The Healing Power of Emotion

4 Multilevel Meaning Making and Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness Theory

The Emotional and the Polymorphic Polysemic Flow of Meaning

Ed Tronick

PSYCHOTHERAPY IS ABOUT changing the meaning people make about themselves in the world. Indeed meaning—private meaning—is a core concept in approaches as varied and contentious as psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychotherapy, cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical cognitive therapies, dyadic therapies, attachment and relational therapies, and even “alternative” body psychotherapies (Tronick, 2007; Harrison & Tronick, 2007; Ogden, Minton, & Pain, 2006; Modell, 1993). Nonetheless, I believe we have misconstrued the nature of meaning in deep ways that limit our understanding of how humans function, what meaning “is,” and how individuals change their meanings. In essence we have tended to limit and categorize meaning into the domain of the explicit, mostly to the domains of language, symbols, and representations. We do this limiting in part because our cognitive processes tend toward chucking reality into categories, so it is hard for us humans to do it other ways. We also do it because our thinking is colonized by language, which in turn feeds back and further reifies the categorizations. Furthermore, the culture of science and its demand for the explicit also plays a role. Finally, we are very impressed with our ability to name things because it gives us a feeling that we know and control whatever it is we name. This thinking holds much truth about the meaning we make of ourselves in the world. But not the whole truth.

Meaning is Biopsychological

Meaning is biopsychological. It is made by polymorphic systems operating at multiple levels of the individual. These polymorphic systems create qualitatively different forms of meaning, what Freeman (2000) refers to as actualizations of meaning, which at best only messily fit together. Moreover, meaning is not one thing–one meaning. Meaning is a layered flow over time of the different meanings emerging from the multiple levels and processes that make meaning. Meaning is a laminated polysemic flow or bundle (A. Harrison, personal communication, 2008) that affects itself as it flows into the future. Yet, this flow of meanings has to be assembled by individuals into a coherent sense of themselves in the world, into what I will call a state of consciousness. No simple task.

Bruner (1990) has said that humans are meaning makers. They make meaning to gain a sense of their self in relation to their own self, and in relation to the world of things and other people. These meanings are held in the individual’s state of consciousness. A state of consciousness is the in-or mostly out-of-awareness polysemic meanings made by the totality of an individual’s biopsychological processes. Some meanings are known and symbolizable, some are unknown, implicit but with “work” can become known, and some may be unknowable. More on that later.

The meanings contained in a state of consciousness organize individuals’ presence, way of being in the world. For example, it is the comfortable and inexplicable feeling one has in a loved childhood home or the unknown shearing discomfort in one’s body, the feeling of a need to stretch and move, when in a house of an unknown trauma. Meanings are self-organized, regulated internally and private as well as dyadically organized, regulated with others, and shared. When self-organized meaning-making is successful, new meanings are made and become part of the individual’s state of consciousness. When meanings are dyadically organized, a dyadic state of consciousness emerges between the individuals and contains new cocreated meanings, which in turn can be appropriated by each individual into his or her state of consciousness.

Successful self-or self-and-other creation of new meanings leads to an expansion of the complexity and coherence of the individual’s state of consciousness. And successful creation of self and dyadic states of consciousness has experiential and functional consequences. So does unsuccessful meaning making. Successful meaning making carries with it a sense of expansion and positive affects; these feelings cascade and affect themselves, perhaps leading to a feeling of exuberance and aliveness, or an oceanic feeling of wellness. When successful meaning is made with another person, a feeling of connection and synchrony emerges, a mutual sense of being together in a special state. Failure to evoke meaning generates negative affects, fearfulness, anxiety, and a constriction and shrinking. These too feed on themselves, leading to radical qualitative changes in state. We see these shifts in our patients during those moments of new insight or when there is the catastrophe—a failure to make meaning (Modell, 1993)—and we must also recognize that we are participants in these processes.

What do I mean by saying that meanings are biopsychologically polymorphic? Meanings include anything from the linguistic, symbolic, abstract realms, which we easily think of as forms of meaning, to the bodily, physiological, behavioral, and emotional structures and processes, which we find more difficult to conceptualize as forms, acts, or actualizations of meaning. The difficulty arises because these polymorphs are made at every level of the organism, from the physiological to awareness, and also because we are forced to use language to discuss meanings that are inherently nonlinguistic and outside of explicit awareness. However, it is possible to comfortably integrate these ideas about meaning under a principle of singularity. The concepts of mind, body, and brain may be useful concepts or not, but they reflect the operation of the way our cognitive processes cut up the world. As such, they do not necessarily reflect or encompass the way the individual operates. Rather, there is a singularity, a concept related to how all subprocesses in a system not only purposively operate at the local level but also function in the context of the operation and goals of the whole system. All systems making up the whole individual—the totality of human biopsychological processes, including, but not limited to, what we call mind, brain, and behavior—operate to gain information about the world in order to act in and on the world in alignment with their intentions and goals as well as to create the individual’s unique, singular purposes, intentions, meanings, and sense of self in the world.

One domain of meanings that we often find difficult to conceptualize as meaningful purposive elements of our state of consciousness is that of emotions. Freud spoke about primary and secondary processes, and though not fully clear about how they served as forms of meaning, he implied, and it has come to pass, that it is the secondary processes that are instantiated as meanings. Witness only that insight—an explicit, symbolized, linguistic form of meaning—was crowned the king of the change processes—whereas primary-process meanings constitute the domain of the unwashed peasant. Emotions were disorganizing, disrupting, disquieting, or even without organization. They were infantile, immature, and had to be grown out of, if one were to come to know the world and oneself.

Other perspectives are not so demeaning of emotions. Emotions have been seen as the intensifiers of meaning or catalysts of meaningful actions, a kind of unidimensional gain-amplifying process, in a manner similar to the way Philip Roth amplifies reality in his novels. Alternatively, they have been conceptualized as adding qualia (value) to experience, in an afterthought kind of way, via an appraisal process comparing the individual’s goal to the outcome (Izard, 1977). Emotions are also almost always seen as existing in a small fundamental set in the individual, and though the core set may be elaborated into more complex blends, it does not show qualitative developmental changes (Ekman & Oster, 1979). Further, emotional processes are viewed as separate from cognitive processes, though in some views they are linked to bodily processes.

