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With affects and their development receiving increased psychoanalytic attention, the relation of affect and the emergent self, the linkage of feeling and being, becomes a particularly fascinating and fruitful realm of clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic inquiry.
As an infant grows, innate emotions acquire meaningfulness and complexity with the onset of self-awareness. With the capacity for self-consciousness, inner and outer realities are conceivable, and self and other, cause and effect become structuralizable dimensions of psychic life. This capacity for self-awareness—being the “I” who feels the feeling and “knows” the experience—is a most fascinating acquisition, one that is central to all psychoanalytic developmental theories and consequently to the role of reconstruction in clinical psychoanalysis.
In this intriguing and highly readable book, Michael Lewis, distinguished child-development scholar and clinical psychologist, offers analysts and general readers an exploration into the nature