Conceptions of Affect

By way of summary, it can be said that Freud's study of affect started from a point of view founded on coherent symptomatic groupings of neurotic symptoms, as a criterion for a discriminating study of the different vicissitudes of representations and affect, in the realms of the Conscious and Unconscious. As his work unfolded and his clinical experience grew, he progressively came to reverse the balance, in his final drive theory and the second topographical model, in favour of affects in relation to representations, as sell as extending the role of anxiety and differentiating aspects of it. Above all, he began to think of the drive as more and more independent

of the idea of content. If it is true that he came to recognize the value of the notion of quality (in pleasurable and unpleasurable states) late in the day; the economic point of view, on the other hand, was to be constantly recalled, so that its importance should not be neglected. Finally, his last period of work was to be marked by an insistence on the primitive distress of the young child, on the general psychological immaturity of the ego at birth and on a shift of emphasis towards the primary object, which, in the first part of his work, was conceived primarily as an object of pleasure (and a force for repression) and subsequently became an object of survival, for building the ego up against the disorganizing power of the drives when it failed against them. Nevertheless, Freud remains faithful to the end to the opposition of representation and affect.