Felt Experience Research Articles

Reinventing the “Red Classics” in the age of globalization

The resurgence of revolutionary literature or Red Classics at the turn of the century is indicative of the cultural logic of the revolutionary hegemony during Mao and post-Mao China. Revolutionary hegemony served quite effectively to legitimate Mao Zedong’s, and much of Deng Xiaoping’s reign, but it has become increasingly difficult to sustain its viability and efficacy. From the beginning of the new century, both the state and consumer popular culture sectors have pushed for a Red Classic resurgence. While the ideological content and styles of the Red Classics are apparently incommensurable to China’s social reality today, their current popularity suggests a success in capturing or eliciting emotional responses from the audience primarily derived from their lived and felt experience during the Mao era. For the state, the Red Classics and the entire revolutionary legacy can now exist only as mummies of history, serving as a nationalist, “patriotic” narrative of the recent past. Meanwhile, the Red Classics is reinvented as nostalgia, a commodity in China’s cultural market. The paper examines the genealogy and current reinvention of the Red Classics, in order to shed some light on China’s post-revolutionary cultural politics.

A Different Perspective in Listening: Understanding Transference Interpretation and the Nature of Therapeutic Action in Dynamic Psychotherapy

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Letters to the EditorFull AccessA Different Perspective in Listening: Understanding Transference Interpretation and the Nature of Therapeutic Action in Dynamic PsychotherapyEVELYNE ALBRECHT SCHWABER M.D.,EVELYNE ALBRECHT SCHWABER M.D.Search for more papers by this author,Published Online:1 Oct 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09050737AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail To the Editor: In their Treatment in Psychiatry article, published in the May 2009 issue of the Journal , Glen O. Gabbard, M.D. and Mardi J. Horowitz, M.D. (1) offered a finely delineated psychotherapeutic approach in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. I wish to suggest an alternative perspective on listening to the patient and thereby on understanding of transference and the nature of therapeutic action. I refer to a position not limited to patients of a specific diagnostic category, but rather to a central shift in outlook on how we listen and its impact on clinical work. It is my view (e.g., reference 2 ) that therapeutic action occurs more profoundly when the therapist—rather than attempting, however subtly, to dissuade the patient from his or her own felt experience (as to correct “misinterpretations”)—seeks instead to locate the patient’s vantage point and its inherent legitimacy. A statement such as “the therapist is not verbally abusing her” ( 1 , p. 520) when the patient feels that he is would then require the qualifier “from his vantage point” (i.e., the therapist’s vantage point), with her vantage point (i.e., the patient’s vantage point) yet to be found. The transference, then, is understood as a perceptual experience to illuminate, not a distortion or projection to alter. This perspective does not preclude the therapist’s addressing concerns regarding what seems to be dangerous or worrisome behavior, but that is a determination different from one attempting to negate or “correct” what is felt or perceived. It is striking how outer behaviors and symptoms may abate—ideations about the therapist’s mal intent or lack of care genuinely ease—when the inner world is recognized. In the hypothetically drawn example, “Ms. A” spoke of her embarrassment. She had shouted at the clerk, who would not accept her credit card, then noticed people staring at her. Had the clerk not been “rude and curt,” she would not have shouted. These were the feelings she described coming into the hour. The therapist did not speak of them, asking instead about the store’s credit card policy. The patient then became furious, feeling that he was suggesting she had overreacted. “What difference does it make? [H]e still should have been courteous!” (p. 517) she exclaimed. Were the therapist to reconsider her perspective, heeding her rage and increasing sense of injury, rather than suggest that she is “making herself miserable,” he might regard how uncaring his response felt to her in failing to acknowledge her difficult experience. In saying “the same thing that happened in the store is happening with me” (p. 517) to highlight a parallel in her seemingly maladaptive response, he might note the parallel between his response and that of the clerk’s, both as critics. This is not to echo the patient’s words as a feel-good measure, but a moment of recognition. Feeling her perspective to be given credence, its inherent legitimacy located, the patient’s own capacity for reflection may be enhanced. Memories may be awakened, recent or long-term, of analogous experience, shedding light on defenses arising in response or anticipation, indeed of what had perhaps been, until then, outside conscious awareness. In this way, I believe—recognition, articulated by another and one’s self—therapeutic action in a dynamic psychotherapy takes hold.Brookline, Mass.The author reports no competing interests.This letter (doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09050737) was accepted for publication in June 2009.

