This article seeks philosophical and theoretical grounding for a clinical generalization, held by the author for more than 20 years, about the contextuality of emotional experience. Three characteristics of emotional experience are said to make its contextuality possible: (a) A developed emotional experience consists in a somatic-symbolic integration, (b) such integrations develop from early states in which emotional experience is exclusively bodily, and (c) this developmental process occurs within an intersubjective context characterized by varying degrees of attunement in a linguistic mode. It is claimed that it is the symbolic or linguistic component of emotional experience that is particularly context sensitive.