In these and other conceptualizations, I think we have misconceived, or at least missed, perhaps the most critical features of emotions. For me, emotions have meaning. Emotions are elements of meaning, being perhaps even the foremost and principal elements assembled in humans’ state of consciousness. And though emotions are elements within the individual (the essentialist or individual psychology perspectives), I believe that they are both internally created in new emergent forms, as well as dyadically cocreated in new emergent forms with both externalized others and internalized objects. Thus, emotions are not fixed elements. They evolve over moments. Old ones change, new ones emerge, nuanced forms abound. They change and develop through emotion-organizing processes, and through the interaction of those process with other processes (e.g., cognitive processes). Further, when emotional meanings are self-created or cocreated in a state of consciousness, their creation has consequences for the formation of relationships, ongoing emotional experience, and the growth of the individual: how the individual thrusts him-or herself into the world (Freeman, 1994).

Infants and Meaning Making

My view of emotions developed out of my work with infants (Tronick, 2007). From Freud onward infants had been viewed as disorganized and/or only responsive to internal processes and/or without intention or contact with reality. Freud shared this view with William James, but notably, not with Charles Darwin or Melanie Klein. This view persisted well into the 1980s and still lingers today, with the related ideas that infants lack language and explicit memorial or cognitive processes. Piaget (1952) saw the infant differently. Though he was not particularly concerned with emotions, he was deeply concerned about meaning and adaptation. He saw the infant as making sensorimotor meaning of the world. Things in the world were what the infant could do to them. Objects as different as bottles, breasts, and rattles were the same to the infant because the infant sucked on them. The meaning of these objects was the action that could be performed on them—they were categorized as suckable. The meaning would change as the infant developed new motor capacities, such that rattles and keys were shakable, but not bottles or breasts. Later in development other processes would supersede motor processes and, eventually, in adulthood, there would be language, symbolization, and abstraction. However, given our adult symbolized, abstract, language-and narrative-based view of the world (e.g., this chapter), it takes a special effort for us to think that a thing is not a thing, but is the action done to it; the sense of the thing to the infant is, in Bruner’s phrase, a literal act of meaning.

Emerging from this perspective was the notion that the infant was competent, but the competence was primarily in the perceptual and cognitive domains. As part of this effort, and based on Gibson’s (1988) theory of affordances, I carried out a study of infants’ reactions to impending collision with a virtual object (Ball & Tronick, 1971). The stimulus was an expanding dark optic array—a looming shadow. Infants as young as 11 weeks reacted to this display by putting their hands in front of their face and turning their head away—a defensive posture. As indicated by these actions, the shadow was something they experienced as threatening, and they ducked away from it. Though it may also have been novel or interesting, it had meaning about their relation to the event—it was dangerous to them. In saying this, I do not think that the infants had a sense of their own self or of the object qua object, and I am sure that they could not reflect on the event or their reaction. And though we don’t truly know the infant’s experience, nonetheless, they gave evidence of an organized state of consciousness in which the looming shadow had meaning, and critically this meaning was made without language or symbols. It is hard to move into the experience of an infant, but try thinking of other cryptic examples, such as individuals with apperceptive visual agnosia who move among objects and handle them in the visual world, but do not see them. Yet we know by their avoidance of objects and how they handle them that these individuals have a state of consciousness in which the “visual” world has meaning for them, but it is as radically different from the normal adult’s state of consciousness as is the infant’s state of consciousness. That is, both ways of knowing the world are beyond our ability to put into words.

FIGURE 4.1
Infant’s reaction to mother’s anger indicates a state of consciousness.

In a related example, we have seen an infant react to an angry facial display by his mother as she attempts to get him to let go of her hair (Figure 4.1). The mother’s angry facial expression and vocalization lasts less than half a second, but the infant detects them and immediately brings his hands up in front of his face, partially turns away in the chair, and looks at her from under his raised hands. Her angry face, perhaps the first he has ever seen, is not just interesting or novel. He apprehends it as a threat; something dangerous is about to occur and he organizes a defensive reaction to protect himself from what seems about to happen. And the mother almost immediately realizes it too. She changes what she is doing and using cajoling actions tries to overcome the rupture and to change his experience. At first he stays behind his hands but over the next 30–40 seconds begins to smile, and then smile and look at her.

The infant’s defensive reaction to the angry face is an obvious state of consciousness, organizing the infant’s way of being in the world, as is the change and shift in his state of consciousness as he begins to smile and look at her. However, as with sensorimotor meanings or apperceptive visual agnosia, we have to be cautious about what we think the infant knows. In this case, I don’t think the infant knows what the danger may be, as might an older child, but the angry face makes him feel threatened by what is happening. He experiences (let’s call it) threat, but we do not know what he might know, if anything, about what or where the threat is. Perhaps the infant’s experience is analogous to a sense of doom people experience when no doom is obvious; it just is. And when the mother smiles, he smiles back, knowing that his world is again safe, but he does not know what makes for the feeling. It is important to note that the infant reacts as a whole system. Arms, posture, facial expression, gaze, and (we were measuring it) his physiology changed in reaction to the threat, and then continued to change as the disruption was repaired and the threat changed to safety and pleasure. The reactions were not only reactions of mind, body, and brain, but of many processes at multiple levels of meaning making, which were organized into coherent whole system reactions. Further, though we failed to talk to the mother about her reaction to her infant’s reaction, we know, based on her actions, that she picked up on what was happening, changed what she was doing, and worked to change her and her infant’s states of consciousness. In particular, we do not know if she was aware of the angry face she had made. Indeed, when we first saw the infant ducking, it took several viewing of the tapes for us to become aware of her angry face.

Emotions, much like the infant’s sensorimotor actions on things, are one of the polymorphic meaning-making systems for the infant. Moreover, given the precocious sophistication of infants in responding to and expressing emotions, compared to their ability to act skillfully on the world, emotions may be the foundational form of their sense making (Tronick, 1980). Perhaps too mechanistically, infants can be thought of as emotion-meaning-making devices. They do not simply differentiate one emotion from another, or respond to the novelty of an emotion. Rather, emotional input has meaning. The meaning is inherent in the emotion processing and does not need to be translated by the infant into some other form. It does not have to be appraised or evaluated by other (e.g., cognitive) processes, though it likely becomes part of those processes. Perhaps an analogy is that the digestive system (emotion-meaning system) takes in nutrients (emotions) and makes them into useful energy and building blocks (meanings), and some things that are not nutritious (lip smack) cannot be digested (lack meaning, are senseless). As adults, we try to capture the world with language, which makes it difficult for us to even fathom what it would be like to have states of consciousness that were primarily emotional. Just think of the emotion of joy that is the glorious meaning of a grandchild coming at you with arms widespread, jumping into your arms.

