ABSTRACT
Emotion plays a central role in psychotherapy processes. The adaptational conflicts that bring people into psychotherapy are frequently organized around core meanings that evoke strong feeling. Across cases, the feelings expressed in psychotherapy reflect the full range of emotional experience. Further, the organization of these feelings is often the product of long personal and social histories. Regardless of the approach, psychotherapy typically involves identifying strong emotions and in some way reorganizing either the emotional experience itself or the role it plays within a client’s life. The DAPP approach attends to all of the interrelated aspects of human activity and experience that undergo differentiation and integration in the course of successful psychotherapy. Emotion is part and parcel of all human experience. The transformation of emotion is part of the process of the transformation of activity and experience. Emotional transformations necessarily contribute to the transformation of action, meaning, and experience; conversely, the transformations in action and meaning entail changes in emotional experience as well. Because the challenges of psychotherapy typically center around conflicts that entail great emotional intensity, and the most important transformations in psychotherapy profoundly influence clients’ emotional lives, we devote this chapter to articulating how strong emotions are understood and tracked within the context of DAPP analysis.