Prosthetic Divinity: Babbage's Engine, Spiritual Intelligence, and the Senses

Prosthetic Divinity:Babbage's Engine, Spiritual Intelligence, and the Senses Tamara Ketabgian (bio) Throughout his life, Charles Babbage sought to extend human faculties with a blend of scientific analysis, calculation, and perception. A prominent early Victorian mathematician, Babbage is today best known for his invention of the difference engine and its anticipation of postmodern information technology.1 Yet in his 1864 autobiography, he also emerges as a relentless thrill-seeker, devoted to transforming and intensifying his own sensory abilities—whether by descending in diving bells, gazing through telescopes, testing the speed of railway trains,2 exploring the erupting lava of Vesuvius, or seeking (at a very early age) to summon the devil and document his existence experimentally. In his best-selling On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), Babbage celebrates this extension of human identity through specifically industrial means. The Economy is, of course, only one of many early Victorian studies that imagine the factory as a "vast automaton" (Ure 14)—a hybrid network of various bodies, organs, and machines. For, as I have shown elsewhere, Babbage views industrial technology as both a prosthetic replacement and addition, restoring the missing organs of the disabled while supplying the able-bodied with "millions" of "additional hand[s]" (Babbage, On the Economy 388, 14). Both amplified and effaced by machinery, the Economy's workers are alternately superhuman in the factory and, outside it, more incomplete than ever.3 Creating new forms of lack and abundance, Babbage's mechanical prostheses also serve potent spiritual and persuasive functions. As instruments with which to view, simulate, and recreate the world, they support fantasies of divine emulation and technical augmentation that pervade his writings on science and religious faith. For Babbage and other Victorian thinkers influenced by natural theology, such fantasies treat humans as inherently disabled, requiring divine aid and mediation in order to realize knowledge. Addressing the limits of human sense and intelligence, these technical aids follow the theological doctrine of "accommodation," which argues that since God is incomprehensible, he must adjust to human capacities all that he seeks to reveal to us.4 In his treatise on Natural Theology (1802), still read by many Victorians, the theologian William Paley defines these "contrivances" as God's rhetorical exercise for humanity's benefit. For Paley, this felt experience of technology—of design and "contrivance"—remains our closest form of access to the divine. Or, to use Paley's famous turn of phrase, when we find a watch—or some natural object—before us, we inevitably reflect on its origins: on how "the watch must have had a maker" (3) whose wisdom we then emulate by studying the watch's distinctive mechanical features. As a practice of religious knowledge based on the direct observation of facts and nature, natural theology thus locates [End Page 33] the path to superhuman skill and intelligence within technological objects, practices, and forms of vision. Babbage's writings share this emphasis on technical instrumentation and symbolic representation, treating God as a mechanical programmer and the world as "a macroscopic version of a factory," "only visible as a system from the point of view of its manager" (Hyman 136-37; Schaffer 226). In his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), Babbage argues for the existence of God with the aid of his calculating engine, a machine that promises to enlarge human moral, sensory, and intellectual faculties by simulating the complexity, magnitude, and eternal memory of the divinity. As popular works of natural theology, the first eight Bridgewater treatises were sponsored by the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater and officially commissioned by the Royal Society. Babbage's effort, however, was unsolicited, unofficial, and unremunerated. It attacked the claim, posed in William Whewell's earlier Bridgewater treatise, that mechanical and mathematical pursuits restrict human spiritual sensitivity. Instead, Babbage suggests, these forms of deductive reason "open views of the grandeur of creation perhaps more extensive than any which the sciences of observation or of physics have yet supplied" (98-99). For Babbage, this augmented vision occurs through both technical apparatuses and mechanical processes of human reason and scientific method. As he stresses in his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), observers may realize...

