The full world of emotions

Les Todres, Ph.D., C.Psychol

Professor of Qualitative Research and Psychotherapy
Centre for Qualitative Research
Bournemouth University

The problem of putting emotions in a box

There have been a number of existential-phenomenological theories of emotional
experience including that of Heidegger, Sartre and Scheler.

These approaches have two central concerns in common:

• That any understanding of emotional experience needs to reflect the intimate

interconnections between emotion, gesture, symbol, expression, situation,
social context, bodily sensation, temporality, personal identity, and all of the
other terms by which we have packaged and categorised the seamlessness of
Being-in-the-world. A phenomenological epistemology would like to
remember that there is nothing essentially bounded about the ways we have
conventionally labelled and split up experiences (such as a category like
‘emotion’) ; that emotion is never ‘alone’ and that the understanding of
emotion cannot be abstracted from its total seamless context.
• That an understanding of human emotional experience is complex. Both
psychological development and cultural modification require models of
understanding emotional experience that are multi-layered. Such a notion of
multi-layered experience sets up a ‘dynamic’ dimension to human
emotionality: how these various levels of experience and action, from
primitive ‘impulses’ to wide and subtle feelings, affect and influence one
another.

Eugene Gendlin’s levels of emotional complexity

These two concerns have been taken forward by Eugene Gendlin in interesting and
distinctive ways. Here I draw mainly on a book chapter entitled ‘A Phenomenology of
Emotions: Anger’ (Gendlin, 1973), which was one of his earliest attempts to articulate
his theory of emotions, and have appeared to have stood the test of time throughout
his many later publications.

Gendlin distinguishes between three kinds of emotionally-relevant experiences in

human beings: routine emotions, situational emotions and felt meaning. All of these
three levels are interactive and functional, but each is wider and more complex than
the former.

Before we consider these levels, let us look at how Gendlin sees all emotionally-
relevant experiences. The way the body lives as an experiencing organism is crucial in
providing a greater ‘set’ of organising principles for the ‘sub-sets’ of particular
experiences. He shows, by using many examples, how the lived body is both
functional and interactive. So for example, in hunger, there is an implication of food
with all its possible interactions (such as digestive readiness, behavioural seeking, and

1
elaborated social routines). The implication of these interactions are also functional in
that they are purposive, moving toward the resolution of a ‘wanted’ outcome. In a
sense, this interactive functionality of the lived body is future oriented (moving
forward in a motivated way) and interactively open (in the world of relations outside
itself). Now, as a sub-set of bodily experience, emotionally-relevant experiences are
also functional and interactive. Anger as a ‘readiness-to-fight’ or as a readiness to
overcome a barrier, is full of intention (functionality) and perception of a fight-needed
situation (interaction). Such emotionally-relevant experience cannot be understood
without understanding such functionality and interaction. Whether it is logical or not
from an external perspective is a separate matter.

And here we come to three levels of emotionally-relevant experience in humans:

routine emotions, situational emotions, and felt meaning.

Level one - Routine emotions

There is a ‘generalised’ or ‘routinized’ part of anger that, in a sense is ‘wired’ into us

or ‘handed down’. In anger, for example, this ‘explosive’ felt quality comes to us in
many different situations and is very similar, in essence, between us. So anger, at this
level has much ‘sameness’ about it in the way that it implies a narrow set of physical
fight-readying chemicals and behaviour. This level of emotionality is closer to a
universally patterned relational structure.

Level two - Situational emotions

We have an inner life. To quote Gendlin (1973) : “We can take the situation which
rouses our fight-readying home with us, and become fight-ready even when the
opponent and context aren’t present.” p. 376. We thus ‘carry’ a historical sense of
various situations around with us as background contexts to new situations. Also, as
our situations differ in different cultures, so do our emotions. Gendlin refers to an
example of the American anthropologist, Geertz, who did not recognise a kind of
feeling that Javanese felt in the presence of a spiritual saint (the closest Geertz could
come to the word was ‘awe’ and ‘respect’, but this wasn’t quite right either). So,
situational emotions can build a lot of complexity and subtlety into them. They imply
particular kinds of personal and cultural history and meanings, and are the
culmination of a developmental sequence of modifications to both shared and bodily-
feeling life. As humans, we have developed many words that refer to a great diversity
of subtle emotional qualities beyond the ‘general’ emotions of fear, anger, and sexual
and parent-child love. Even coming to so called ‘romantic love’, we have elaborated
and experienced many distinctions. So the complexity of situational emotions in
human history have ‘emerged’ and we have developed a more complex vocabulary to
attempt to do justice to the subtlety of these emergent experiences --- such as a ‘sense
of poignancy’, a ‘bitter-sweet feeling’ or ‘an ironic humorous feeling’. Often, we
don’t have words for many of these and may say “ I feel as if I were…” Such
complexity is multi-layered and may move beyond the so-called clarity of one thing
or another, either fear of anger. As poets understand, human existence is full of
‘mixing’, and emotional consciousness is wide enough to allow these emergent, and
even novel, emotional qualities to come.

2
Level three - Felt meaning

Beyond routine emotions and situational emotions, Gendlin sees a further, more
complex, emotionally-relevant experience that human beings have developed. This is
the capacity to broaden one’s attention to notice the felt qualities of a whole situation
that contextualises a series of specific situational emotions or feelings of routine
emotionality. Here, attention is widened to find a ‘felt’ quality to ‘what we are in’.
Implicit to this is that a felt quality can form that tells us more about the
relational/functional background that is ‘before’ and ‘larger than’ the delineation of
specific situational emotions. This felt background can be directly sensed as a quality
in itself, and then reflected upon, to differentiate a number of situational emotions. as
well as routine emotions, that may interact and change from one to another. One is
then not focused on a particular emotion, but focused on a broader, felt quality that
encompasses a number of emotionally-relevant experiences and situations. Such a
focus brings a more fluid experience. This dimension emphasises how our
experiences are holistic and interrelated. Such interrelated and holistic dimensions can
themselves have felt qualities larger and more complex than particular routine or
situational emotions.

