Affect: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

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.