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Since 1983 we have collaborated on the development of a model of the mind to understand affect. We seek to be comprehensive in treating the psychoanalytic evidence and scientific in approach by using recently developed tools from the theory of dynamical systems. In this chapter, we summarize some of the psychoanalytic ideas that guide our thinking, show how we model affect, and demonstrate the benefits of our approach.
By affects we mean subjectively experienced feelings; an affect-response is any response to a stimulus that one ordinarily expects to evoke affects. We call such a stimulus an affect-evoking stimulus. In fact, affect-responses are enormously varied, and indeed, an affect-evoking stimulus may produce no affects at all in certain circumstances. So we ask: what determines the specific response to an affect-evoking stimulus, and what, in particular, enables the feeling response to occur? We want to know what the crucial variables are and how they act, separately and in concert.
Our model accomplishes the following: First, it synthesizes disparate clinical material in a coherent framework. This framework is visual in form; it allows us to grasp the situation as a whole and to see how the different aspects of affect-response are related to each other. Second, it gives us insights about affect in the form of unexpected predictions and new therapeutic strategies, all empirically testable. By having such descriptive and predictive power, our model meets the most stringent demands of a scientific theory.