Affects in Theory and Practice1

In the early days of psycho-analysis affect played a leading rôle in theory and in practice. Freud's first hypotheses were framed in terms of ideas rendered dynamic by their emotional charges. Thus, the hysteric was said to suffer from repressed painful reminiscences and cure was held to follow the recovery of these memories, together with the adequate discharge of the associated feelings. The essence of cure by catharsis was abreaction of affect. Psychic tension appeared first as feeling-tension, and conflict as conflict between ideas with incompatible feeling-charges. Soon, however, Freud's investigation of the repressed unconscious brought him up against problems of instinct. With the formulation of the libido theory and the conception of conflict as conflict between ego and sexual instincts, the ideo-motor terminology lapsed into disuse. To-day the language of instinct holds the field in theory. Thus, we speak of cathexes of objects rather than of the emotional charges of ideas and tend, in practice, to regard these two expressions as synonymous, though the precise relation between instinct and affect is by no means fully understood as yet. The modern concept of the three-fold structure of the mind is a concept of an unorganized id-reservoir of instinct out of which organized ego and super-ego systems are differentiated. We regard instinct as the source and stimulus of psychic activity. We regard mind as an apparatus for the regulation of instinct-tension and as the mediator between instinct and the outer world. We think of the development of mind as progressive organization, adaptation and modification of instinct. Nevertheless, we are also accustomed to think of development as progressive mastery of anxiety, an affect concept, and we do not hesitate to equate instinct-defence with defence against the emergence of intolerable affects. But, until quite recently, very little attention has been paid in theory to affects as such, apart from anxiety an