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One of the most popular terms in psychology today is the adjective “inappropriate.” In every clinic, at every case conference, we hear that “the client presented with inappropriate affect,” “the client was inappropriate,” and so on. This usage warrants reflection. What is appropriate affect? What makes someone's affective state appropriate or inappropriate? And what is it that that person's affect is appropriate to or for?
“Appropriate” is presumably not meant in some platonic sense as a universal, immutable quality or characteristic of an emotion; most psychologists who use this term would not claim, I suspect, that they are saying that manifesting a certain affect is inappropriate in every circumstance, in every single place on earth, in every culture, and in every historical era. Yet they are claiming that, in their specific historical time and place on earth, certain affects are always inappropriate in certain circumstances-in clinics or hospitals, or in the therapeutic setting. If a patient becomes verbally aggressive during a therapy session, many therapists are quick to tax him or her with inappropriate behavior. But isn't it often simply an ordinary transference response, reflecting the way the patient tended to deal with one or both parents, or a negative reaction by the patient to a certain approach to therapy being adopted by the therapist? How can anything that occurs in the therapy setting be considered inappropriate? If the patient throws a vase out the therapist's window, isn't that telling? Isn't it, in fact, telling of what the therapist has not allowed or not brought the patient to express in some other way?
The patient's behavior here could be understood as “acting out”-not in the thoroughly degraded sense the term has taken