ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe the starting point Stern’s understanding and description of the affects and the importance of feelings for development, since his model is both inspired by modern affect theory and also supplements it. Individuals, couples, and families often come to therapy because they feel that neither are they understood nor do they understand each other. Affect attunement resembles empathy in that both phenomena presuppose a form of emotional resonance. Attunement takes place automatically, beyond consciousness. The original emotional resonance takes place automatically in another expression, and it is this transformed re-creation that turns affect attunement into a separate phenomenon. The relation between modern psychoanalytic self-psychology and modern affect theory has been an issue in psychotherapy research. The abreaction and ventilation of feelings was one way of freeing oneself from connections to traumatic events and other repressed experiences.
