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For feeling has to him imparted powerThat through growing faculties of senseDoth like an agent of the one great MindCreate, creator and receiver both,Working but in alliance with the worksWhich it beholds.
It is customary for everyone starting to write on affects from a broad perspective to recall that there is no present satisfactory theory of affects, and to say that all the same the census of the theories is by the present time more or less around a hundred.
Such a field of research is so full of possible confusions that it is important to examine carefully definitions and basic assumptions. For instance, one can compare the different statements of Laplanche and Pontalis, Fine and Moore, and Rycroft, written in approximately the same year,1 which show significant differences of perspective.
Instead of building a realistic portrait of affects, one has to give priority to the problems which hamper our understanding because of our difficulty in organizing our conceptions. Therefore accepting that our description has to give up the aim of similarity to what it is dealing with, I prefer to use conceptual tools whose value makes it possible for us to link what one supposes are fundamental aspects born from our thinking about affects from a psychical point of view. One will then try to build a representation of affect which may stand as a psychical construct. In fact what I am