Emotions and Object Relations

The Theory of emotion has been one of the great tangles of the field of psychology, and I am only too aware of the perils of intruding into this special domain and picking one's way through it, if it be done in the attempt to satisfy the requirements of the academician or the laboratory experimenter.

On the other hand, in analytical psychology we view the emotions as the very matrix of growth and development and the well-spring of meaning and involvement in life, and therefore we would be at fault if we allowed ourselves to be so overawed by the difficulty of theories of emotion as to allow ourselves to be reduced to respectful silence on the issue. Doctor Hillman (1960) has done a superb piece of work in covering the topic from A to Z and putting the varieties of formulations into a balanced perspective which should only make it easier for others to proceed with investigations, knowing the place of their conclusions in the total picture of the field.

My own work with the topic of schizophrenia has made it necessary for me to contend with the psychology of the affects at every point, since that is at the heart of the syndrome. Many years of this clinical work, combined with the formulating and teaching of the psychology of the complexes, have enabled me to formulate a theory of the action of the emotions in everyday life; I see this contribution, then, as an addition to the general theory of emotion already grown so complicated.

What is already clear in Jung's work on the emotions and therefore in our current, generally accepted model of the psyche, is that the emotions are the activity of the unconscious, the non-ego (Jung, 1907). This is in marked contradistinction to psychoanalytic theory that finds the emotions to be part of the functions of the ego (Brenner, 1955); in that model, the classic emotions are those of fight and flight, or anger and fear, and the ego is the entire zone of the psyche concerned with adaptation. Jung, on the other hand, pointed to the obvi