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.
In the “Ego and the Id” Freud (1923) said, “Psychophysiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special position among the other objects in the world of perception …” (p. 25). He then proceeds to anchor the ego in the body with the phrase, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego”; adding in a footnote that “The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensation …” (p. 26). Thus Freud in no uncertain terms aligns psychoanalytic thought with what we know intuitively as he points out that ego functions, the executive operations of the psyche, are rooted in bodily experience.
Thus, in our daily lives, we use our bodies to feel our way to choices and decisions. Feelings of frustration and tension at the beginning of an enterprise give way to more pleasant feelings of novelty and surprise as problems are being solved, and at the end feelings of increasing skill, facility, and familiarity permit us to claim projects and solutions as our own doing. We know about affect and emotion as a subjective bodily given, a primary definitive aspect of our experience. The subjective emotional awareness of the stream of our bodily experience permits us to lay personal claim to action, choice, and decision, the kind of possessive familiarity that permits people to say “my choice” or “my decision.”
The relationship of the bodily perturbations to experienced affect has occupied thinking for as long as we have records. Because feelings are considered to represent the vital gist of experience, the conception of affect has served as an enigmatic projective screen, a screen with the power to capture the thinking of an age. Thus,