Chapter 5 Affect and the Two Topographical Models

The diversity, entanglement and complexity of the problems seem to make any attempt at theoretical unification, if not impossible, at least hazardous. Nevertheless, I think it ought to be attempted.1

Depending on the texts, one finds in Freud two different definitions of the affect, whose compatibility presents a problem. In the first, the affect designates essentially a quantum, a quantity or sum of excitation ‘capable of increase, diminution, displacements and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body’.2

The electro-physiological orientation of the definition is not in doubt. Freud is here, at the outset of his work, still imbued with the preoccupations of his biological period. ‘The project for a scientific psychology’, not yet written, would be constructed around two hypotheses: the neurones and moving quantities. Here, then, affect corresponds to an energic allocation, that of a mobile, variable, transformable, dischargeable quantity. The free or bound state of this energy specifies very different kinds of functioning (primary and secondary processes). Later, the state of binding or unbinding will reflect the action of opposed instinctual groups: Eros or the destructive drives. Are there one or two new energies present, according to its link to Eros and the destructive drives? Should one consider that, depending on the case, a single energy is bound or unbound?

In the latter case, by what or by whom? Is the tendency to unification or to separation exterior to the energy, subjecting that energy to its action? One would then have to consider Eros and the destructive drives as endowed with properties that are place