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The Mind's Affective Life continues the author's presentation of philosophical and psychoanalytic efforts to elucidate the interconnections among language (and listening), thinking, cognition, and affect in the living organization of the human mind. Fiumara has dealt with this topic in three preceding books.1, 2, 3 This volume
focuses on the persistent and inevitable orchestration of thinking and feeling in both everyday life and in the most abstract conceptions of fields that are supposedly free from human emotions, such as philosophical thinking and theory building in scientific disciplines.
Contemporary epistemology excludes affect as an outsider to its enterprise. Fiumara argues that “affects inhabit and fuel the illusive empty interiority of our epistemologies” (p. 1). Her book points to the need to develop our emotional intelligence and to recognize to what extent “emotions serve to construct both interpersonal relations and reality” (p. 1), even scientific and philosophical reality. Psychoanalysis must examine the connection between affect and the theories it utilizes to sustain its praxis. Even though psychoanalysis “considers affectivity a central working process inseparably linked to cognition,” it presents mental events as “two-sided—one side looks in the direction of propositional, logical processes, while the other points to affectual unconscious dynamics” (p. 2). In the author's appraisal, “a fuller significance actually derives from their continued interaction” (p. 2). This proposal is not merely a new version of the known primary/secondary process continuum, but an encompassing examination of the ever-pr