Affect and Emotional Life

“Psychoanalysis is emotional medicine for emotional ills.” (Orange, 1995). “Ideas, insights, interpretations, and other cognitive approaches may support emotional healing, but they do not provide it… only if the analyst can find room in inside herself or himself for THIS patient is there any hope.” (emphasis added).
Accordingly, Orange outlines an intersubjective theory of affect and emotional life. She emphasizes three features of emotional life. First, the complexity of emotional life. “Emotional life, an irreducibly complex process, requires an epistemology that resists the urge to oversimplify. Relational history makes understanding emotional life an intricate task. We continually organize and reorganize [experience] in layers of meaning.

Therefore, “[w]hen we attempt to extract an “affect’ from the continuity and complexity of any emotional life, and use that affect to explain something, we make two mistakes. First, we abstract and extract what is inextricable. Second, we may violate the integrity of the person’s experience. Although some of this violence is unavoidable, patients often point it out to us. When we attempt to help a patient articulate a feeling, we often hear: “But that is not all,” or “It’s more than that,” or “It keeps changing.”

Orange points out that one “effect of the psychoanalytic tendency to speak of single emotions has been the focus on ambivalence and its acceptance as a model of mental health. In this view we are always torn between love and hatred, conceived as two basic and simple affects. We must feel both toward the same person at the same time. On the contrary, I see emotional life as originally complex. It makes more sense to wonder how it disintegrated, how it became oversimplified. How did the responses in a given family bring a child to feel that loving a parent was incompatible with anger, or disappointment, or interest in something else besides the parent? How did the child develop the conviction that feeling itself was dangerous to significant ties?”

In addition to isolating some emotions from the whole of emotional life, another difficulty is that “[m]any emotions, like shame and dread, are themselves internally layered. Shame involves self-hatred in the face of explicit or implicit other’s perceived or expected disapproval. It is complex, often multiply layered, and usually continuous with moments of more intense pain. People often say, “I’m ashamed that I’m ashamed about this.” (I plan to consider of shame as part of the experience of emotional trauma in a subsequent post which I suggest to read in the context of the present one.)

“A second essential feature of emotional life,” Orange continues, “is its relational character. Emotions are responses to relational events or needs, and emotional expression is an attempt to connect, or to regulate connection, with another. The social smile of infants is a social smile. Smiling and crying are methods of “object seeking” (Fairbairn, 1952). Any thoroughly relational theory of human nature or psychoanalysis must treat emotional life in that context. Emotional experience begins, continues, and heals in specific intersubjective contexts. When emotional experience is presented as independent of context – psychiatry speaks of “inappropriate affect,” for example – this may mislead us into thinking of emotion as a mere internal signal. Instead, from the perspective of intersubjective theory, we see the emotional expression of the moment as formed by relational history and as evoked or triggered by the intersubjective fields of the present. Its reference to the future often consists in the expectation that the relational experience of the future will resemble that of the past, but it includes an anxious hope that someone will respond differently.” (emphasis added).

Third, “[n]ot only complex and relational, emotional life is emotional. This apparent tautology is important only because both psychiatric and psychoanalytic languages have attempted to describe and work with emotion as if it were a cognition or an instinctual derivative. In either case it is viewed as residing in the individual. On the contrary, I see emotion as a primarily noncognitive and nonverbal relational response. It can be linked to cognitions and schemata, but it has its own reality.”

Recognizing that intersubjectivity theory had a cognitive cast, Orange (1995) began, and has continued, ((Orange et al (1997), Stolorow et al (2202)), to point out that the principal components of subjectivity, the organizing principles, “often unconscious, are the emotional conclusions [or emotional convictions] a person has drawn from lifelong experience of the emotional environment, especially the complex mutual connections with early caregivers. Until these principles become available for conscious reflection, and until new emotional experience leads a person to envision and expect new forms of emotional connection, these old inferences will thematize the sense of self. This sense of self includes convictions about the relational consequences of possible forms of being. A person may feel, for example, that any form of self articulation or differentiation will invite ridicule or sarcasm.” (emphasis added).

