineffably fluid. The rock gradually dissolves in the water, but the water can no longer be described simply as “soft.”

The qualities “soft” and “hard” are virtually omnipresent building blocks of personality. At each moment of development the self senses both itself, its capacities, functions, and objects in terms of soft and hard resonances. Its organizational capacities are partly steered by an implicit awareness of the soft-hard contours of sensed mental and physical realities. Blocks and distortions in the perception of these qualities and their shifting emotional meanings both reflect and perpetuate developmental deficiencies. Many individuals often are relatively insensitive to or misinterpret these vital cues of psychic movement.

The therapeutic task of helping patients to “experience their experience”