Conclusion

Despite the unquestionable progress made in our knowledge of affect, one is still waiting for a theory that would be unanimously accepted. One might well ask whether there will ever be such a theory. No doubt the obscurities surrounding the problem have something to do with this, but the nature of the phenomenon itself plays an even greater role. Whereas psychical phenomena relating to the intellect have aroused strong convictions that their solution was in sight, by resort to models inspired by cybernetics, artificial intelligence or computer science, rejecting outside the area of scientific investigation everything in the activity of the mind that did not satisfy the criteria that made it possible to approach it from this point of view—affectivity, in fact—until very recently one could not find equivalent theories that would take affectivity as their main focus and give rise to a general theory of psychic activity whose extension would be seen from this point of view. If at best there is a strong inclination to the idea of eliminating affective phenomena from the map of valid knowledge, there is even greater reticence to place affects in a dominant vertex from which the other concepts relating to psychical life would be ordered around it. Is this not because the very existence of affect and its supremacy over the whole psychical life would have something very wounding about it for our idea of mankind?

Even if one remains on the limited plane of the psychical aspects of affective life, the task is scarcely made any simpler. It is here that questions of method arise. It was hoped that salvation would come through greater attention being paid to the study of development and to the observation of babies, either alone or in relation to their mothers. But attention has not been paid to the fact that the advantage of a longitudinal systematics, spread out over time, entailed a concentration on external, behavioural aspects, which ran the risk of distorting our view of a p