It is approximately sixty years since Freud produced his last works on the affects or affective states, as he had by then come to call them, meaning emotive-cognitive complexes, and yet it would seem that Psychoanalysis has only managed to make slow and laborious progress as far as the Theory of the Affects is concerned. There has however been great interest in the affect as a symptom and thus there is a vaste amount of literature dealing with mental pain in general, with anxiety, with the treatment of pathological affective states and the corresponding technical psychoanalytic criteria. Indeed four years ago, our own National Congress was devoted to the theme of Mental Pain.

Now, I don't intend to dwell on Freud's thought, nor on the subsequent advances it prompted, but I feel it is necessary to sketch a brief history of the essential stages of its progress in order to