It may help us to appreciate emotions as a form of meaning about our relation to world by considering the ways in which they are similar to, and different from, cognitions. The meaning adults make upon being alone in a dark, shadow-filled, unknown city is fear, anxiety, and creepiness. This meaning exists, side by side, with other forms of meaning conveyed in words and symbols by self, friends, and guides who say that the city is completely safe. Yet often adults remain stuck in the emotional meaning; it determines their sense of the world—danger. Things and people no longer are what we explicitly (cognitively) know them to be; now they are frightening, be they garbage cans or people. In fact, even when a person knows that the thing in the corner is a garbage can, it often still only means—only is—terror. The meaning is inherent in the person’s scared state of consciousness.

The emotions do not carry meaning about episodic time, about digital yes/no categories, or boundaries, as do cognitions. Though they come in sequences, they do not have a narrative structure and they do not have a grammar. They also motivate the individual to action, whereas cognition can occur without action. Emotions also may motivate acts, though the target remains unspecified. Fear without knowing what is fear provoking can still lead to flight. Rage when one does not know what is provoking the rage is still rage. Paradoxically, it is almost as if emotions have no connection to the external world, though they move us into the world. In these ways, they are like Freud’s view of primary process, and they share the timelessness of the unconscious, but they are not primary processes in the way Freud and James spoke of them.

Meaning as a Polysemic, Polymorphic Flow

Emotions are only one of many meaningful elements in a state of consciousness that are part of the hierarchically multileveled organization of individuals’ way of being in the world. A state of consciousness is a dynamically changing biopsychological state integrating biological and psychological meaning, purposiveness, and intentions made at every level and site of operation in the organism, from physiology to awareness. As Freeman (2000) puts it, all organismic processes have purposes. The meanings from different sites at different levels emerge over different time spans (milliseconds to minutes or even longer), such that there is a temporally laminated flow of meanings about the same event, and these actualizations of meaning become part of the flow of meaning as it moves forward in time.

Let me give an overly concrete example (Dan Siegel, personal communication, March 2006) of different elements of meaning that I think makes it clear that the elements of meanings are different from one another and are not transmutable into the other. A father is walking through the brush in the desert with his son when he suddenly experiences a feeling of terror and pushes his son away from a bush just before a snake moves across their paths. What is the meaning of this event? Likely, the father detected a movement in his peripheral visual field that led to an automatic defensive reaction, at the level of spinal reflexes and early visual processes, of backing off. He jumps away without any awareness, plan, or intention, though there is a biological purposiveness to the action. There is no identified object, just the reaction. As the meaning-making sequence progresses, the amygdala is activated because of its role in evaluating visual input. The sympathetic nervous system is also activated. Attention gets focused on the environment for other dangerous elements.

These reactions and processes all occur before awareness of the event. But clearly there is a meaning to the event as actualized in the father’s behavior, though the event is not yet identified as to what it is, and the meaning in the moment could be incorrect. The son is pulled away simultaneously. With the engagement of this circuitry, meaning takes an emotional form—fear, terror—but the meaning is not yet tied to a named target. Having moved away to a safer position, both father and son experience (outside of awareness) a parasympathetic response beginning to shut down the fear and arousal. Then there is an engagement of cortical cognitive and executive processes that evaluate the situation, detect a target, and further inhibit the fear reaction. Whereas the subcortical processes occur in milliseconds, these cortical processes take seconds or even longer as they unfold. There has been a polysemic cascade.

What I want to focus on is the importance of recognizing that there is not a single meaning, but rather a laminated flow of meanings that emerge over time from multilevel meaning making systems, what Harrison (personal communication, April 2008) calls a polysemic bundle or flow. The automatic reaction may have occurred, but had the target been a bird, the cascade of meanings would have unfolded differently. It seems to flow logically, but it also is the case empirically that the body and brain processes engaged are not equivalent as different meanings unfold. The automatic response engages reflexive spinal and perhaps other visual circuitry, circuitry that is completely different from the circuitry of the autonomic nervous system, or the circuitry of the amygdala fear system, or that of the cortical circuits. And though each form of meaning influences the others, each meaning is qualitatively different from that made by others. Think only of a “father” as having nothing more complex than the amygdala and the spinal jump-back reflex, a father that has only McLean’s reptilian brain. The McLeanian father would have experienced one meaning totally reflexive and out of awareness, followed by an emotional meaning of terror. There might not be a target, no cognitive evaluation. We can also only wonder if this reptilian-brained father would have pulled his son out of harm’s way.

These different meanings emerge over time and are incorporated into a state of consciousness over time. Thus the meaning made is hardly instantaneous. In this example, the target and location, time and context are certainly not in the reflexive meaning or in amygdalar meaning, but in the hippocampal and cortical meaning, and eventually may be incorporated into a narrative of the event (It was about noon, and we were walking along the path, when…”). But keep in mind that although the narrative meaning comes to colonize the experience, it is never equivalent to the flow of the meanings experienced. It comes after the experience of the other meanings and is incorporated into the flow of meaning forward in time.

One other point: These laminated events do not constitute a linear sequence of meaning making. Rather, they are part of the operation of the whole brain and body: The steps in the sequence are both the content (products) of the processes and the constituents of the meaning. Whole-brain processes contextualize the meaning. One reason the father is vigilant is because he knows they are in the desert. Had he been in his house, the reaction to a similar noise would have been different. Thus, meaning-making processes that are continuously operating in the background “prime” for certain other meaning-making processes. Another example, the reaction to protect the son, whether learned or innate, is also a priming of the father’s meaning-making systems. Simply put, the father’s state of consciousness always includes his son in his own sense of self and his reactions. It is his way of being. And the meanings made over time constitute the meanings that will continue to be made. Had the target been a bird, or had the father or son tripped, other meanings would have flowed and constituted the ongoing meaning-making process. Thus a state of consciousness integrates individuals’ current sense of place in the world with the past sense of self and with the continuous temporal flow of meanings emerging in every moment. And it is always dynamically changing.

