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Few analytic readers will disagree with Donald Nathanson's assertion that “it is affect that makes things matter” (p. 305), and most will be rewarded by this book's efforts to teach us how. To this end and in a personal, direct, (at times contentious, humorous, exhortative) voice, he was written an ambitious, wide-ranging,
interesting, readable, and useful book, one whose several strengths outweigh its few weaknesses. Expanding on his previous edited collection, The Many Faces of Shame (Nathanson, 1987), Nathanson sets out to correct two serious and related deficiencies in our understanding (both as treaters and fellow sufferers) of our emotional selves. The first is the neglect, especially by psychoanalysis, of the work of Silvan Tomkins on the nature and the expression of emotion. While I have some discomfort with Nathanson's hyperbolic depiction of Tomkins as “the American Einstein,” I concur that his charge is appropriate and his effort at redress is both important and informative. The ways he discusses the dimensions, organization, and development of our “affect system” is useful and intriguing and among the book's greatest values to analytic readers. The second corrective on his agenda is the neglect in our (same our) understanding of shame as a (or perhaps the) defining affect of self-organization, on both intrapsychic and interpersonal or social levels. Here I am indebted to Nathanson for sensitizing my analytic ear to the voice of shame in my patients (and myself); but, in his views of psychopathology and social pathology, he risks becoming reductive and overreaching. I found this and his discussions of psychoanalytic theory to be weaknesses.
Central to Nathanson's discussion of affect and affect theory is the concept of affects as amplifiers. Affects have dimensions and qualities that give meaning to our experience of our needs or drives and therefore to our sense of self. Drawing on Tomkins, he clarifies the relationship of affects and drives:
Affect, says