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Spezzano has written about soemthing essential in psychoanalysis, something that has been implicit in psychoanalytic thinking for a long time but has never been articulated as clearly as it is in this book. His position is that feelings are the basic units of human experience—“the core of human subjectivity” (p. 64)—and therefore deserve a central place in any general theory of psychoanalysis. He says that “the central and most radical argument of psychoanalysis is that human psychological life is, at its core, human affective life” (p. 113). Yet he also notes the long-standing tension in psychoanalytic theorizing between the “experiential centrality (in terms of how both analyst and anlysand think about their work together) and the “theoretical tangentialness” of affects. He explores the reason for this gap between “the (largely) implicit clinico-technical theories … and the formal official theories used” (p. 39), and attributes it in part to Freud's overvaluation of memory recall and intellectual insight as curative factors in analysis and to classical theory' maintaining that affects are “mere” drive derivatives and hence not worthy of study in their own right.
Spezzano takes an opposing point of view, which is that affect precedes drive, such that “affects give rise to relationships, and drives evolve out of the inerplay between them” (p. 112). He derives this from Freud's “signal theory” of affect and goes on to describe feeling “as crucial forms of information about the state of the self among its objects, as modes of communication, and as action predispositions” (p. 152). Spezzano cites Bion's quote that “feelings are the few things which analysts have the luxury of being able to regard as facts” (p. 35) and states that affects “constitute our fundamental categories of meaning” (p. 113). In other words, in some literal way, we are what we feel; human beings are defined by their unique patterning of affective responses to the various events of their lives. Thus