David D. Olds's “Affect as a Sign System”

Dr. David Olds's paper1 on the possible application of a Peircean semiotics to psychoanalysis is particularly stimulating and explorative in its concluding two subsections. In these pages, Dr. Olds discusses three aspects of affect and their possible dissociations, and the import of the symbolization of affect. His discussions bring to the fore in explicit ways the possible value of a semiotic modeling of affect and, in the process, exemplify concretely the possible relevance of a semiotic point of view to psychoanalytic practice. I would like to suggest a salutary move: a semiotic reconstruction of his Peircean application that begins with these two subsections. In this reconstructed paper, the move would be from a descriptive analysis of the clinical semiotics operative in psychoanalytic practice to possible neurological–physiological semiotic correlates. The critical comments that follow are geared to that reconstructive effort and intended to be read as such—that is, as positive in their aim.

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As Olds intimates in speaking of “the possibility of a unified theory of mind and brain” (p. 82), and of the way a semiotic model “approaches” the question of “the necessary dualism in a world where there are irreducible dichotomies such as those between the animate and the inanimate, and between the mind and the brain,” the appeal of Peirce's semiotics lies in the fact that it is applicable across dichotomies (and academic divisions). Because it is basically a metaphysical system, it ostensibly lets one pass effortlessly from one level of reality to another— that is, from experience to physiology to brains … and back. In this sense, it is indeed a heuristic, precisely as Olds views it in the context of his study, and precisely as he intimates when he states that “we follow the flow of information; we attend to patterns and structures that are transformed as information travels in living organisms” (p. 83). The end result, however, is less th