Arising as “emotional inferences a child draws from intersubjective experience in the family of origin… [t]hese principles [or convictions] may concern relatedness, as in “I must adapt to others’ needs (moods, expectations, and so on) if I am to retain significant emotional ties. They may also consist in a fundamental sense of self, still intersubjectively configured: “I will never amount to anything,” I am always a burden,” “I am worthless and god for nothing…” More often, these principles are emotional inferences drawn as the child attempts to organize some sense of self out of chaotic, traumatic, or more subtly confusing early and later relational experience.”

Orange (1995) concludes “[i]f emotional life is truly complex, relational and “emotional,” then certain clinical consequences follow. One is that our patient’s “Yes, but…” may not be defensive but instead may be a plea for a fuller understanding of “complex mental states”(Kohut, 1959). If we believe that emotion really differs from cognition, then we will distinguish emotion and cognition in talking with patients and support a respect for the contribution of each to a whole human life. We will show regard for a “sense of things”- ours or the patient’s – whether or not this sense is verbalizable. In a Winnicottian spirit, we will make more room in many psychoanalytic treatments for art, music, and poetry as a means of creating a shared emotional life. We will also have less need to reduce these “forms of feeling” Hobson, (1985)to any form of cognition or insight.” (emphasis added).
Ernesto Vasquez, April 6, 2010

Orange, D. (1995), Emotional Understanding: Studies in Psychoanalytic Epistemology. New York: Guilford Press.
Orange, D., Atwood, G., & Stolorow, R. (1997), Working Intersubjectively. Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Stolorow, R., Atwood, G., and Orange, D. (2002), Worlds of Experience. Interweaving philosophical and clinical dimensions in psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Affect. A Trilogy. Part 3. Thinking with our Hearts

There were two presenters for the ‘Meet the Authors’ session at the fall meeting of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology in 1995, Joseph Jones and Donna Orange. In his presentation, Jones offered a sustainable argument for his hypothesis that affect is the center of all of psychological life, a sketch of which I present in the first two posts of this trilogy.

Thinking with our heart is the metaphor with which I try to capture Jones’s (1995) understanding of a sense of self as “the personal organization we experience when we are able to effectively integrate our affective experience with what we think in a relatively stable internal relationship…it is the ability of the individual to create a relationship between his feeling core and his thinking “I” that is at the heart of selfhood. It is affective-symbolic integration that leads to the creation of the sense of self.” To which I would add that thinking with our heart is what truly distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. I would also like to say that, in my opinion, the relative stability of that network is the crucial factor: too much or too little of each component can cause a rupture. Our patient’s report that disruption sometimes saying: “and when she or he said that!, right then I lost it…”; thought acts like a brake to regulate affect, but this function becomes ineffective in the presence of increased affect, the network falters.

Orange’s presentation was so vastly rich that any attempt to summarize it would be a daunting project; Emotional Understanding (1995) and her subsequent books are to be carefully studied over time. Some of her comments, however, were directly applicable to certain aspects of the work on affect Jones had just reported.

Regarding terminology Orange suggested to use “the words “emotions” or ‘emotional life” for what can only be known by introspection or empathy, that is, psychoanalytic methods of observation... “Emotional life” [refers] also to the totally or complexity of subjectively experienced feeling.”

Orange, moreover, challenged “an atomistic treatment of single primary affect states, such as excitement, as underlying prime matter... These views suggest the existence of original or fundamental affects, which, like the elements of the periodic table, may combine, that we can study in isolation. Emotions in such view are like the empiricist’s sense data, lacking the complexity and relational meaning they should have if…they are intersubjectively regulated and maintained.” She suggested to replace the atomist conception of affects with an attentiveness to the totality and complexity of person’s emotional life. The details and the history of the particulars are important but only as far as they conduce toward understanding a person’s organized emotional “sense of things”. We must neither reduce the whole of emotional life to the sum of its parts nor mistake the affective tress for the emotional forest.”

