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Joseph Jones has made a helpful contribution to the understanding of affects in this book. For Jones, I feel; therefore I am is a central organizing principle that implicitly underlies his exploration of the role of affect in motivation, cognition, and development. He shows how affect can be modeled as a presymbolic information-processing system or even a rapid system of appraisal, not simply a tone added to thought. He points out that affects are not composites of thought and impulses to act but intimate parts of the cognitive process. In fact, Jones's focus on philosophical principles and his careful delineation of such basic points as the relationship of affect and cognition are useful aspects of this volume. Jones makes the logical point that philosophical commentary on psychoanalytic theory is extremely helpful; I think, though, that there is more room for debate than does Jones on the extent to which Freud was influenced by such philosophers as Brentano, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Jones simply cites Freud's “contempt of metaphysics” (p. 7).
One problem of this useful volume is Jones's attempt to cover an enormous area of affect studies. In discussing the development of emotions in infants and young children, the role of affects in motivation, the philosophical underpinnings of affect studies, the complex relationship between affect and cognition; in describing universal core affects; in attempting to delineate a metapsychological position of affects; and in redoing a great deal of our theories of motivation, object relations, and development, he gives himself a task that is beyond the scope of one book. The volume can be best seen as a book of ideas and suggestions for further work. The reader should not expect an encyclopedic treatise of ideas developed in great detail but rather a creative and thoughtful series of essays.