Feelings accomplish external and internal reduction in a single operation – that is their strength and their weakness. They reduce the possibilities of the environment by settling preference on one object, and accordingly at the same time establish internal possibilities of processing experience. The affective system, as one says, 'identifies' with its object. In allowing no alternatives either outside or inside, feelings are inelastic, fixed, non-transferable. They can only be reorganized by being destroyed and remade. Every breakdown of the emotional relationship would restore the crushing complexity of the world. Anxiety therefore lurks in the background of feeling and motivates the continuance of the relationship, if it receives any kind of confirmation.

DEFINE: Defines the affective system's dual function: external reduction (narrowing environmental options) and internal reduction (structuring experience), which paradoxically produces rigidity and anxiety-driven maintenance.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 288