Affect in Psychoanalytic Theory

I have chosen this title in preference to “Affect Theory in Psychoanalysis” because there is no systematic treatment of affect as a category in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis is essentially a clinical discipline. The psychoanalyst is intensely and constantly concerned with the meaning and significance of specific affects. His observations permit him to generalize about the triggers of affects, about the circumstances under which affects occur, and about the consequences of affects. However, clinical observation alone is not sufficient to establish the nature of affect. In his earliest writings (1895) Freud conceded that the nature of affect was not a psychoanalytic, nor even a psychologic problem, but ultimately a physiologic one.

The affects which psychoanalysts study, are the affects of neurosis. Though Freud acknowledges that a play of affect continues without interruption during waking life, and in dreams too, it is only the affect directly appearing in his patient's neurosis that the analyst examines and deals with. The clinically significant affect is found to be associated with an idea—an idea which portrays the gratification of some instinctual need, or defends against the gratification. Instinctual needs are represented psychically as wishes, and the ideas in which the gratification of these wishes is visualized, bear affects. In psychoanalysis we deal with gratifying ideas which were once repressed and are now threatening ot escape from repression. This threat to escape compels the creation of compromises, each composed of gratification and defense—namely, symptoms. Or, the repressed idea may be held repressed, while it transfers its impetus to similar but disguised ideas acceptable to the ego, to derivatives. Each symptom and each derivative idea is associated with an affect appropriate to the instinctual impulse which is striving forward toward action, or to the need to defend against it. However in the process of defense, the affect may be denied,