In this paper, the concept of self and object presentation has been used to construct a model for the derivation of a number of affects. A variety of affects could be "explained" by assuming the passage of the same psychic energy through a variety of structures. For example, desire is correlated to a hypercathexis of the self presentation, while longing is correlated to a hypercathexis of the object presentation.

The affects which have been discussed are desire, longing, anxiety, pain, grief, humiliation, and shame. The affect especially focused on in this paper is pain of mental origin. In analogy to pain of physical origin, it is treated as a narcissistic lesion, i.e., a lesion of the self (presentation). While pain of physical origin is generally ascribed to the influence of an external agent, pain of mental origin is ascribed, in this paper, to the absence of an external influence—to the absence of the influence of the constant external object.