Commentary on “Becoming Aware of Feelings”

Being aware of feelings both in ourselves and in our patients is an essential aspect of the practice of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts have therefore acquired a huge clinical data base concerning the phenomenology of feelings. This accumulated experience of over 100 years of clinical observation has provided psychoanalysts with a sophisticated and complex knowledge of emotions and feelings. This has occurred despite the fact that psychoanalysis does not yet possess an adequate theory of affects. Psychoanalysts observe not only the emotional upheavals of transference but also an entire range of defenses against the emergence of feelings. These observations need to be grounded in a neurobiology of emotion and feeling, but what psychoanalysts can learn from cognitive science must also be consonant with their own hard-won clinical knowledge.

When I attempt to synthesize this clinical knowledge with the research findings of cognitive scientists, which Lane & Garfield have summarized, I am made uneasy and experience a feeling of conceptual dissonance. I recognize that there are basic assumptions, concerning the relation of consciousness to the unconscious mind, that separate me from cognitive science. This is illustrated in cognitive science's assumption of a “procedural” unconscious that is devoid of meaning. Furthermore, much of this target paper consists of reports of certain experiments of cognitive scientists that I believe have very little relevance for psychoanalysis. I see this as a problem of context—that feelings generated in the experimental procedures of cognitive science cannot easily be analogized to feelings that are generated within the psychoanalytic setup.