Anger and Felt Sense
In August 2023, the annual conference of the Japan Focusing Association was held in Fukuoka, Japan, and I gave a presentation on "Anger and Felt Sense" as a panelist at one of the symposia. Here is an English translation of the slides from that day's presentation:
The slides consist mainly of quotations from Gendlin's writings, which alone may make it difficult to understand the back-and-forth connections since there are no oral supplements in the day's presentation. Therefore, a summary is provided below.
In Gendlin's writings, the distinction between "emotion" and "felt sense" is crucial. Emotion is a strong feeling that can be expressed in a single word at the moment, such as joy, anger, sadness, or pleasure, while felt sense is a subtle feeling that cannot be immediately expressed in a single word. This distinction is made in both Focusing's practical writings and his philosophical writings. Therefore, I have explained the difference between the two terms as I have moved back and forth between the two kinds of his writings.
First, I preached the story from the perspective of emotions that occur in nonhuman animals, pointing out the differences and similarities between them and emotions that occur in humans. In the case of dogs or monkeys, although they feel angry when fighting with their mates, they do not reflect on the situation after leaving the fight. In the case of humans, they feel anger but do not direct it to the other person and may keep it inside.
Despite these differences, anger ignores much of its surroundings and has a narrow attention scope, which is common to dogs, monkeys, and humans. Emotions of disappointment when expectations are not met and embarrassment, when laughed at, are often patterned and tend to obscure individual differences in situations. I explained that this is where Gendlin's argument comes in, that humans form a felt sense that puts them back in touch with the felt sense of the situation as a whole.
この記事が気に入ったらサポートをしてみませんか？