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For the honour conferred upon me by your invitation to speak to-day on the theory of affects I am, I think, indebted to the fact that my researches link up with trains of thought initiated long ago by Freud. This demonstrates the truth that not only in our analytic therapy do we always go back to childhood but that every science must remain conscious of its beginnings. It is not a matter of making a dry, so to speak philological, inquiry into its origins but of once more taking up an old line of thought, which may daily and hourly assist us to bring our practical endeavours to fruition. At the very beginning of his work Freud pointed out the importance of 'strangulated affects' but, since then, he has seldom dealt with affects as a whole. He turned his attention first to the theory of instinct and later to the formation of the super-egos. To-day, however, I propose to ask the following questions: What are these affects of which the vicissitudes may be so important? How do they originate? What is the usual course of their development?
From both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic standpoint the problems with which we have to deal concern a part of the ego. For, whilst the id-forces, the instincts, maintain a continuous or rhythmic flow, corresponding to the vital processes at work in our organs, affects represent reactions to stimuli from the external world. Affects are typical responses to typical demands, responses handed down from one generation to another in the form of potentialities. That is to say, they do not belong to the personal ego which comes into existence in every individual life but are an important part of the impersonal ego.
When we wish to explain some natural phenomenon, we are obliged to study its origin. So in our present inquiry we must not begin with that final form of the affect, which is almost entirely confined to the