The “Lilt” Feeling

This paper describes a new feeling, lilt, which emerges in some patients who undergo psychoanalysis. First we discuss the timing of occurrence of the lilt feeling. Then we describe its characteristics. Next we compare the lilt feeling with known human affects in psychoanalysis, and finally we discuss the utility of this new feeling.

In the course of psychoanalysis, patients often begin to experience themselves differently from the way they did when they started. This occurs in the final phases of a successful psychoanalysis. In the beginning of therapy, feelings of depression, anger, or anxiety prevail. As psychoanalysis progresses and as the patient becomes curious about unconscious conflicts, the work leads to the resolution of these conflicts. This is commonly called the middle phase of treatment. Then in the final phases of the process, the conflicts are reworked or worked through and the patient leaves. Often it can be observed that the patient has developed or individuated beyond his or her original goal of symptom relief and the resolution of one or more of the basic conflicts. The patient is decidedly a different person than when he or she began.

There is a subjective feeling that arises as an outgrowth of the work, and that feeling now becomes a focus of attention, discussion, and pursuit. It approaches the feelings of pleasure or comfort. When the patient discusses this phenomenon, it becomes clear that he is experiencing a refined, quite diminutive feeling that is nonconventional and not easily expressed in words. While it is close to pleasure and comfort, it is really something new in his experience. The little feeling is not as intense as pleasure and not as peaceful as comfort. Rather, it can be described as a very soft, cool, and uplifting affect that can occupy a good deal of his waking life experience. In fact, one of the problems that patients have in describing this feeling is that there is no one word that accurately portrays what it really is. He