Messiness and the Creating of the New

It should be obvious that a critical characteristic of a multileveled temporally laminated flow of meaning making is that the process of regulating and creating meanings is inherently messy. By messy I mean that, within the individual, the multileveled processes constituting meaning operate on different time scales: one-tenth of a second for perceptual processes, reflexes, reaction times, brainstem, and parasympathetic responses, but larger time units for the integration of perceptual input and memorial processes, and the operation of mirror neuronal networks, and even full seconds for complex cortical processes. These different time scales make it difficult to coordinate them. Their coordination is further complicated by the continuous feedback effects that each of the actualizations of these systems has on itself and on other systems (e.g., the inhibition of cortical processes upon limbic activation). Also, the systems serve different purposes and sometimes cross-purposes. For instance, the parasympathetic system functions, in complicated ways, to down-or up-regulate the sympathetic system, which functions to down-or up-regulate arousal, and both affect the amygdala as it functions to generate emotional reactions. There is no reason to assume that they will all be fully coordinated.

In recent research on what we call relational psychophysiology we have looked at the interplay of the multilevel processes of meaning and meaning making and found a good deal of messiness among different systems (Ham, 2008). For example: Infants’ emotional expressions, cardiac reactivity (heart rate, parasympathetic reactivity, Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia), and sympathetic reactivity (skin conductance) were evaluated during the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm (FFSF). In a neat (i.e., not messy) system one might expect reciprocal relations among these different systems: high arousal levels with intense emotional expressions, low parasympathetic reactivity, and high heart rate. Certainly we found some of these relations, but more impressive was the messiness of the relations. As expected, infant angry protest was positively related to cardiac reactivity across the episodes of the still-face situation, and it was negatively related to parasympathetic reactivity, but only in the play episode and unexpectedly not in the still-face. Also, unexpectedly, there was no relation between angry protest and sympathetic reactivity in any of the episodes. Other relations among other behavioral and physiological measures were much the same kind of mix. Adding to the complexity (messiness) of the findings was what appeared to be striking individual differences in the behavioral and physiological relations among the infants. There are likely many reasons for the findings, but they are not of concern here. Only the messiness is of concern because it speaks to the complexity of the interplay among the meaningful elements making up a state of consciousness.

In the study we also wanted to evaluate the relations and coordination of these meaning-making systems between the infant and the mother, so we simultaneously coded maternal emotions and behavior, recording cardiac reactivity, parasympathetic reactivity, and sympathetic reactivity. As was found for the messiness of different meaning-making systems in infants, we found dyadic messiness among the meaning-making systems of the infants and mothers. When infants were protesting during the play episode, maternal parasympathetic reactivity was negatively related to protest, whereas during the reunion episode maternal parasympathetic reactivity was positively related, cardiac reactivity was negatively related, and sympathetic reactivity was positively related. Infant and maternal sympathetic reactivity and cardiac reactivity were unrelated over the still-face and reunion episodes but were positively related during the play episodes. In this case, in a sense, one system, the sympathetic reactivity, is saying “Get more activated and continue what we are doing together,” whereas the other system, the parasympathetic, is saying “Slow down, we need to pause.” A primary conclusion from these findings is that the different purposive systems of the infants and mothers were related to each other and affecting each other, but the coherence among the systems was at best imperfect: It was messy.

Both the messiness within the infant and mother¹ and in their dyadic relations should be expected for two reasons. First, these systems operate at different levels within individuals and operate on different time scales. Moreover, they have different purposes and contribute different meanings to the infants’ and mothers’ states of consciousness, respectively. The parasympathetic system is, in part, operating to regulate the activation of the sympathetic system, and both further regulate the emotion-generating activity of the amygdala. Or, to “debrain” this explanation, the purpose of one system is to dampen down the intensity of the individual’s reactions, whereas another system is trying to increase that activation, and both are interacting with an emotional system that is generating qualitatively different emotional meanings over time. The totality of these different psychobiological purposes contributes to—that is, provides the elements and actualizations of—meaning in the infants’ and the mothers’ state of consciousness.

The second reason is of a different order of magnitude. Messiness is the wellspring of change and the stuff out of which new meanings emerge. Systems that are fixed, static, and tightly controlled do not change. They remain the same even if they are complicated. For example, spacecrafts have enormously complicated control systems, but they do not develop; nothing new emerges within them. They have a singular purpose; variability is limited, and if variability gets too great, the spacecraft simply fails. By contrast, self-and dyadically organized systems generate new meanings. Self-organized private meaning making, such as self-reflection or mentalization (Fonagy & Target, 1998), may lead to a new insight. So might engaging with another person. Either may generate a new state of consciousness.

Emotions are no exception. Individuals self-organize their emotions into a messy state of consciousness along with other polymorphic elements of meaning. As a consequence, the emotional meaning changes and, at times, new emotions emerge. For example, we don’t see the emotion of shame in infants, but it does emerge later in development as emotional, cognitive, and cultural process become integrated into an emerging meaning. It may seem odd to think of emotions as changing, no less that they can be qualitatively different over time, because we tend to think of them as a fixed set of primary and secondary (blended) encapsulated entities that are universally shared (Ekman, 1980; Izard, 1977). In that kind of thinking, to the extent that emotions do change, the change is construed to be under maturational control; once they mature, they do not develop.

But I think emotions change. They become more nuanced and subtler, richer and textured. New ones emerge—guilt, intimate love. They also are changed and modified by other processes, such as bodily processes (pubescence) or cognitive processes (abstract thought). Dyadic processes change emotions and generate new ones, such as relational emotions (feeling in synch with another; Fosha, 2001). These dyadic processes may also be messier than self-organized emotional meanings because each individual brings his or her own meanings into a meaning-making exchange, enabling a possible cocreation of new emotional meaning between the two. Indeed, I think it is likely that certain emotions are not only cocreated by two individuals but also exist only in, and are specific to, their relationship (e.g., the bubble of a blip of warming love that might come with a shared glance that is unique to one relationship).

Thus emotions are cocreated by an interplay of the active self-organized emotional meanings in the individual and the actualized emotional meanings of the other interactant as they mutually affect the self-organized emotional meanings in each other. The mutual interplay is an ongoing, continuing process of exchange that leads to shared meanings states—dyadic states of consciousness—with meaningful and “agreed-upon” elements of emotional meaning between the interactants. These dyadic meanings are appropriated to the meanings in each interactant’s state of consciousness. The possibility of cocreating shared meanings—dyadic meanings—dampens the solipsistic view of private meaning.

