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A theoretical conception of the affect cannot escape historico-structural confrontation. This confrontation may be detected in psychoanalytic theory itself, as well as in psychoanalytic practice. One may posit a double opposition depending on the parameters of history and structure. On the one hand, the opposition between primary affects and secondary affects, the terms designating the primary and the secondary having to be understood in their historical and structural ambiguity. In the sense of a diachronic succession, the primary precedes the secondary; in that of a synchronic simultaneity, the primary co-exists with the secondary, the whole reflecting a double systematic differing in its mode of organization. By primary affect I shall denote both the earliest, the least elaborate affects, and the affects relating to a mode of organization that is opposed to a mode of secondary organization. Furthermore, it might be noted that the affect is always given in a constitutive bipolarity; thus to the pleasure-unpleasure dyad correspond other dyads, such as good and bad, enjoyment (jouissance) and pain, love and hate, right or wrong.
To the three points of view that constitute the Freudian metapsychology (dynamic, topographical, economic), others have been added: the genetic point of view and the structural point of view. In my opinion, these additions are not justified in so far as the history-structure opposition is present in each of the points of view that make up the metapsychology. If Freud did not differentiate them explicitly, it was because they formed part of the implicit approach of any theorization of psychoanalysis. However, one is obliged to separate them artificially in order to show, in relation to the affect, what each of them contains.
No notion is more directly linked to the historical dimension than the affect. When one thinks of what remains irreducibly childish, not to say infantile, in us, one thinks of