ABSTRACT
This chapter provides to characterize an active, relationally engaged form of therapeutic comportment called emotional dwelling. Central to emotional dwelling is the therapist's capacity to enter into a patient's reality even while simultaneously holding on to his or her own. The antithesis of emotional dwelling is the therapist's attitude of objectification. The most extreme forms of such an attitude are found in crude materialism and behaviorism, wherein the whole concept of the human being as an experiencing subject is abolished. Emotional dwelling, in contrast, recognizes the embeddedness of all experience in constitutive intersubjective contexts, including the one created by the act of dwelling itself. Emotional dwelling, in contrast, is occupied with apprehending subjective truths rather than objective facts. While the patient's views frequently differ from those of the analyst, sometimes very dramatically, this difference is endured without judgment being passed as to whose reality is correct.