Emergent Consequences of States of Consciousness

For some, the creation of dyadic states of consciousness or intersubjective states—states of shared meanings—is a sort of end state of interactive meaning-making processes (Trevarthen, 1985, 1998; Stern et al., 1998; Stern, 1977). But nothing could be further from the truth. The self-organized creation of new meanings in a state of consciousness, and especially the cocreation of a dyadic state of consciousness, has powerful consequences that continue to unfold. What are some of them? First there is an objective consequence. When new meaning is created in a state of consciousness, it “objectively” fulfills the first principle of systems theory: A biological system must gain resources to maintain and expand its complexity and coherence or else it dissipates. Indeed, when a dyadic state of consciousness is formed, there is an expansion of the complexity of each individual’s state of consciousness as each incorporates the new meanings in the dyadic state into his or her own state of consciousness.

Beyond the objective, there are subjective experiential and developmental consequences. The self-or cocreation of new meanings leads to an emotional experience of expansion, wholeness, and growth, and it is marked by positive affect. A critical experiential, as well as objective, consequence that comes out of cocreating a dyadic state of consciousness is to feel connected, that is, to be in relationship to the other person. In fact, I believe that the creation of new meanings with another is the process leading to the formation and growth of relationships. We create something new together and consequentially feel connected to each other, rather than feeling connected because of some mysterious chemistry.

Meaning Making, Attachment, and Relationship Formation

Privileging the process of meaning making leads to a different take on how attachments are formed. When new meanings are cocreated, they generate a variety of emotions and qualities—intimacy, love, playfulness, excitement. This may sound like I am talking about the quality of attachment, but I am not. Attachment relationships have different qualities, and we have confused ourselves with the overly broad usage of attachment constructs. The different attachment classifications—the A, B, C, or D—are primarily about how individuals deal with safety, feelings of security, and the reduction of fear in the context of relationships. But these are not the only, indeed hardly, feelings and qualities in relationships. Years ago, Hinde (1979) emphasized that relationships have a variety of qualities and intensities, and that there are a whole bunch of ways of being together in relationships. Furthermore, relationships with one person become increasingly differentiated from relationships with other people who have other qualities and ways of being together in a relationship (Tronick, 2003). We simply don’t do the same things with everyone; we have different ways of being with people that go beyond four, five, or even ten categorical forms. Relationships between children and their mothers, for example, are likely to be the most differentiated because mothers and children do so many things together and make so many new meanings together. Moreover, this process of differentiation continues throughout childhood and into adulthood, when security is hardly the issue. The relationship typically has a lifelong course, making it unlikely that it is fixed early in development. Furthermore, its differentiation, specificity, and changing qualities make it difficult to see how the mother–infant relationship could serve as a prototype for other relationships; it is too differentiated, too specific. Even were the mother–child relationship the model for other intimate relationship, new meanings and new ways of being together in those relationships would be cocreated and the relationship would become increasingly distinct from its initial starting point.

Importantly, security and other relational qualities noted by Hinde can and must be conceptually and empirically dissociated. To start, intimate relationships may or may not be secure. An abused child or adult may love the abuser but not feel secure with him or her. A child may be attached, feel secure with many people, but love only one of them. In the domain of psychopathology, to think that the infinite forms and variety of neuroses and psychopathology emerge from failure to feel secure in early relationships is foolishly constrictive. Aren’t there individuals with personality disorders or depression who were in safe and secure relationships during their childhood? And, following Hinde, could the quality of “normal” relationships, their enormous variety within and across individuals, be traced back to feelings of security. These and many other anomalies do not allow us to make attachment quality (A, B, C, D) equivalent to relationships.

Put another way, the processes of forming relationship and personality qualities and the processes of security making may overlap and normally do overlap, but they are not the same, and we need to begin to appreciate how they differ. A person can foster security and have a limited relationship, or have a highly differentiated relationship that does not provide a sufficient sense of security. For example, the unique being together of a child and his or her grandparents may not provide sufficient security for the child to stay overnight with them, but doesn’t their relationship have a specialness that is not the same as the security or qualities of the relationship the child has with his or her parents? So what is it that grandparents or parents or anyone in a relationship does that leads to differentiated relationships?

Attachment theory emphasizes sensitive caretaking as the process underlying the development of relationships, but for me it does not seem adequate to account for the varieties of normal and abnormal, the uniqueness and the specialness of relationships. Sensitivity is a process of appropriately responding to the child’s needs and intentions. A basic need of a child is to feel secure; at its base, sensitivity is a way of being with a child that reduces fears and anxieties. Thus, sensitivity may be adequate for generating the categorical qualities of relationships. But granting the security-enhancing function of sensitivity, it is still not adequate to the task of accounting for the qualities of relationships because it is one-sided and does not fully recognize the self-organized and active role of the infant in the relationship—that is, what the infant brings to relationship formation. Importantly, sensitivity is also not sufficiently rich, as conceptualized or studied, to generate anything new or as variegated as the qualities and varying intensities of relationships. Indeed in van Ijzendoorm’s (1995) review of sensitive caretaking, as empirically studied, it does not even seem adequate to account for the development of the different categories of attachment: van IJzendoorm’s sensitivity gap. Thus I think a more variegated and nuanced process is needed, and I think that the process of meaning making, of creating something together, is possibly that process.

Meanings come in infinite multileveled polysemic forms, all of which are aimed at increasing complexity or coherence. When meaning making is successful, new meanings are cocreated, new ways of being together are created, and these qualities are incorporated into the states of consciousness, the ways of being of the individual. Think of all the times when we talk about a person whom we love that we begin by saying “We used to do blank together.” The blanks are infinite and different for each person and each relationship. And they lead to a variety and subtlety feelings in each individual and between them, and further differentiation of ways of being together.

By contrast, when meaning making fails to increase complexity, it is generally because the meaning-making processes have been saddled with the aim of maintaining current levels of complexity and staving off dissipation. The experiential consequences of not making new meanings within oneself or with others are damaging and invariably accompanied by negative affects (Tronick, 1989, 2003). Failure comes with a feeling of constriction and immobilization. There may even be a feeling of fear because new resources are not being appropriated and the individual’s sense of organization becomes threatened. In the extreme, a feeling of annihilation may be experienced. “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m coming apart!” There can be a failure of the relationship, a constriction and limitation of ways of being together. These feelings lead to meaning-making processes of any sort that will maintain the individual’s current level of complexity and coherence. And critically, the meanings made may be desperate and out of touch with reality or the self, yet they are infinite in variety and related to the unique way in which the individual self-organizes. These desperate meanings lead to problematic meaning making in dyadic relationships, particularly with those who are often the source of the senselessness. Such desperation can generate a variety of remarkable personality organizations and psychopathologies. Think of the chronically traumatized child who self-organizes dissociated states and a bizarre sense of self and others to maintain some semblance of coherence; or children of pathological or drug-dependent parents who cannot make sense of their ways of being with their parents, yet must make sense in some way in order to keep functioning; or the children of narcissistic parents, who in trying to make sense of how to be with the parent, have to give up their own feelings and intentions or else face a devastating emotional dismissal.

