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In the practice of our craft, we are aware — we are made aware, with no place to hide — of the emotions of our patients when these take over the analytic scene so that we cannot avoid the confrontation. We are learning more about the experience of countertransference. We have our great division in classification, Affective Disorders, as though all other conditions to which we give a classificatory name are not themselves affective disorders. Predominantly, we address ourselves to moods and emotions that demand attention as ailments and as what should be changed in the course of therapy — as something that should be made to go away. Thus, we deal with resentment and anger, with depression, and infrequently, to our awareness, with the moods of elation.
It is then astonishing that, in spite of the fact that affects are a universal experience for human beings and that we somehow recognize affects in each other (and, indeed, often in other kinds of living beings), we yet still lack adequate, explicit word definitions for affect, feeling and emotion. Webster is of little help, since we are given a run-around of the approximate equivalence of these terms: that affect is “feeling, emotion and desire, with an implication of their importance in determining thought and conduct.” Psychoanalysts and psychologists have recognized and addressed the problem, and so far have only recognized the impasse. Beginning with Freud, the basic importance of affects in the psyche has been confronted, discussed, but not yet clearly conceptualized.