ABSTRACT
Years ago I saw two people in my practice who were dying and desperate to talk to someone. I initially had no idea of what to do with either of them, which was for the best, because as I searched in earnest for what was needed, I eventually found myself being directed by them towards a particular therapeutic event. What they seemed to require of me had to do with their wish to express something very important to them, and to know that I had understood them deeply enough to have felt what they had felt; to know that their affective experience had been shared by me. I like to refer to this clinical phenomenon as affect sharing, where a therapist both experiences and communicates about a mutual affect state occurring within the analytic dyad.
