FEELINGS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

Each of the major approaches to psychotherapy (psychoanalytic, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and humanistic) has dealt with the issue of why verbal, conscious activity seems to be impotent to control feelings and behavior. In these appraoches, thinking has been equated with conscious, verbal activity and feeling with nonconscious, nonverbal activity. However, recent debate has centered on the characteristics and location of both cognitive and feeling systems. One way to view the relation of feeling to thinking is to see these two as at least partially knowing systems. The verbal knowing system is linear, flexible, and slow in its responsiveness, while the feeling system is global and holistic, and fixed, rigid, and rapid in its responsiveness. Crucial to this interpretation of the feeling system is the assumption that it processes meaning and that the conscious, verbally guided response sequences may get programmed into a nonconscious, affective level. Given these assumptions, two sources of pathologicl behavior may exist: rapid, consciously uncontrollable behavior; and articulated meanings. This perspective leads to a flexible view of psychotherapy in which articulation of meanings is needed. Articulation will lead to an integration of the two knowing systems through hypothesis testing, juxtaposition, and restructuring. (BL) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that n be made from the original-documen