The Phenomenological Failure of Groundwork III

Henry Allison and Paul Guyer have recently offered interpretations of Kant's argument in Groundwork III. These interpretations share this premise: the argument moves from a non-moral, theoretical premise to a moral conclusion, and the failure of the argument is a failure to make this jump from the non-moral to the moral. This characterization both of the nature of the argument and its failure is flawed. Consider instead the possibility that in Groundwork III, Kant is struggling toward something rather different from this, not trying to pull the moral rabbit out of the theoretical hat, but instead seeking a proto-phenomenological grounding of morality: a grounding that begins from first personal felt experiences that already possess moral content, and proceeds to its further practical claims via attentive reflection on these felt experiences. This paper brings this assumption to our reading of Groundwork III, showing that in doing so we acquire a deeper appreciation both of the argument, and the reasons it fails. Kant's argument is practical throughout. And the failure of the argument is the failure of Kant's nascent efforts to provide a new, phenomenological method for the grounding of practical philosophy.

Making Sense of Self and Systems in Psychoanalysis: Summation Essay for the 30th Annual International Conference on the Psychology of the Self

The theme of the30th annual conference on the Psychology of the Self was “Self and Systems.” Three panels explored and developed this theme, conceptually and clinically. This article, first, summarizes these presentations and, then, develops two paradigms with which to compare and contrast the utility of the concepts, self and systems, within psychoanalysis. The first paradigm addresses the purpose of the concept: Does the concept seek to describe felt experience, or does the concept seek to explain conditions that give rise to felt experience? The second paradigm concerns the mode of the theory. The focal question here is, Does the theory conceive of the mind as structure, or does the theory conceive of the mind as process? These two paradigms are conceptual tools that are offered to the reader to facilitate his or her own assessment of the relative utility for psychoanalysis of each concept, self and systems. El tema del XXX Congreso Anual de la Psicología del Self versó sobre “Self y Sistemas”. Tres panels exploraron y desarrollaron este tema, conceptual y clínicamente. Este artículo primero resume estas presentaciones, y luego desarrolla dos paradigmas con los que comparar y contrastar la utilidad de los conceptos, Self y Sistemas, en psicoanálisis. El primer paradigma afronta el propósito del concepto: ¿el concepto pretende describir la experiencia sentida, o pretende explicar las condiciones que dan lugar a la experiencia sentida? El segundo paradigma se refiere al modo de la teoría. Aquí la cuestión central es: ¿la teoría concibe la mente como estructura o como proceso? Estos dos paradigmas son herramientas teóricas que se ofrecen al lector para facilitar su propia valoración de la relativa utilidad para el psicoanálisis de cada concepto (self y sistemas). Le thème de la 30e Conférence Annuelle sur la Psychologie du Soi était «Le soi et les systèmes». Trois tables rondes ont exploré et développé ce thème du point de vue conceptuel et du point de vue clinique. Cet article résume en premier lieu ces présentations, et, ensuite, développe deux paradigmes avec lesquels comparer et mettre en contraste l'utilité des concepts, le soi et les systèmes, à l'intérieur de la psychanalyse. Le premier paradigme aborde le but du concept: est-ce que le concept cherche à décrire l'expérience vécue, ou est-ce que le concept cherche à expliquer les conditions qui donnent lieu à l'expérience vécue? Le deuxième paradigme traite de la modalité de la théorie. La question centrale ici est la suivante: est-ce que la théorie conçoit l'esprit comme une structure ou est-ce que la théorie conçoit l'esprit comme un processus? Ces deux paradigmes sont des outils conceptuels offert au lecteur pour faciliter sa propre évaluation de l'utilité relative de chaque concept, le soi et les systèmes, pour la psychanalyse. Das Thema der dreißigsten “Annual Conference on the Psychology of the Self” hieß “Self and Systems”. Drei Panels untersuchten und entwickelten dieses Thema sowohl konzeptionell als auch klinisch. Diese Arbeit fasst zuerst die Präsentationen zusammen und entwickelt dann zwei Paradigmen, mit deren Hilfe die Nützlichkeit/Brauchbarkeit der Konzepte „Selbst und Systeme“ innerhalb der Psychoanalyse verglichen und gegenübergestellt werden sollen. Das erste Paradigma bezieht sich auf den Zweck des Konzeptes: versucht ein Konzept, erlebte Erfahrung zu beschreiben, oder versucht es, die Bedingungen zu erklären, die das Entstehen von erlebter Erfahrung ermöglichen. Das zweite Paradigma betrifft die Art und Weise der Theorie. Die entscheidende Frage ist dabei: versteht eine Theorie die Psyche als eine Struktur, oder versteht sie Psyche als einen Prozess? Diese beiden Paradigmen sind konzeptionelle Werkzeuge, die dem Leser angeboten werden, um seine Einschätzung der relativen Nützlichkeit/Brauchbarkeit des jeweiligen Konzepts „Selbst und Systeme“ für die Psychoanalyse zu erleichtern.

