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ERNEST SCHACHTEL CONFRONTS US in his essay (1959) "On Affect, Anxiety, and the Pleasure Principle", with the terms "activityaffect" and "embeddedness-affect", notions which are developed in response to one deterministic Freudian assumption that affect and motoric discharge are mutually exclusive phenomena. Freud (1900), (1911) argues that an infant's restlessness, in the absence of the libidinal object, engenders an increase in drive tension which is measurable as affect; and that, in the presence of the drive object, there is motoric expenditure of instinctual energy, and, hence, no expression of affect. It is with this latter dictum that Schachtel differs. He postulates that affective expression exists in two reduced forms: affects which appear in coordinated, goal-directed actions and embrace, for example, feelings of "eagerness, zest and intentness" (p. 25). These he calls activity-affects. On the other hand, there exist affects arising from wholesale discharge of psychic energy, usually in service to the maintenance (or seeking) of some narcissistically nurtured state. These he terms embeddedness-affects.
Schachtel ultimately sees these affect states as the expressive aspect of personality, organized around active or embedded tendencies, and that the "self-as-organism" has the innate potential toward the pursuit of either developmental line. I believe his concerns here spring from one of the earliest and most persistent Freudian paradigms (deriving from the pleasure principle): that is, if it were not for the impingement of reality on the developing organism, there would be no stimulus toward the involvement of the organism with its environment, except in the most reactive-adaptive