You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We will begin with a question: Should therapists use their own affects in interpreting the affects of their patients?
Over the years, as our technology has advanced, social critics have time and again voiced the worry that the machine age will eventually catapult us into an emotionally sterile world, a world without affect. That this fear is unfounded should be obvious, above all to the psychoanalyst. Affect is the substrate of our conscious and unconscious life. In Spitz's (1965) words, affect is the trailbreaker of all development. Perception, cognition, language, motor behavior — all of these unfold only in an affect-charged atmosphere, the atmosphere of the parent—child relationship. We do not simply learn to talk, but to talk to mother. We do not just crawl; we crawl to and away from mother. Thus all our capacities, as they develop, are ineradicably stamped with affect. And though, as adults, we may try to ban affect from certain areas of functioning, it invariably resurfaces. In Stanley Kubrick's film fantasy 2001: A Space Odyssey, there is a telling moment when the spaceship computer, Hal, refuses to obey the commands of one of the scientist-astronauts. Hitherto cold and businesslike, the scientist begins to plead desperately with the machine, begging it to respond. This is a supremely ironic situation. Even in a hypothetical future presumably cleansed of affect, even in the face of a machine devoid of affect, the human creature, under stress, reverts to affect.