Implications for Therapy

This biopsychological multilevel view of meaning making has many implications for therapeutic processes. For me, therapy is a process of changing individuals’ biopsychological state of consciousness, their sense of themselves in relation to the world. To start, one can ask what biopsychological domains does the therapist work in; that is, what level of meaning must be addressed to induce change in a patient’s state of consciousness? In the Boston Process of Change Group (BPCG; Stern et al., 1998; Tronick, 1998), we argued that the change process could be found in the “something more,” rather than in insight. The “something more” was the domain of the implicit. This argument was somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect for several reasons. Adults and children make meaning explicitly with the use of language. Words, insights, and cognitions in awareness are elements in an individual’s state of consciousness. Working on changing a patient’s explicit sense of his or her place in the world can produce change. Think of the varieties of cognitive therapies and insight-oriented therapies. Meaning-making processes also affect one another, so even if a problematic meaning were located outside the explicit domain of language or narrative (e.g., the memory of a trauma, an emotional state unlinked from an episodic memory), changing the narrative meaning—the explicit—will have “downward” causal effects on other levels of meaning. Of course, the inverse is true as well. Working on levels of meaning such as emotional meaning or bodily meanings can lead to changes in a patient’s state of consciousness and have effects on his or her explicit sense of self. This perspective suggests that all levels of meaning affect all other levels of meaning—which is likely the case. But we can also ask if, at times, one or another domain should be privileged for therapeutic focus.

The answer is hardly simple and likely still unknown, but we can perhaps find some guidance in a multileveled biopsychological approach. With any patient, it would seem necessary to evaluate the level of what is problematic in his or her state of consciousness. Is it, as a cognitive therapist might argue, in the patient’s automatic thoughts? Or is it, as a relational therapist might propose, a problem in the individual’s way of being with others? Or is it an emotional issue? Trauma is often treated with talk therapy, yet van der Kolk (1994; van der Kolk, McFarlane, & Waisaeth, 1994) argues forcefully that the problem is “located” in bodily processes and that talk or relational therapy is not enough to induce change. He goes even further—and I think with some hyperbole—to say that the relationship is not important for trauma-healing bodily change processes.

Thinking of us in the multilevel meaning-making camp suggests that the therapy ought to be specifically (or at least, better) fitted to the level of the problem. Emotional issues may need to be addressed using an emotion-focused experiential therapeutic approach; traumatic issues that distort bodily (e.g., autonomic) functioning may be best changed using body-focused or somatic techniques; and distorted self-narratives that constrict other meaning-making systems may require work in the explicit domain of talk psychotherapy.

Of course, problems do not come in compartmentalized forms because, over time, initial causes affect other levels. Thus, what is most likely is not only that therapeutic work may need to take place in multiple domains, but the domains addressed initially may need to change over the course of the therapy. Initial work may focus on feelings of security and anxiety regulation, whereas later work may focus more on memorial processes and associations. Pat Ogden’s approach with trauma patients focuses on bodily processes, though not exclusively, and it seems to me her focus changes as the patient changes (Ogden et al., 2006). The principle may be that, whatever domain is being worked on, the therapeutic input may need to be fitted to that level (Sander, 1977). In particular, it may be that the therapeutic input that fits what the level is “designed” to process is likely to be most effective in inducing change: Emotions may most effectively change emotions, bodily processes change bodily processes. But again, the “fittedness” cannot be exclusive of other inputs.

A related implication of the limitations of one domain of meaning making excluding other domains is that the therapist and patient may need to be in shared states of meaning making to be receptive to meanings made by the other and to cocreate new meanings. Limiting the variety of receptive states to only one or another state may preclude an exchange of meaning and lead to a feeling of not being heard by the patient and confusion for the therapist. For example, working in an explicit insight-oriented approach may be facilitated when the therapist and the patient are in focused cognitive states, whereas working on an emotional issue may be facilitated by the therapist being in a state that allows for emotional resonance. More generally, as suggested by the work of T. Ogden (1994) and Bion (1972), the range of states of the therapist and of the patient and therapist working together may need to be expanded.

There is an implication about a multilevel view of meaning that may be disquieting—it is for me: Not only may there be meanings that are out of awareness, but there may be meanings that are not possible to bring into awareness. Bollas (1987) writes about the unthought known, implying that the unknown can eventually be named, and that an emotion or event that is deeply hidden away can be brought into awareness. The second possibility here is more extreme: There may be meanings that are in our state of consciousness and affect our way of being in the world but that cannot be known. A meaning-making process such as an emotional process affected by early experiences that shapes the form emotions can take, is unknowable. Even if we were to extract an explicit account of how early experience distorts a plastic meaning-making system, the sculpting experience would remain unknowable. For example, early experiences of loss that bias the reactivity of the parasympathetic system, leaving one fearful and hypervigilant, are out of awareness. However, certain meanings being unknowable does not mean that meaning cannot be worked on, but they can be, in multiple ways. Bodily processes can be retuned with body-oriented therapies, and emotional regulation and experiencing can be shifted through emotional and relational experiences, and by the interplay of other forms of meaning.

There are reciprocal or parallel effects for therapists and how we think about therapy. One is the obvious: There are “unknowables” for the therapist. These unknowables affect how the therapist interacts with the patient and affect the therapist’s countertransference. Therapists may have to do what they do without necessarily understanding why they do it, because the reasons, historical or dynamic or otherwise, for what they do might not be knowable. An implication is that therapeutic work might be going on for reasons that are not knowable, yet this unknowable work could be an essential part of the change process. I find this an especially disquieting idea.

