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I appreciate very much this new generalized differentiation of the psychoanalytic concept of adaptation given by Joffe and Sandler which tries especially to clarify the role of affects in relation to the development of the representational world. In the development of psycho-analytic concepts the total link of affects with the drives was partially removed. Following the ideas of Joffe and Sandler it seems necessary to distinguish quite clearly between all functions, structures, and mechanisms that subserve adaptation on the one hand and the criteria, which are really experienced, and which lead to a special individual and different utilization of these structures, functions, mechanisms and energies, on the other.
A difficulty in our discussion may be, similar to the use of other terms in different languages, to locate the term "affect", which is occasionally used together with emotions and feelings. I fully agree with the term "feeling states" used by Joffe and Sandler; but after I went through the literature on the psychoanalytic theory of affects, I found myself a bit confused about the synonymous use of affect, emotion and feeling, which seem to describe quite different areas of psychodynamics.
Freud points out that the phenomenon of tension and discharge should not be regarded in their quantitative aspects only. It seems more adequate to realize the change of quality in different quantities of the same drive tension. Following Rapaport's systematization of the psychoanalytic theory of affects, one can envisage a hierarchy of motivations leading from drives to interests and special preferences. What Freud called "Das Binden der Affekte" and Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein stressed as "neutralization of mobile energy" appears to be a very complicated continuum of affects between