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Any suppression of affect results in a bleaching of … experience … and thus to …
impoverishment of the quality of life (Demos, 2019, p. 137).
Just as the repeated suppression of affect is likely to result in psychic impoverishment, the fuller expression of affect can be a source of richness and vitality throughout a lifetime. But either the suppression or expression of affect takes place in the context of human relationships and is uniquely influenced by them. In particular the quality of interactions in the primary infant-caregiver relationship contributes to the very experiencing of affects in the newborn and can either make or break the infant’s later capacity to bear and to modulate feelings, especially those that are undesirable or painful.
Affects are the primary motivators in human experience (Demos, 1988, 1998, 2019). They give life its meaning (Tronick, 2007) and make us care about what happens (Demos, 2019). From birth onward the cumulative amassing of affective experience both positive and negative is what eventually organizes and coheres to form the earliest sense of self.
These are only a few of the insights to be found in Demos’ quietly passionate and masterful presentation of Silvan Tomkins’ work in her 2019 book, The Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. In this book Demos celebrates Tomkins’ ideas but also gives us so much more. She allows her own viewpoint, resonant with Tomkins’ but not identical to it, to shine through on every page as she articulates with an exquisite sense of balance the inextricable back-and-forth between the biologically programmed capacity for the full range of affects in every newborn child and the inescapable impact of the primary caregiver’s participation for better or worse in the child’s affective development. Thus we learn that the possibility for a full range of human affect is a given at birth but that the psychic competencies involved in tolerating and using one’s affects toward making su