ABSTRACT
A sense of fragility and basic anxiety tend to accompany the gentle person’s experience. This opening chapter looks into the relationship between these feelings and the perceptual-sensory-conscious gap that gentle people often face in relation to their primary environment, a gap which also affects the latter’s capacity to offer good-enough holding and containment.
Eigen points out how responsiveness to sensitivity – sensitivity to the other’s sensitivity – is the groundwork of ethics. From here on I draw a first distinction between sensitivity and gentleness: I propose to think of mature gentleness, of which sensitivity is a part, as a mental achievement and a value, and I suggest how life’s injuries, in the presence of the right support, may transform into a connecting tissue: between a person and herself and between herself and others.
