Argues that therapy changes people partly through ‘moments of meeting’ between patient and analyst, which reorganise the patient’s implicit sense of how to be with others; interpretation alone is not enough.
A shared moment
When one person in a circle feels met, does the other feel it too, and do they describe the same moment?
Being met is usually studied from one side. Asking both people about the same moment would show whether meeting is mutual, and how far each side’s sense of the other is right.
Builds on eight works
Why it matters
Practitioners speak of being met as something that happens between people, yet research on feeling understood asks one person at a time (Morelli et al. (2014)), and so does the design proposed in What being met is like. If meeting is shared, both people should be able to find the same moment and describe it in ways that fit together. If it isn’t, a circle can feel mutual without being so.
What exists
Psychoanalytic researchers have proposed that therapy changes people partly through “moments of meeting” between patient and analyst (Stern et al. (1998)), a proposal built on theory, not on asking both people. In Høffding et al. (2023), two string quartets’ heartbeats fell into step as they played, the expert quartet’s more than the students’, which the authors take as tentative support for an absorption the players share.
Diary studies of intimacy ask one person to rate both their own disclosure and their partner’s response (Laurenceau et al. (1998)). People are better at knowing how others in general see them than how a particular person does (Kenny & DePaulo (1993)), and they underestimate how much a conversation partner likes them (Boothby et al. (2018)), so one side’s sense of the other can’t stand in for asking the other.
A possible design
After a circle, invite pairs in which each named the other in a moment that mattered. Interview both, separately, about that moment with micro-phenomenological interviews (Petitmengin (2006)), using video to find it, then compare the timing and the structure of their accounts. Add pairs from ordinary conversations for comparison.
Pitfalls
Partners who talk before their interviews will tune their stories to each other, so interview them separately and soon. A shared description is not proof of a shared experience: people in the same community use the same words.
Builds on
- 1998Non-Interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The ‘Something More’ Than Interpretation
- 2023Into the Hive-Mind: Shared Absorption and Cardiac Interrelations in Expert and Student String Quartets
Cautions: Small sample
Two string quartets, one world-class and one of students, played the same Haydn passage under seven conditions: hearts synchronised more in playing than at rest and more in the expert quartet, whose synchrony held through most disruptions.
- 2014The neural bases of feeling understood and not understood
Cautions: Small sample
A brain-imaging experiment found different activity patterns when people felt understood or misunderstood, alongside differences in how much they liked the supposed listener.
- 1998Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges.
Cautions: Self-report only
Two diary studies linked disclosure and feeling that a partner responded with understanding to greater intimacy, with emotional disclosure more strongly linked than factual disclosure.
- 1993Do people know how others view them? An empirical and theoretical account.
A review found that people judge their general reputation more accurately than the distinctive impressions particular others have of them.
- 2018The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?
Across five studies, people tended to underestimate how much conversation partners liked them, and this gap lasted for months among student housemates.
- 2006Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness
A methodological paper explains how guided interviews can bring out details of lived experience and discusses how to assess the resulting accounts.
- 2007Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition
Introduces participatory sense-making: an enactive account of how people understand one another, in which their bodies and the dynamics of their interaction play a part, not only what happens in each person’s head.