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Fromm-Reichmann9 in her discussion of the affective experience of tenderness, notes that this feeling is frequently subject to resistance during the course of psychotherapy. Fromm-Reichmann speaks of a reluctance to speak about tender, asexually loving aspects of relationships. She offers in explanation of this phenomenon a cultural hypothesis and asserts that Western civilization inculcates such avoidances of feelings of tenderness.
Freud's exposition of the feeling of tenderness formulates a rather common lack of integration of this feeling and sensual feelings. Due to the anxieties of the Oedipal situation, the parental love object ceases to be regarded as a target for erotic impulses and becomes linked to aim inhibited erotic feelings such as the feeling of tenderness. The consequent split between the image of the tender asexual parent and the sensual nonparental object continues to color later adult relationships transferentially. In terms of this formulation, there would develop an avoidance of associating tender feelings toward objects toward which frank erotic interest existed.
Implied in the formulation of tenderness as aim-inhibited sensuality toward parental objects are several further determinants of the avoidance of tenderness. Since such aim inhibition results from positive as well as negative Oedipal wishes, tenderness possesses a homosexual as well as a heterosexual component. The diffuseness and contentlessness of feelings of tenderness resulting from inhibition of sexual aim may make it quite an ambivalent experience regarding its unconscious sexual aim. All feelings of tenderness may thus come to be avoided on the ground that homosexual and heterosexual wishes are experienced as fused.