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“The impossibility of communication without frustration is so familiar that the nature of the frustration is forgotten”
As far as I know, no distinction is made in psychoanalytic literature between “affects” and “emotions”; they usually seem to be treated synonymously. However, there is a difference between describing a person as “emotional”, and describing him as “affectionate”. Also, there is a difference between saying of a person that he is “moved by” and saying that he is “affectionate” to something or to someone. If we attach importance to the deeper meaning hidden behind ordinary language, we cannot but admit that the psychic distinctions pointed to by these different uses are too significant to ignore. This essay sets out to investigate the difference between emotions and affects, in order to facilitate analyst-patient communication in moments or spheres of communicative impasse. By this we mean a kind of impasse in the “dialogue” between analyst and analysand, and thus something more like Money-Kyrie's concept of misunderstanding, rather than the idea of impasse in the