Psychoanalytic Theories Of Affect

This book collates and clarifies psychoanalytic theories on affect, and how they relate to the clinical process. The author outlines and analyses the most important theories on affect, and examines empirical work presented over the past 100 years, exposing the rigidity of some existing notions.

The Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy explores central issues in current clinical work, using the theories put forward by Silvan Tomkins and presenting them in detail, as well as integrating them with the most up-to-date neuroscience findings and infancy research, all based on a biopsychosocial, dynamic systems approach.Part I describes the essentials of life, based on our evolutionary and biological heritage, namely a need for a coherent understanding of one’s world and the capacity to act in that world; the infant's capacities are described in detail as embodying both. Longitudinal data is provided beginning at birth into the third year of life. Part II reviews current debates in psychoanalysis relating to motivation, and the lack of an internally consistent theory. Recent neuroscience findings are presented, which both negate drive theory, and support Tomkins' theory. His theory is then described in detail. In Part III, two case histories are presented: one is a clinical case illustrating one of Tomkins' affect powered scripts. The second case is drawn from a longitudinal study extending from birth, into early adulthood, which is made sense of with the help of Tomkins' theory. Demos concludes with a look at competing approaches to theory and responds to recent cognitive-based attempts to disprove both Tomkins' work and the latest findings from neuroscience. The Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatric nurses.

This book aims to integrate different psychoanalytic schools and relevant research findings into an integrated psychoanalytic theory of the mind. A main claim explored here, is that a revised and expanded ego psychology constitutes the strongest foundation not only for a unified psychoanalytic theory, but also for the integration of relevant research findings from other disciplines. Sophisticated yet accessible, the book includes a description of the basic tenets of ego psychology and necessary correctives and revisions. It also discusses research and theory on interpersonal understanding, capacity for inhibition, defense, delay of gratification, autonomous ego aims and motives, affect regulation, the nature of psychopathology; and the implications of a revised and expanded ego psychology for approaches to treatment. The book will appeal to readers who are interested in psychoanalysis, the nature of the mind, the nature of psychopathology, and the implications of theoretical formulations and research findings for approaches to treatment. As such, it will also be of great value on graduate and training courses for psychoanalysis.

Feelings, also known as emotions and affects, intrude on our awareness in all that we do. Affect: Psychoanalytic Perspectives addresses our newest views about these phenomena from multiple vantages. Developmental, clinical, and integrative perspectives are detailed in sixteen original papers by leaders in psychoanalytic thought and developmental psychology. The section on Clinical Perspectives elaborates a two-way effort that uncovers the contribution of theory to clinical studies and establishes how clinical inquiry has led to new theories. Signal affects now replace signal anxiety and clinical data are elaborated to show how attention to affect directs our grasp of unconscious fantasy. In the section on Development the latest biological theories of affect generation are reviewed and their relation to the socialization of emotion at various developmental stages are explored. These phenomena are traced from early interactions to the consequences of the development of self on affect in the later years. The Integrative section elaborates newer notions about procedural memory and the effect of nominalization of feelings on the process of treatment. Clinical experiences of affects are viewed in tandem with Darwinian concepts of affect, Freudian catharsis, and the emergence of complex emotions of shame and love. The latter are given new life in experience-near psychoanalytic data. The volume is full of clinical examples, wisdom, and application of new knowledge to an area of scrutiny that has for too long evaded our systematic study.

In this readable meditation on the nature of emotional experience, Joseph Jones takes the reader on a fascinating walking-tour of current research findings bearing on emotional development. Beginning with a nuanced reappraisal of Freud's philosophical premises, he argues that Freud's reliance on "primary process" as the means of linking body and mind inadvertantly stripped affects of their process role. Further, the resulting emphasis on fantasy left the problem of conceptualizing the mental life of the prerepresentational infant in a theoretical limbo. Affects as Process offers an elegantly simple way out of this impasse. Drawing in the literatures of child development, ethology, and neuroscience, Jones argues that, in their simplest form, affects are best understood as the presymbolic representatives and governors of motivational systems. So conceptualized, affects, and not primary process, constitute the initial processing system of the prerepresentational infant. It then becomes possible to re-vision early development as the sequential maturation of different motivational systems, each governed by a specific presymbolic affect. More complex emotional states, which emerge when the toddler begins to think symbolically, represent the integration of motivational systems and thought as maturation plunges the child into a world of loves and hates that cannot be escaped simply through behavior. Jones' reappraisal of emotional development in early childhood and beyond clarifies the strengths and weaknesses of such traditional concepts as infantile sexuality, object relations, internalization, splitting, and the emergence of the dynamic unconscious. The surprising terminus of his excursion, moreover, is the novel perspective on the self as an emergent phenomenon reflecting the integration of affective and symbolic processing systems.

Drawing on the writings of Freud, Fairbairn, Klein, Sullivan, and Winnicott, Spezzano offers a radical redefinition of the analytic process as the intersubjective elaboration and regulation of affect. The plight of analytic patients, he holds, is imprisonment within crude fantasy elaborations of developmentally significant feeling states. Analytic treatment fosters the patient's capacity to keep alive in consciousness, and hence reflect on, these previously warded-off affective states; it thereby provides a second chance to achieve competence in using feeling states to understand the self within its relational landscape.