Adaptive Functions of Affect and Their Implications for Therapy

Despite their ubiquity, therapeutic interventions intended to promote and clarify affect lack an adequate theoretical basis. In the vernacular language: How do people benefit from “getting in touch with their feelings?” The pervasive focus on affect in psychotherapy hardly needs documentation. Increasingly popular are therapies with an almost single-minded focus on eliciting emotion, such as Janov's18 primal scream therapy. Concomitantly, techniques designed to stimulate emotional expression have proliferated.29 Practice seems to have far outstripped theory here in the sense that regardless of therapeutic orientation, it is typically assumed that the focus on affect has lasting consequences, but the means by which such enhanced capacity for affective experience results in better functioning has not been specified.

In short: How is affect adaptive? Since Freud11 reformulated the relationship between anxiety and defense, this issue has been a central focus of psychoanalytic theories of affect. Rapaport34 traced this history through three phases. First, affect was equated with psychic energy: it could increase or decrease in quantity; it could be displaced; and it could be discharged through secretory and motor channels. Second, affect was differentiated from drive energy and was considered to be the outcome of a discharge process wherein affect served the safety-valve function of reducing the accumulated psychic energy when conflict with the demands of reality prohibited discharge through action. As a discharge process, and because of its tie to drive