The Problem of Unconscious Affect: Signal Anxiety versus the Double-Prediction Theory

The purpose of this paper is to provide new answers to four basic questions: (1) What causes the initiation of defense? (2) What causes anxiety in situations of intrapsychic conflict? (3) What is the role of anxiety in situations of intrapsychic conflict? (4) How does one account for those clinical phenomena traditionally explained by the concept of unconscious affect?

Freud's (1915) reluctance to countenance the existence of unconscious affect as more than a “manner of speaking” is well known and commonly linked to his early energic discharge theory of affect. It is often assumed that the logic of his later “structural” theory of affect should have induced him to accept the existence of unconscious affect. I will challenge this assumption by presenting a theory of affect modeled after Freud's 1926 theory of anxiety which dispenses with the existence of unconscious affect. Because Freud's signal anxiety theory is sometimes cited as proof for the existence of at least one unconscious affect, namely, anxiety, and because of the importance of signal anxiety in the theoretical literature of psychoanalysis,