The problem with the way we communicate our emotions and try to delve more deeply into them, is that we tend to leave the emotion itself out. Mostly what we are doing when we are investigating an emotion is surrounding it, giving it a clearer background. That background can extend, in classical psychoanalysis, to the cradle, but as for the emotion we are experiencing itself, it can somehow not have been touched. We may both come to feel better about what we have done [in talking about it], but generally what will have been accomplished is a sort of dissipation and distraction.

C. K. Williams, “Poetry and Consciousness”