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ARE AFFECTS discharge or tension phenomena, or both? Should they rather be conceptualized as ego phenomena, signals for defense action and adaptation? Are they experiences of the self or functions of the ego? Are motives and appetites affective processes, affect derivatives, or parallel to the affect functions of the ego? What is the role of conflict, of cognition, of object relations? Should the psychoanalytic theory of affect concern itself more with content, meaning, and communication than with energy, drives, and functions? These are the questions Peter Hartocollis asked in his introduction to the topic, questions that psychoanalytic theory has failed to answer with any degree of cogency and consistency.
These questions have "tantalized" psychoanalytic theorists since Freud's original equation of affect with instinctual energy, but so far the answers have not amounted to a well-integrated theory of affect. The failure of psychoanalytic theory to come up with good answers in the area of affects stems from the fact that some of the very basic metapsychological concepts, such as instinct, psychic energy, drive cathexis and countercathexis, psychic structure, the ego, the self, are yet to defined comprehensively. "These are boundary concepts that stand or fall on the question of relevance to data from the clinical field, as well as from developmental psychology, neurophysiology, psychopharmacology and ethology," Hartocollis added, implying any such definition will only be a working definition to accommodate current