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Spezzano's remarkable and original contribution provides something very old and familiar and at the same time something refreshingly new and different. What is old is the central significance of affects and affective communication in the analytic situation. What is new is a clinically relevant theory of affect with a masterly integrative account that is phenomenological, developmental, and clinical. The author eloquently argues his central claim that psychoanalysis has something indispensable to say about the nature of affect and its origins. Affects have a central place in his definition of psychoanalysis: “Psychoanalysis is the study and clinical treatment of the vicissitudes of an individual's affective states and desires, representations, and narratives into which these states have been elaborated developmentally” (p. 209).
This volume is divided into four parts. The first part grounds his formulations epistemologically in his stance that theories are languages for talking about the world. He argues persuasively that truth is not an aspect of the world but of our conversation about the world. The only way we have of determining that we are coming closer to or moving away from truth in any scholarly effort is by agreement or lack of agreement with other members of the dialogical community. In Spezzano's relational model of therapy, the truth emerges from a process of inquiry, argument, and agreement that involves two persons (therapist and client) in a dialogical community.
In Part II, after extracting Freud's ideas about affects and their transformations in the analytic process from Freud's clinical and theoretical writings, he draws on the contributions of Fairbairn, Klein, Sullivan, and Winnicott to tell the story of psychoanalysis as the evolution of a theory of affects. He describes and explains how