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Affects have always been the ugly duckling of psychoanalytic thought, too mercurial or messy theoretically for us to know what to do with, not as tidy as ideas and clear interpretations of things such as the Oedipus constellation. And yet affects are the cornerstone of our work; they are the nuts and bolts of the clinical venture, guiding our impressions and interventions. Affects are the “core of psychological experience, the most tangible dimension of human subjectivity” (jacket). It is not surprising that affects are most important to our patients, who are less interested in the (intellectual) truth of our compelling theoretical formulations. Patients want to know, does what we discover make sense? That is, can it be felt as meaningful? Furthermore, feeling must define the nature of our success in psychoanalysis. Spezzano pointedly asks, “Can there be such a thing, an analysis that has been successful, in some sense, but at the end of which the patient does not claim to feel better in some way?” (p. xi).
Thus, if affects are the most of what we know as clinicians, or, if, as Bion put it “feelings are the few things which analysts have the luxury of being able to regard as facts” (p. 35), then why such a mess of a theory of affects? Charles Spezzano tackles this question, along with many others, in this complex and scholarly contribution. Spezzano's conclusion, after he has analyzed the history of theoretical considerations on affect, is clear and unmistakable:
Affect theory is increasingly recognized as the most likely candidate to bridge the gap between clinical theory and general theory in psychoanalysis, and most analysts think predominately in terms of their patients' affective lives and talk to patients predominately about their affective lives. The natural extension of this reality of how we talk to our patients is the recognition that a theory of affects is the superordinate perspective for which we have been searching, the one that transcends theories of dr