What are the reasons for meaning being unknowable? Our use of language, in part, accounts for the unknowable. Language dominates the therapeutic experience in many ways. Narratives, for example, are post session accounts that cannot possibly capture the flow of a therapeutic session for several reasons. The narrative structure is imposed on the session without recognition that the session did not have to unfold the way it did. It could have gone differently. Narratives lose the reality of unpredictablity by trying to maintain a canonical form with a beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, the therapist, in narrating the session, has an investment in presenting the session as having worked, in terms of his or her effectiveness. Another form of colonization by language is the demand for the explicit: It robs emotions, and other forms of meaning, of their richness. One cannot assert that words such as sadness, anger, or joy, ascribed to a patient, can capture the flow of experience, no less its thickness and resonances. Less recognized as an issue but nevertheless important is the argument that because language is best at capturing the explicit, it privileges the reception of the explicit and loses, or at least downplays, the meanings made in other domains. Although we often say, “Of course, this account of the session is missing so much,” we move on quickly and hardly attempt to take the missing meaning into account.

There are also deeper reasons why certain meanings are unknowable that are unrelated to language and the explicit, but to the multilevel process of meaning making. As I argue here, meaning is multileveled, such that much meaning is not exchanged in the explicit: Much of that exchange is already out of awareness, and, to make things worse, some of these meanings are not knowable. Yet, these forms of meaning have powerful effects on the patient’s and therapist’s states of consciousness and on their cocreation of meaning. The totality of the polymorphic and polysemic flow is part of the change process, because all the forms of meaning are part of the process of meaning making. Thus, we are unavoidably engaged in therapeutic processes, some of which are unknown, but perhaps knowable, and some of which may be unknowable. It seems that at least part of the change process is inherently cryptic because of the limitations of what we, as biopsychological beings, are able to know and bring into awareness.

Many questions and issues emerge if we accept this idea of cryptic processes and multilevel meanings of meaning making. One is, How is it that therapeutic processes, be they emotional, relational, dynamic, cognitive, or whichever, seem to demonstrate that their putative change mechanisms work when they are studied? One current answer is that the quality of the (therapeutic) relationship is the agent of change, whatever the particular therapy model. However, that doesn’t tell us very much because the qualities of the relationship are not specified and seldom is any alternative evaluated against the relational hypothesis; it is a default explanation. Putting aside the often horrific quality of the research and its self-serving nature, the likelihood is that whatever process is hypothesized as the change process under investigation (e.g., insight, schema change), in the actual session, moment by moment and over sessions, the change process involves, intertwines, and co-occurs with other levels of meaning that do not enter into the theory’s explicit self-accounting. A CBT researcher may claim that the change seen in a case is related to getting rid of automatic thoughts, but it is unlikely that that riddance has operated independently of other meaning-making processes, such as emotional exchanges and regulatory processes. The tyranny of theories is such that they leave out of consideration of other possible change processes. One simple way to put this—and we have known this for some time—is to say that the linkages between theories and actual practice are weak, loose, even nonexistent.

Beyond the Moment by Moment

What might be the change process and what does it look like in the moment by moment and over time? In the BPCG, we argued for the importance of looking at the “something more” of therapy, with the “something more” referring to implicit change processes of meaning. I think this idea is very powerful. However, we need to recognize that meaning making is multileveled and far richer than the dichotomy of the implicit and the explicit. Thus, I think we need to see is that the what that changes are states of consciousness that are assemblages of multiple levels of meaning and that change processes need to work at the totality of these levels. Fosha’s (2000, 2001, 2002; see Chapter 7, this volume) accelerated experential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) model and Bion’s (1972) work emphasize the need to work at many levels to generate coherence in self-and dyadically organized states of consciousness. But what does such work look like?

In the BPCG we used mother–infant research as a guide and mutual regulation model (Tronick, 2007) and dyadic states of consciousness to organize our thinking about the therapeutic process. We did this in part because infants lack the explicit and because their moment-by-moment exchanges have been carefully studied. However, when we turned to examine analytic therapeutic exchanges, we actually operated in the domain of the explicit. We took case reports and narratives and did text analyses, though we spoke as if we were in and analyzing the domain of the implicit. Furthermore, even if we had not been only in the domain of the explicit and were doing some work in the implicit (they do overlap some), we certainly were not in the multileveled domains of meaning that are simultaneously present in the analytic exchange, or any other therapeutic interchange, for that matter. The problem of being in the realm of the explicit and using language and narratives permeated much of our work, yet the problem seems to go unrecognized (Boston Process of Change Group, 2002). Thus, we claimed a theoretical evidence linkage, but at most it was an enticing metaphor. One possible way out of this dilemma is to measure other domains of meaning making, such as relational psychophysiology during therapeutic sessions (Ham & Tronick, 2009), and to actually look at what goes on in the moment during different therapies (Safran & Muran, 2003). The experientially oriented theories of Ogden et al. (2006), Fosha (2000), Johnson (2004), and Hughes (2007) use video to track the moment-by-moment process of exchange. This method certainly should prove to be enlightening, though we must be cautious and wonder about how much of the unknown the recording can capture or how much we will be able to actually see.

But there is also something that goes on beyond the moment and becomes a constraint on a way that meaning is made. It is how the past is formed and how it becomes a constraint on the present. Again borrowing from microanalytic analyses of mother–infant interactions, the BPCG focused on the moment by moment as if it were the only time unit of the change process. But there isn’t only the present moment, and furthermore, other meanings constrain the present moment. From a dynamic systems theory perspective, there are changes that occur in real time that may be highly unstable, but with reiteration become increasingly stable. They become the constraints that operate on the range of real-time possibilities and on future directions. An analogy is to think of how drops of rain (moment by moment) come to shape a landscape; and with the shaping, the pathways in the landscape (constraints of the past) where the rain can flow become increasingly limited; however, at the same time and over time, these pathways continue to be shaped by the rain (Granic, 2006).

Therapy operates moment by moment, constrained by how the reiterated moments have shaped the landscape of states of consciousness, and by ongoing reciprocal effects of moments and constraints. Constructs such as “representations of interactions that have been generalized” (RIGS; Stern, 1977), model scenes (Lachmann & Beebe, 1999), transference, internal working models (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978), self–object–emotion configurations (Fosha, 2000), and such, when not seen as fixed or reified but as constraints that operate on the present, are extremely valuable. To emphasize a point, it is important to remember that they also continue to be changed by what is going on in the present (Lachmann & Beebe, 1999; Stern, 1977).

