The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration by Luiz Pessoa, Cambridge MA:  MIT Press, 2013,  320 pp. $40, ISBN 978-0-262-01956-9 The Feeling Body: Affective Neuroscience Meets the Enactive Mind, Giovanna Colombetti, Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2014,  270 pp. $40, ISBN 978-0-262-01995-8

This is not a book review in the normal sense of the word but rather an essay presenting some thoughts of my own on the current status of affect theory, prompted by the publication of two new books on the topic. Readers who would like to know more about my own views on this topic are advised to look at my recent publications (Solms, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2015, Solms & Panksepp, 2012).

Few topics are more fundamental to psychoanalytic psychology and psychiatry, to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, than that of affect. Our focus on affect—on emotional feelings—has always distinguished psychoanalysis from other approaches to the mind. When we speak of “psychodynamics” we refer not so much to the fact that mental processes are inherently dynamic. Even cognitive psychologists, with their box-and-arrow models, approach the mind from that starting point. Rather, we refer to the interplay of emotional forces, giving rise to phenomena like resistance and defense, and the whole domain of mental conflict.

Patients seek our assistance with unmanageable feelings (or thoughts that give rise to such feelings); they do not say “Doctor, there is something I am unconscious of; will you please help me discover what it is?” They are all too aware of what troubles them. It is us (the psychoanalysts) who infer unconscious processes behind their feelings. The feelings themselves are conscious.

This practical matter brings us immediately to an arcane theoretical problem in psychoanalytic metapsychology, namely Freud's insistence that there is no such thing as unconscious affect.

It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, that is, that it should become known to consciousness. Thus, the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned. (Freud, 1915, p. 177)

According to Freud, the cognitive processes (“ideas” or “Vorstellungen” in German) that give rise to affects can be repress