Constructing a bricolage of nursing research, education and practice

Drawing upon post doctoral reflections of a shared methodology, the authors explore the use of bricolage as a way of better understanding the inter-related connections between theory, nursing practice and the felt experiences of service users. The origins of bricolage can be traced back to the work of Levi-Strauss, and Denzin and Lincoln's contribution to qualitative methodologies. Bricolage is a multifaceted approach to the research process. Differing epistemological positions and mixed methods of data collection are utilised to bring a richer understanding of human beings and the complexities of their lived experiences. For the bricoleur the object of inquiry, cannot be separated from its context, that is the language used to describe it, its historical situatedness and the social and cultural interpretations of its meaning as an entity in the world. The paper discusses the importance of being able to move beyond the notion of the research method being merely a procedure, to one that respects the complexities of the lived world.

Affect revisited: Transference–countertransference and the unconscious dimensions of affective, felt and emotional experience

This paper explores the concept of transference–countertransference arguing that it holds out the promise of an inherently relational understanding of the unconscious dimensions of affective, felt and emotional experience. This argument is contrasted to Ian Burkitt's multi-dimensional model of affect, feeling and emotion which rejects the notion that these have unconscious dimensions understood in psychoanalytic terms. The paper suggests that there may be more grounds for dialogue between these approaches than those that meet the eye and that, as such, transference–countertransference may be a useful resource in the current putative ‘affective turn.’

Narratives, Normality, and Diagnostic Neutrality

Narratives, Normality, and Diagnostic Neutrality

Learning to self-regulate multi-dimensional felt experiences: The cases of four female medical students

Self-regulation skills in the context of medicine are important and can foster learning. While regulating felt experiences has been shown to enhance performance and well-being in sport, this process has not been examined in medicine. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the process in which four female medical students learned to regulate how they felt by participating in a feel-based, person-centered intervention. Results, synthesized through an analysis of narratives, indicated that for each student, feel was a holistic, dynamic, self-defined multidimensional experience that varied over time. Through the intervention, each student was able to identify how they wanted to feel based on different dimensions, observe how these mediated each other, and learn how to regulate their felt experiences to optimize performance and well-being. Findings are linked to the growing literature on self-regulation and give insight into healthy, lifelong, self-regulated learning in the medical field.

Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History

Felt TheoryAn Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History Dian Million (bio) An ideology is made of what it does not mention; it exists because there are things which must not be spoken of —Pierre Machery1 We were not normal children at these schools, we were more like robots, always taking orders, never involved in decision-making of any kind. We were never asked what we thought or even encouraged to think for ourselves. We learned soon after arriving at the schools not to express ourselves. We got into trouble when we spoke our minds, expressed feelings, or dared to question anything. —Bev Sellars2 [End Page 53] In this essay I make the case for remembering and understanding the impact of Canadian First Nation women’s first-person and experiential narrative on white, mostly male mainstream scholarship. I argue that these narratives were political acts in themselves that in their time exploded the measured “objective” accounts of Canadian (and U.S.) colonial histories. First Nations women in Canada changed the actual conditions for what could be said about the poverty and discrimination that were their daily fare. I wish to discuss the conditions under which these women spoke at all: of sex discrimination in their lives and communities, of what it took to challenge their own families, particularly the men. It is these women’s acknowledgment of their actual experiences that illuminated a space for both men and women to speak one of colonialism’s nastiest “domestic” secrets. First Nation men’s and women’s personal testimony in the early 1990s put Canada in an international spotlight for genocidal child abuse spanning a century. Their personal testimonies shamed Canadians’ simple belief in the benign nature of their child education–assimilation policies. But their stories hadn’t magically appeared. They were at the heart of the struggle. Native women’s personal narrative explored the racialized, gendered, and sexual nature of their colonization. In doing so, they transformed the debilitating force of an old social control, shame, into a social change agent in their generation. I explore here their sixth sense about the moral affective heart of capitalism and colonialism as an analysis. A felt analysis is one that creates a context for a more complex “telling,” one that illuminates the deeper meaning of their “education” in Canada. By exploring the early work of Maria Campbell, Lee Maracle, Ruby Slipperjack, and others, I suggest ways that Indigenous women participated in creating new language for communities to address the real multilayered facets of their histories and concerns by insisting on the inclusion of our lived experience, rich with emotional knowledges, of what pain and grief and hope meant or mean now in our pasts and futures. It is also to underline again the importance of felt experiences as community knowledges that interactively inform our positions as Native scholars, particularly as Native women scholars. Our felt scholarship continues to be segregated as a “feminine” experience, as polemic, or at worst as not knowledge at all. I also argue that academia repetitively produces gatekeepers to our entry into important social discourses because we feel our histories as well as think them. How is it that our oral traditions and our literary and historical voices are suppressed? What are the arguments that have been used to reduce what we say to the margins of public and academic discourse in the United States and Canada? Our voices are still positioned in a particular way, definitely reminiscent of the past silences we know so well, contingent [End Page 54] to our colonized position now. Indigenous women have spoken and written powerfully from experiences that they have lived or have chosen to relive through the stories they choose to tell. Our voices rock the boat and perhaps the world. They are dangerous. All of this becomes important to our emerging conversation on Indigenous feminisms, on our ability to speak to ourselves, to inform ourselves and our generations, to counter and intervene in a constantly morphing colonial system. To “decolonize” means to understand as fully as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times. Violence Is the Game and Sex Abuse Is Its Name What finally...

