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Iréne Matthis's paper appeared in Part 2, Volume 81, and was placed on the website for discussion on 26 April, 2000. The aim of this paper (presented at the 41st IPA Congress, Chile, 1999), was to transmit to the psychoanalytic reader Freud's two fundamental hypotheses as presented in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940) and to present a contemporary sketch for the metapsychology of affect. She opens her paper by saying
It will not be easy reading, as not only will the task raise philosophical and epistemological issues with which psychoanalysts do not always feel at home, it will also ask the reader to adopt a perspective on conscious and unconscious processes that may initially feel somewhat counter-intuitive (p. 216).
I agree that this paper and the subsequent discussion during May and June 2000 were not ‘easy reading’but they gave psychoanalysts an opportunity to revisit controversies concerning earlier metapsychological formulations of affect and its unconscious processes. This is primarily a theoretical paper that cites neurophysiological research rather than a clinical one that puts forward psychoanalytic observations.
For Matthis, affect is a psychological concept lying on the frontier between the mental and the somatic. She finds support in Freud's second hypothesis in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940), where he writes that psychology should look to the somatic processes to see the true essence of what is psychical. From this baseline the concepts of feeling, emotion and affect are differentiated and defined. Feelings and emotions are seen as two psychically perceived expressions of affective processes. The concept of affect is then defined by Matthis as an affective matrix linked to a predisposition of the bodily systems to react in a certain way to internal or external stimuli. The affective matrix can find expression either in psychically perceived affects—feelings and emotions—or in physically perceived ‘affect-equivalents’—psychosomatic symptoms and so