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 this analytic chapter, I shall trace the development of Freud’s ideas on affect. Several stages may be distinguished:
from Studies on Hysteria to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900);
from The Interpretation of Dreams to the Papers on Metapsychology (1915);
from the Papers on Metapsychology to the article ‘Fetishism’ , the subject being taken up again in the article ‘The splitting of the ego in the process of defence’ .
After 1927, there are few important references to affect.1
The most important text on affect after the second topography is Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. I felt that it was logical to group together Freud’s various views on anxiety from 1894 to 1932, by separating them from the other texts.
The history of affect, like that of psychoanalysis itself, is closely bound up with hysteria. But, before the appearance of the ‘Preliminary Communication’, Freud, in the entry on hysteria for the Encyclopedie de Villaret of 1892, introduced the notion of modifications in the distribution of the quantities of excitation in the nervous system. What we are dealing
with here is more cathectic energy than the quota of affect as such, but the second is included in the first, as the following quotation shows:
Alongside of the physical symptoms of hysteria, a number of psychical disturbances are to be observed, in which at some future time the changes characteristic of hysteria will no doubt be found but the analysis of which has hitherto scarcely been begun. These are changes in the passage and in the association of ideas, inhibitions of the activity of the will, magnification and suppression of feelings, etc.—which may be summarized as changes in the normal distribution over the nervous system of the stable amounts of excitation.2
Freud attaches more value to this hypothesis than to the description of the hysterical temperament that