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I have chosen to approach the theme of the representation of affect in an attempt to take up once more certain of the ideas that I have expressed on this subject and to evaluate not only the relations between representation and affect, but the representative function of affect, in other words, to discover whether one can attribute to the affect a function of representation and how that function of representation may become part of our conception of the psyche.
I do not know whether I shall succeed in bringing more order and clarity to the subject, so difficult is it to define the nature of affect and to situate it in the unconscious. The true difficulty lies in its use of modes of thought that are fairly far removed from consciousness and the rationalizations of consciousness.
For me, it is no longer satisfactory to remain at the point at which my earlier work had brought me, namely, to distribute affect into two categories, one integrated in the chain of representations, and therefore having a value as signal, the other being a factor of traumatic disorganization, which takes up again the two forms of anxiety described by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. I should like to attempt an investigation that would go deeper. However, one must be aware that all reflection on representation must set out from the idea that the Freudian oeuvre is our representation. It is our representation because we operate on it in exactly the same way that representation operates on sense impressions; one constantly makes it drift into post-Freudian theoretical systems; and one is always obliged to go back to it, as if it were both an u nknown object of reference and the starting point of the drift as representation itself.