Feelings are a unique adaptive form of cognitive action that anchor, and are anchored in, the myriad ways humans perceive and evaluate their internal and external worlds: feelings are crucial factors that make pure objectivity a fiction. Feelings are inherently linked to specific social contexts and objects; thus, they must be defined in both intrapsychic and relational/empathic terms. Just as external stimuli provoke feelings from within, feelings also locate our external world, and in this sense bring all that is external to life. Here feelings are seen as continual phases of evaluations, as ways of being in and of the world.

Feelings are also orienting signals for basic organismic survival. At the same time, they help us create and maintain our value systems that go beyond such vital needs. Psychic conflict emerges from contradictory and rigidified aspects of unquestioned feeling-laden evaluations—“dead certainties.” Psychoanalytic therapy helps patients better attune to their feelings in order to reappraise and recreate