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Although Affect in psychoanalysis: A clinical synthesis is something of a tour de force in its rerereading of all the major thinkers from Freud on, its goal is to show the integrative effect of focusing on “affects” as the normative prism, as it were, through which to read both analytic theory and clinical
practice. The text has four sections: (1) knowing and talking about affects, (2) the evolution of analytic thinking about affects, (3) dialectics of affect, and (4) technical implications of affect theory.
Spezzano's basic thesis is that “affects give rise to relationships, and drives evolve out of the interplay between them” (p. 112). And further: “The central and most radical argument of psychoanalysis is that human psychological life is, at its core, human affective life” (p. 113). Although the author interprets this to mean that “affect” is more basic than relationship, I would argue that to speak about affects is to speak about relationships. Just as we know that we humans have an innate capacity for language, we do not know it, in fact, and cannot know it, until we use it. It is, therefore, coexistent with use. So too, I believe, is it with affects and object relations. This may be more than a stylistic difference. Spezzano argues (p. 98) that implicit even in Fairbairn's conceptualizations is that when the child is reaching for the object he/she is doing so in order to experience a feeling of safety and/or self-valuation. Although such a reading is possible, I believe that when human beings reach for “the other” they are doing so precisely to experience “the other” as such, with all the vicissitudes that such experience(s) entails. Such an approach is consonant with an English object relational model.
Dr. Spezzano's focus on the import of affect as a modus operandi is enormously helpful. When, in his clinical section, for example, he reiterates the benefit of the analyst's “unknowing” and affectively interacting with patients, we can see the experiential lo