ABSTRACT
The historicity of emotionality is a relational, primary-group phenomenon. The emotionality of self-other feelings is lived and played out in the internal drama of the human family or its equivalent. The interpretation of emotionality, in addition to containing vocabularies of emotional meaning, rests on self-justification. Defining emotions as self-feelings felt in emotionality has the advantage of placing their study directly in the field of social interaction. There is stratification to the person's emotional life that moves outward from feelings of the lived body to the surrounding interactional world. This stratification of emotional life corresponds to the structures of the person's lifeworld. The emotional experience, in the form of embodied self-feelings, radiates through the person's inner and outer streams of experience. However, what is experienced in the self of the person is an emotional experience. In any emotional self-feeling there is a core, or essential emotional experience that is named and felt— anger or fear or guilt.
