Chapter 3 Affect in Clinical Structures

In the title of this chapter I speak advisedly of clinical structures. I shall not be dealing here, therefore, with affect in clinical practice, but rather of the place of the affect in various structures. For affect, as it presents itself in the psychical organization of this or that individual, is what is identified most readily with what is most irreducibly particular, most singularly individual about that individual. My approach could have taken the form either of a monograph in which an individual’s affective organization would be studied, but which would produce no general conclusions, or of an attempt to systematize the psychoanalytic field as a whole, considered from the point of view of affect. Since it seemed to me that I should try to elucidate a general problematic, without ignoring the dangers of a superficial examination of the question, I have chosen the second solution.

The principle of my study will be to define the situation of affect in the four great clinical forms that I have referred to as the four cardinal points of the compass. Indeed hysteria and obsessional neurosis structure my examination of the psychoanalytic field of the neuroses, rather as manic-depressive psychosis and schizophrenia structure the field of the psychoses. Reference to these nosographical entities is, for many, open to question. I should make it clear however that I refer to them not as ‘illnesses’ in the psychiatric sense of the term, but as forms of organization in which certain structural models are revealed with particular coherence. Those models, which Freud and Melanie Klein always used, constitute in a sense shapings of the Oedipal structure. They are defined not by their frequency, but by the significant character of the work of the psychical apparatus culminating in their fulfilment. They enable us to understand the atypical or incomplete structures, much more frequent than typical ones, by referring the second to the first. Hence the usefulness of this investiga