Sensitivity to Feelings

For the past 10 years I have specialized in marital and sex therapy. Bringing the insights of psychoanalysis to the problems presented by these patients has helped enormously, even with the majority of patients who are treated nonanalytically. Couple therapy, providing rapid feedback of perceptions, causes me to reflect on the phenomena of awareness and sensitivity to feelings in dyadic transactions.

As analysts, we know that people have different capacities for sensitivity to their own feelings. Emotional isolation is not only characteristic of the obsessional, but seems to be extremely common in adolescence, where the emergence of affect is often associated with childhood trauma. Although the ontogenesis of affect, the degree of consciousness permitted, the freedom to express affect, and the trust in feelings as a guide to behavior are complex facets of personality development, it is safe to say that there is a spectrum with regard to awareness of one's own feelings. Sensitivity to one's own feelings, however, is not a constant; it changes with time, circumstances, the other people with whom one is interacting, etc. Nevertheless, there is still a baseline capacity which differs from person to person.

There are four aspects of dyadic transactions, all equally important: (1) sensitivity to one's own feelings; (2) sensitivity to the other person in the dyad; (3) sensitivity to one's own feelings in response to the behavior or words of the other person; (4) sensitivity to the impact of one's own works or behavior on the other person. Of these four (2) is termed empathy, and (3) “recipathy,” a term used by Henry Murray, the famed Harvard psychologist. As far as I know, we have no shorthand term for (1), unless it might be “self-awareness,” nor for (4). I would like to call the latter “impact-awareness.”

Reams have been written about empathy and its importance in interviewing and therapy. Its role in the effectiveness of psychotherapy is still controversial, but almost eve