Gendlin uses the example of ‘being in’ a situation with a policeman. One may simply
get ‘sucked into’ a routinized emotion such as fear or anger, or a specific situational
emotion such as a sense of quiet caution. Being simply moved by the sense of quiet
caution may result in a particular trajectory of behaviour, one possibility being, to act
in an excessively unquestioning way. So, in such a situation, getting ‘sucked into’ the
situational emotion may become a habitual pattern that reduces the likelihood of
responding in other possible ways that require novelty. A felt meaning is a broader
focus. In noticing and feeling the quality of the whole complex experience, it first
comes as a feeling of “all that”. As human beings living with language, we are able to
symbolise and describe “all that”. “All that” turns out to be much more than just one
routine or situational emotion to which we may automatically react (either by
repressing or expressing). In attending to felt meaning, the interrelationship of a
number of emotion-implying meanings may emerge. To quote Gendlin(1973) , this
level of felt meaning comes when “ I put myself into this whole situation I am up
against, rather that just this already thinly defined routine patter.” p389.

A number of different levels of personal meaning and context may become more
explicit when this broader ‘having’ of ones situation is attended to. So, for example,
“in” attending to a broad felt meaning that may first look like a ‘feeling of threatened
constraint’, a number of different feelings, levels and meanings may emerge: the felt
importance of where I was going, the feeling that I have allowed others to control me
too often in the past, that it is important for me not to stereotype the policeman, that
there is “all that” about my need to keep the peace ( a long story which seems to
resonate with many other personal stories). “All this” and more is “in” the felt
meaning and contains endlessly more facets than can possibly be separated out.

Yet one can have “all this” in the immediacy of a felt meaning as a whole, even
though it may take time to articulate and symbolise what is “in” it. Such felt meaning
comes in wholes rather than parts. Gendlin thus sees this level of attending to
experience as a particularly human emergent capacity, one that announces an ability
to ‘stand back’ and feel the quality of the “all that” that enters into the constitution of

3
specific emotions. He would say that the felt meaning of an “all that” is different than,
and more complex than, routine and situational emotions. The main differences are
that it breaks the routine between feeling and action, and can find a more specific
‘next step’ that takes account of the personal complexity of the situation. This may
allow the possibility of a form of emotional intelligence that does not rely on mere
general logic and rationality, but which can be informed by the more holistic
intelligence of one’s uniquely situated, emotional context, in relation to one’s
personal identity and history.

So what relevance may Gendlin’s distinctions have for emotional processing?

Emotional processing: unpacking the fullness of emotions

Gendlin developed a form of therapeutic emotional processing which he calls

‘focusing’. It partially addresses his concern that our theory of emotions has
substituted ‘thin schemes’ for the complexity of concretely lived experience. Thus, for
example, he was critical of ‘energetic’ theories of emotion that encouraged
‘catharsis’:

“It is a silly notion that anger is some sort of hostility fluid that is simply in people
and has to be got out by catharting” (Gendlin, 1973, p.385).

His method of focusing involves two essential components:

• broadening attention to the felt meaning level that is larger than specific
routine and situational emotions, ----- allowing the felt quality of ‘how things
are’, to form
• neither repressing this experience nor reacting to it, but differentiating the
‘facets’ of it in language and checking the credibility of these ‘facets’
experientially in relation to the ‘felt sense’ to see whether they are distinctions
that ‘fit’.

These two components move back and forth in which new descriptions change the felt
meanings in the body and the changed felt meanings become further described. The
benefits of this experiencing-symbolising process is that it goes in both an inner and
outer direction. In broadening inner attention, one feels what may ‘be there’ beyond
the routine, repetitious and general ways of labelling one’s experience and emotion.
This increases felt credibility and a heightened sense of oneself as a unique person. In
symbolising or languaging this inner attention, one moves outward to forms of
possible interaction and responsiveness that are more nuanced and more novel than
the action-sequences that have been patterned by more routine and situated emotions.
Emotions can still carry great power and depth, but may ‘fit’ the uniqueness and
novelty of ‘this’ particular moment more intelligently.

Gendlin (1973):

“One gets past routine pattern or anger when letting oneself feel the whole situation.
Only here is uniqueness. The felt meaning is also patterned , but so multiply patterned
as so richly related to so much else, that it can only be felt as a whole and not via
given sequences, however many.” p389

4
“Without the felt meaning made to come home to me whole, I would simply be in the
routine patterns.” p390

Gendlin does not want to control or repress routine or situational emotions. The level
of focusing on felt meaning, however, gives them a more fluid context and a greater
possible freedom for flexible expression. Each of the three levels of emotionally
related experience are ultimately implicated and enfolded into one another, but the
broader ones re-organise and re-direct the narrower.

In conclusion, it could be said that Gendlin recommends a form of emotional

processing that attends to the ‘more’ of emotion, and sees a developmental emergence
in our increasing capacity to experience, differentiate and act from these ‘mores’.

Reference:

Gendlin, E.T. (1973) A Phenomenology of Emotions: Anger. In Carr, D. & Casey,

E.S.(Eds). Explorations in Phenomenology: Papers for the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosphy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. pp367-397.