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While sharing its title with the Kafka tale, Schachtel's Metamorphosis is a much more optimistic story. It describes the process of becoming a perceiving, feeling, remembering, thinking human adult. It may be that we have yet to fully examine and appreciate the far-reaching clinical applications of Schachtel's understanding of human development.
According to Schachtel, our story begins as infants eager to explore the world. Countering the Freudian emphasis on the drive toward a tensionless state, Schachtel focuses on the infant's active effort to encounter reality. Schachtel distinguishes two types of motivating affects: the embeddedness affects, which have as their goal the discharge of tension, and the activity affects, the eager, directed strivings. From infancy onward, our approach to life reflects some mixture of the pull to remain an embedded, safe, tensionless creature, and the pull to emerge as a separate, activity-seeking explorer.
This view of human motivation has several significant implications. First, it implies that for the human being, the stimulation impinging from reality is not necessarily either unpleasant, or useful only as a means toward a return to a tensionless state. Reality is not merely an obstacle or a means to an end, but can be an end in itself.
A further, and far-reaching implication of this vision of human striving is the picture it creates of the functions of the emotions, or affects. The emotions are not merely safety valves for letting off steam, or getting rid of unwanted tension. They can energize, direct, and maintain the activities that link the individual with the surrounding world.
A moment's reflection reveals some of the clinical implications of this approach. Consider, for example, our understanding of the addict's search for a tensionless oblivion. Is the addict's pathology an inadequacy at using other, more constructive means to reduce tension? Or is his aim itself, when so single-mindedly pursued, pathological? Schachtel's c