A service science perspective on the design of social media activities

In this article, we describe the design of social media services in terms of service science. Applications of the social media are growing rapidly, and technology provides opportunities for new types of services. There is a lack of discussion of social media applications as services. In this article, we open this discussion and define a new type of service for social media, namely share with me-type of service, and propose a method of designing these types of services. We discuss a mobile social media design framework that could be used in designing user experiences and user activities for next generation mobile social media services. The model is based on existing models; such as activity theory (AT), Mobile Web 2.0 Ecosystem (MW2E) and on the idea of considering the shared felt experience as a central design rule. We believe that studying social media using a service science framework can support the creation of future service innovations in social media.

Learning to self-regulate multi-dimensional felt experiences: The cases of four female medical students

Learning to self-regulate multi-dimensional felt experiences: The cases of four female medical students

“Feeling part of things”: Personal construction of self after brain injury

There is a growing body of literature on the nature of subjective changes experienced following brain injury. This study employs personal construct and qualitative research methods to address the question of how people make sense of, or construe, themselves after brain injury. Thirty-two individuals who had experienced acquired brain injury engaged in small group exercises based on a personal construct approach. Bipolar constructs were elicited through systematic comparison of pre-injury, current and ideal selves. The constructs elicited in this way were subjected to a thematic analysis. Nine themes were derived and an acceptable level of reliability of the definitions of these themes achieved. The highest proportion of constructs fell into the theme “experience of self in the world”, followed by “basic skills” (cognitive, sensory, physical, social) and “experience of self in relation to self”. It is concluded that following brain injury, people make sense of themselves in terms of the meanings and felt experiences of social and practical activity. This is consistent with social identity theory and stands in contrast to traditional neuropsychological sense making in terms of impairments and abilities alone, or activity or social participation alone. The implications of these findings for future research and rehabilitation are briefly considered.

Encountering the Primordial Self

Jung contended that the human psyche, like the body, has an evolutionary history. He referred to it as the two-million-year-old in us and as archaic man. Late in life, he said that by collective unconscioushe meant “age-oldphylogenetic experience.” This article poses the question: Can the psyche “remember” its phylogenetic background? The author gives a chronological summary of Jung'sideas, along with his own related dreams. She presents twenty-seven contemporary dreams that contain evolutionary references. This material is organized into stages of the encounter between the modern self and the primordial; the challenges that accompany this encounter are discussed. The importance of recognizing objective evolutionary dream content is emphasized. With human origins in mind, clinicians have a fresh way of interpreting dark-skinned and/or negroid figures in dreams. The author concludes by speculating that dreams with evolutionary or phylogenetic content may occur with increasing frequency today, in response to the worldwide extinction processes and other threats to life on this planet. A felt experience of our species ancestry may be an important healing factor.

