Commentary on “Becoming Aware of Feelings”

Ever since Breuer (in Freud, 1895) observed that Anna O.'s symptoms remitted when she remembered the circumstances of their onset with affect, analysts have struggled with the problem of emotion. Clearly, emotions are of central importance in people's psychological lives, but they are not easily encompassed in the vocabulary developed to describe cognitive function, or even ordinary discursive speech. As a result, much analytic discourse about emotions follows Breuer's lead in treating emotions as a kind of attachment to cognition. Even though the concept of signal anxiety (Freud, 1926) provided some means for conceptualizing emotions in a way more related to information processing, much psychoanalytic discussion of emotion continued Freud's early hydraulic view of emotion as a quantifiable substance that followed conservation laws similar to the laws of the conservation of mass and energy (Galatzer-Levy, 1976). This approach found further support in the description of traumatic states as involving some sort of quantitative overwhelming of the psychological apparatus. Both these ideas, despite their clearly fantastical nature, found favor, in part because they corresponded well to many people's subjective experience of emotion. They fit particularly well with the fantasies of ridding oneself of distressing emotions by placing them somewhere else (e.g. in another person) that were described by Melanie Klein and her followers. Despite strenuous efforts by analysts to develop more adequate conceptualizations of emotion, analytic practice to this day is largely dominated by the same metaphors that Freud used in his early formulations.

Matters are further complicated because analysts often use the term “affect” to refer to a variety of matters that are difficult to include in ordinary discursive discourse. In this view, the mental world is divided into cognition and affect. Sometimes an additional area of “unconscious fantasy”—which functions by different rules but in a m