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It is a familiar and often repeated lament that a satisfactory psychoanalytic theory of affects linking clinical work and theory eludes us. Since Freud's earliest work with hysterics, there has never been any doubt about the clinical importance of the affects. Affects, as Ruth Stein notes in her introduction, are the focus of clinical psychoanalysis. She writes, quoting Bion, “feelings are the few things which analysts have the luxury of being able to regard as facts” (p. xi). Variously considered the problems and the solutions, the pathogens and the cures, the emotions have come to be viewed as indicators of psychoanalytic process and markers of psychic change. Yet, why is it that our affect theories lag behind our theories of psychic structure, motivation, development, and even psychoanalytic process? What makes the emotions, obvious in lived experience, so theoretically elusive? And perhaps even more important, why the criticism of psychoanalysis for not having established a coherent and serviceable framework about the nature, sources, origins, meanings, mechanisms of affects? It is not for lack of trying.
In some measure, the problem of affect theory reflects the place of psychoanalysis as a discipline sitting between the neurosciences and the humanities. The emotions (felt and unfelt) bridge clinical psychoanalysis with these neighboring fields; psychoanalytic theory has at times and in differing fashions leaned in each direction. Such shifts or persuasions in psychoanalytic history form an important theme in Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect.