feltolkning

Feltolkning is a term used in Swedish and Norwegian to describe the interpretation of feelings or affect in response to a text, artwork, performance, or situation. The concept centers on how observers experience and articulate the emotional and sensory dimensions of what they encounter, rather than focusing solely on factual content or authorial intention.

In aesthetics and critical theory, feltolkning refers to the reader’s, viewer’s, or listener’s emotional reception and the meanings they derive from a work through affective response. It emphasizes subjective experience, empathy, and the ways in which a work resonates with personal history and culturally conditioned feelings. In this sense it complements more formal analyses that prioritize structure, themes, or historical context.

In psychology, pedagogy, and therapy, feltolkning can describe processes by which individuals interpret their own or others’ emotional states and bodily sensations to construct meaning, regulate behavior, or guide decision-making. It is often linked to approaches that value lived experience, phenomenology, and reflective practice.

Different from purely cognitive or text-centered interpretation, feltolkning foregrounds affect and the inseparable link between perception and emotion. Critics warn that it can be highly subjective and influenced by personal or cultural bias, so it is often used in conjunction with more objective methods.

See also: hermeneutics, phenomenology, affect theory, interpretation, emotion.