Celebrating NHS mental health services: Still a long and winding road to recovery

Celebrating NHS mental health services: Still a long and winding road to recovery

Clinicians, market players or bureaucrats?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the variety of mechanisms applied since 1991 to engage English and Welsh general practitioners (GPs) in local health services planning and implementation. Three qualitative case studies. The paper identifies three types of mechanism: separation, alliance and integration. "Separation" characterises the relationship between most GPs and health authorities during the 1990s; alliance refers to the cooperative arrangements between groups of GPs and health authorities such as GP commissioning pilots, total purchasing, primary care groups and local health groups; integration refers to the integration of most health authority functions with primary care organisations (primary care trusts--PCTs and local health boards). Alliance models appear to have been most successful in promoting GP engagement in local planning and implementation; the necessarily bureaucratic nature of PCTs an local health board has alienated many. As yet, the National Health Service (NHS) lacks organisational arrangements which permit GPs a primarily clinical focus while ensuring that their knowledge and advice is available to those carrying out administrative functions. Practice-based commissioning may provide a means of improving such arrangements. The paper combines a number of features in health services and policy research. Few studies of primary health care organisations in the mid-2000s have been undertaken; the Welsh NHS is very under-researched; organisational analysis of the NHS is more often based on analysis from the outside rather than grounded in the felt experience of NHS personnel; and the historical perspective is often neglected.

Art in Its Experience: Can Empirical Psychology Help Assess Artistic Value?

This article outlines the roles of art theory and empirical psychology in understanding a work of art in its experience. Art theory sets the criteria of what the experience should be, and psychologists examine whether the predicted experience matches the observed experience of the recipient. An important issue is the role of knowledge in artistic evaluation, with resulting demand characteristics and concerns for self-presentation. With the help of recently developed implicit measures, both behavioral and biological, researchers are able to distinguish between explicitly reported knowledge and genuinely felt experience. The author presents examples of how art theory and empirical psychology might interact and how psychology can be used to examine a work's artistic value.

Fraternity without equality, and other Conservative ideals

I n June 2005, when we had just begun the collective discussions leading up to the Compass publication The Good Society, an email circulated amongst our group containing a link to a speech by Oliver Letwin, who was then the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The speech was called ‘Conducting Politics as if Beauty Matters’, and the theme was Environmentalism. Drawing on the language of the Romantics, Letwin argued that politicians needed a new vocabulary to talk about the environment. This was an issue that went beyond the merely mechanical. He called for a new political culture in which environmental policy is recognised as being the achievement of beauty. ‘The language of politics needs to refl ect the felt experience of the environment as sensations and impressions that are capable of moving us to delight and awe.’

Victims and agents

Scholarly accounts of children of the urban poor in South Asia often decry the exploitative conditions of child labour — the harsh and debilitating environmental conditions. At the same time, these accounts treat young people merely as victims and consequently leave out the felt experiences of working-class children and youth. Based on fieldwork among a marginalized leather worker community in an urban neighbourhood in India, this article aims to go beyond countering homogenizing perspectives and the challenge to the exploitation narrative. In doing so, I examine their specificity through ethnographic accounts of the ways in which young people actively construct their own identities, and reinterpret and negotiate adult notions of labour, caste, and community solidarity. Significantly these perspectives help us to comprehend the nature of youth discontent towards their traditional occupation. I analyse their discontent with the general declining employment opportunities in a globalizing Indian economy. Focusing on the youth cultures in the neighbourhood, I explore the conflicts within and between genders and generations emanating from the changing economic conditions.

Making Space for the Inner Guide

The therapeutic relationship is described as a curative factor in its own right as well as facilitative for other tasks. Experiential tasks that facilitate working on the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and existential domains are distinguished. Focusing is an intrapsychic task of paying attention to one's bodily felt experience. Clearing space helps clients finding a right distance for exploring their experience when they are too close or too distanced from their emotions. Interpersonal work takes the lead when maladaptive interactional patterns are hindering the relational life of the client. Metacommunicative feedback and interpersonal experiences in the therapeutic encounter act as an invitation to develop new ways of communicating. Existential processes are challenged when the client struggles with the givens of life. Finally, the "inner guide" found in accessing experiencing may involve an awareness of a transcendent dimension that leads one to spiritual growth. Vignettes from short term psychotherapy illustrate how this approach is established in practice.