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To be sensitive to the subjective experience of others and of ourselves requires our increased sensitivity to the range of feeling states. We tend to be simplistic and think only of the major, or what may be called the massive, states of feeling, such as depression, despair, resentment, anger, rage. Most of these the patient can tell us about, can verbalize. But at times a far wider range of feeling states is present than we psychoanalysts and psychologists are prone to consider. Our compass of emotion tends to include love, hate, resentment, ambivalence, anger/rage, depression/despair/grief, elation/mania, anxiety, shame, and guilt. This list omits many more terms, often with nuances that we are tempted to homogenize away, thus closing off our awareness of the related experience. Some closing off of exploration unfortunately lies at our door. We need the poet’s range!
—Rose Spiegel*
ROSE SPIEGEL’S STATEMENT issues a challenge to us as analysts. We must become attuned to the subtle shadings of emotional experiences in ourselves and our patients. Awareness of major shifts is insufficient. Like the poet who can capture fine gradations of meaning in apt phrases, we must be able to catch hold of minute degrees of our own and others’ emotions just as they make their appearance, so that we may search for adequate words to embody them. We sense the subtle appearance of a feeling in ourselves or our patients, and we must apprehend—later, perhaps, comprehend—its quality. Well-chosen words may help us move from apprehension to comprehension, but the whole process depends on that initial noticing of a subtle emotional experience.
Think of how many ways noticing minor emotional shifts serves us as analysts. Awareness of a slight boredom in ourselves, for example, can alert us to examine our countertransference. Further, Sullivan (1953,