Experiencing Ourselves Emotionally

This chapter sketches an account of one way in which emotional experience incorporates a sense of self. I develop a conception of self-experience as a multi-faceted orientation through which we find things significant in emotional ways. This orientation is experienced as dynamic, open to change, fragile, vulnerable, and to varying degrees conflicted. I add that certain emotional experiences, most of which lack established names, are concerned primarily with tensions and incongruities within the self, rather than with how events and situations are significant in relation to the self. More generally, emotional self-experience should be construed in terms of the dynamic, temporally extended experience of significant, cohesively organized possibilities.