Empathic emotional linkage involves adequate stimulation of feelings in the infant by the mother. This is of significance in terms of patterns of behavior in the infant, problems of personality development, and later, adult personality disturbances including chronic disturbances of affect and obscure emotional reactions in intensive psychotherapy. Anxiety, disgust, and rage are reactions that can be unwittingly evoked between mother and child; this can result in impairment of the development of the need for tenderness. As situations involving the need for tenderness occur in adult life, the orginal dissociated affects of anxiety, rage, or disgust may recur.