You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This essay investigates the difference between emotions and affects, in order to facilitate analyst-patient communication in moments or periods of communicative impasse. The author's suggestion is that in the absence of sufficient ability to communicate between analyst and patient, certain emotional states produce "personification" phenomena which, if opportunely recognized, can serve as proto-communicative links. By the term "personification," the author means the phenomena by which one of the two members of the couple unifies and takes upon himself or herself the projective identifications circulating in the emotional field. While affective cathexes (Besetzungen) establish and define whether the bond is positive or negative, emotional states seem to precede or accompany what takes place within the bond itself, favoring or impeding its growth, evolution, and change. When there is extreme turbulence in the emotional field, no object representation is possible, and the analyst unconsciously impersonates important split parts of the patient; at such times the evaluation of the transference and countertransference can also be misleading.
The failure to perceive an emotional involvement (as distinct from a countertransference affect) distorts the awareness of how personal affects contribute to the