ABSTRACT
Learning more languages, we learn more theoretical languages and theories broaden our understanding and excite our imagination. The more we talk to each other, the more we learn each other's languages, the more we use commonly agreed definitions and assumptions. Emotions, we learn as soon as we learn another language, are not neatly packaged entities universally and uniformly recognizable like cats or dogs or cows. Many things that are hard or uneconomical to put into words may be communicated through intonation, body language, colour, or sounds. Psychotherapists have somewhat similar troubles because of these limitations in the words for what their patients are engaged in. Their language, their concepts, their aims and interests, are not exactly like those used by professionally interested people nowadays—counsellors, psychotherapists, and psychologists—but, like us, they were trying to understand people. Police, journalists, juries, psychotherapists, all know the difficulty of getting accurate accounts of people's experiences; we really only know what people report.