The work of Freeman (1994) provides guidance on how to use these ideas to deal with the relations between the present moment and past constraints. Freeman has shown that the electroencephalography (EEG) activation pattern for an odor in the olfactory cortex of the rabbit is different each time it is experienced. Second, different odors nonetheless produce activation patterns and responses that are differentiated from one another. Third, when a new odor is introduced, the organization of all the individual EEG patterns of the previously experienced odors and the overall olfactory cortical pattern are changed. The specific patterns and the overall patterns operate as constraints, yet they are constantly changing such that there are no fixed patterns or archetypes. Nonetheless, the response to an odor is veridical, that is, the rabbit finds the food or (usually) avoids the predator. Freeman’s interpretation is that there is a dynamic array of olfactory activation patterns that reciprocally influence one another. This array of patterns is contextualized in a changing overall gestalt of the olfactory cortical space that allows for the recognition of different odors. Though not part of Freeman’s account, an assemblage of activation patterns in response to a set of odors from a particular terrain could be thought as the rabbit’s integrated knowledge of its place in the world; that is, as a state of consciousness reflecting the rabbit’s meaning making.

I applied Freeman’s thinking to relationships and what I called relational activation patterns (RAPS; see Tronick, 2003), and here I would like to apply it to one particular polymorphic form of meaning, namely, the emotions. Applying Freeman’s model to emotions is easier than applying it to relationships because Freeman’s work is based on the olfactory system, which has many meaningful emotional consequences (Panksepp, 1998a). Emotions, and what might be thought of as emotional activation patterns (EMAPs) in the brain, are activated by a variety of internal and external events. EMAPs are dynamically assembled in a functional emotional meaning-making multiloci and multilevel network (e.g., the autonomic nervous system, limbic system, cortical areas, mirror networks: Schore, 2001, 2003a, 2003b; Freeman, 2000) that creates emotional meanings. As with the assembling of many activation patterns of odors for a particular terrain, an EMAP is not a fixed form but one that changes in relation to other EMAPs, to its own reiteration, and to the overall gestalt of EMAPs in the emotion meaning-making network. That is, as Freeman would see it, in the process of making emotional meaning, much of the brain operates as a whole over time and reciprocally affecting itself.

This conceptualization of EMAPs is both dynamic and specific. Dynamically, each time infants experience a particular event, their EMAPs and their assemblage change in an analogous way to the change in the activation pattern of the reexperienced odor. As a consequence “all” of the infants’ emotional meanings are changed. In addition, when an EMAP is reinvoked by an event, the change is not divorced from its past. Rather, it is influenced by the integrated assembling of the meaning of emotions of already existing EMAPs and their gestalt; that is, the raindrops of emotional meaning are influenced (and influence) by the emotional landscape on which they fall. Thus, EMAPs are subject to a host of changes that make each emotional experience dynamically singular (unique, but not fixed and forever static) and capable of influencing other emotional meanings and other levels of meaning in unique ways.

Infant Emotional Dynamics

A final implication of multilevel meaning for the study of emotion is that there are emotional psychodynamics in infants. At a straightforward level, there are multiple emotions and multiple other elements of meaning in states of consciousness that can have conflicting purposes and meanings at one point of time and over time. Angry emotions come in conflict with inhibitory regulatory processes. Furthermore, emotional meanings in the moment may not fit well with the Gestalt of the individual’s emotional landscape. A depressed emotional landscape channels the pleasurable meaning of joy into a preworn landscape of withdrawal and sadness or neutral affect. These conflicting meanings make for the messiness of states of consciousness, and their resolution may generate something new, but the conflict may linger. But, again, the landscape is not fixed, and chronic exposure to joyfulness, with reiteration, is likely to shift and change the emotional landscape over time. Or as Main has shown, a “good” relationship can shift the insecurity of past traumatic relationships into a more secure domain (Main, 2000).

A more intriguing possibility is the presence of a dynamic conflict among meanings in infants. To avoid theoretical conflicts here, I would like to think of a dynamic conflict in a most general and typical psychodynamic manner. In the unconscious, there are thoughts or representations that are intolerable that have to be kept out of consciousness. Given that meaning is multileveled, any and all of these levels can contain meanings that clash with meanings at the same or other levels. The dynamic conflict to which I refer would be a conflict among polymorphs of meanings; the polymorphs might be subjected to some of the classical analytic mechanisms for keeping them out of consciousness (e.g., denial), or to powerful experiential mechanisms that are unique to each individual, or to mechanisms we do not yet understand. Consideration of the unknowable meanings and their effects on other forms of meanings makes this hypothesized dynamic conflict among polymorphs of meaning even more complicated and likely more powerful. The infant experiencing an approach–avoidance conflict freezes and cannot move in an organized direction, and experiences terror. One consequence of this hypothesis is the recognition that, even though infants do not have the usual array of explicit and representational processes that are thought to generate dynamic conflicts, they do have meanings that can come into conflict. Think of the love and hate Melanie Klein wrote about or the separation–individuation conflicts identified by Mahler (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). One can only wonder what regulatory or “defense” mechanisms infants and young children truly possess for coping with their intolerable conflict.

I would hypothesize that these conflicts are formative and constitutive of psychological issues in infancy and childhood and, perhaps, affect the whole lifespan. How these conflicts are dealt with constitutes one of the fundamental processes that shapes the emotional landscape. Furthermore, I would hypothesize that parents are affected by these dynamic conflicts of their infants, and that infants are able to take on and participate in the dynamic conflicts of their parents. Such reciprocal effects during infancy are likely to have longlasting consequences because they become part of how the infant qua child and parent interact over time, so they are chronically reiterated, deeply cutting the “landscape.”

Conclusion

Thinking about meanings and meaning making in a temporal and biopsychological multileveled way is distinctly different from the ways in which we typically think about meaning as symbolized, explicit, and categorical. By doing so, I believe that we overcome some important issues, including the conundrums over mind and body, mind and brain, and brain and body. Seeing these myriad biopsychological processes that make up the whole individual (the whole system and all its components) as meaning-making systems provides a unifying conceptualization that makes sense of the individual’s place in the world.

In particular, we can better understand the emotions as a system of meaning, along with cognition and other levels of meaning, without having to make one or another preeminent. We can also focus on what kinds of meanings each is able to constitute. At the same time, we do not get caught up by sequentially localized models of meaning making, but are able to work with the apparently paradoxical interplay of localized functions and the gestalt of contexts. In a multileveled view, local functions are always contextualized by the whole, and the whole is affected by the local. The same view helps explain the moment-by-moment experience and the integration of moments into larger units of meaning that, in turn, affect meaning making in the moment. Lastly, it opens up a far broader way of understanding therapeutic processes and demands the inclusion of multileveled interventions with a full recognition of the known and unknown meanings and processes that are at play.