I believe Orange’s comments about affects are equally applicable to the study and understanding of intellectual functions (thought). We must reread Piaget’s work then with contextualist eyes, keeping in mind that what he researched in such detail and described so well is really our intellectual life.

But I wonder if these notions, whether affect and thought or emotional life and intellectual life, can be seen in yet one more light. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger talks about ‘affectivity’ (emotions, moods) as a mode of living, of being-in-the world, a human quality or attribute, profoundly embedded in constitutive context, a notion of something which “underscores the exquisite context-dependence and context-sensitivity of human…life.” (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002).

Perhaps we could consider ‘thinking with the heart’ as well-- a quality of being human, a sensibility, an inclination, one which, like the capacity for empathy, we are to value, to care for, and to cultivate over time, and in many ways.

Ernesto Vasquez, MD
April 3, 2010

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Transl. J. Maquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Original edition 1927.
Jones, J.M. (1995), Affects as Process, An Inquiry into the Centrality of Affect in Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ, The Analytic Press.
Orange, D. (1995), Emotional Understanding: Studies in Psychoanalytic Epistemology. New York: Guilford Press.
Stolorow, R., Atwood, G., and Orange, D. (2002), Worlds of Experience. Interweaving philosophical and clinical dimensions in psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Affect. A Trilogy. Part 2. Affect as Process

In his foreword, Lichtenberg offers this guidance: “Affects as Process is a book that merits study but must be read. By this I mean that the book is packed with information about the organization and processing of information and the nature of symbolization – all in reference to emotion... Affects as Process calls for perusal with pauses for reflection. It reflects the author’s having spent years of tussling and puzzling with the unresolved conundrums of cognition, affect, and behavior; of information processing, intercommunication, and motivation; of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity.

Lichtenberg continues, “…[for example,] the reader may have only limited knowledge of the…literature on information processing in pre-symbolic and symbolic forms that are key to all of Jones’s assumptions about the role of affects. Consequently, when asked to entertain [a particular] hypothesis…the reader may have an acute attack of terminological shock. I can only advise: Hang on. There is a point to be learned here, and, once mastered, a new, more empirically based view of infant development will be your reward.”

On a personal note, what Lichtenberg describes is what I experienced on the initial reading of both Jones’s Affects as Process and Orange’s Emotional Understanding and her subsequent books. I would always hope there would be enough time until the next contribution for me to assimilate the richness of their work. Of course, there never is…!

In the first post of this trilogy, I indicated that Freud retained Descartes’ hypothesis of the divided mind but said that the critical dualism was not between affect and thought, but between two types of information processing – primary process (the instinctual drives) and secondary process (thought). Freud’s theoretical shift from affect to drive stripped affect from its process role and assigned it to the drives (primary process). The conundrum of affect was thus established.

If our capacity to use symbols (thought) emerges at approximately 15 to 18 months of age, how then do we process information until the arrival of thought?

Affects are easily observable in animals which are presumed to be unable to think, and in infants before symbolic abilities come on line. “Affective information processing - an analogic system - is what we share with the rest of the animal kingdom.” Jones describes six types of emotional experiencing: impulses that regulate physical movement; sensations (thirst, hunger), which give us information about our body; simple moods with which we can process only a single environmental event at a time during the first 8 weeks of life; complex moods which appear after 8 weeks because of brain maturation (the ascendancy of limbic circuitry) and with which we can process multiple environmental events; simple emotions (fear, joy, anger) beginning at 8 weeks when the limbic system comes on-line; and complex emotions which appear with the arrival of thought and represent the integration of affect and thought (love, futility, hatred, compassion, serenity).

Jones argues that if affects are process, then the experience of any affect is itself cognitive because the affect adds to our knowledge of our body or the world. If one thinks in terms of a process theory of affects, then affects are not composites [Freud’s (1916-1917) original formulation, perpetuated by Bruner (1964) and Horowitz (1972) in the cognitive theory of emotions], “they are simply part of the cognitive process.”

Affects are non- symbolic signals that convey and process information, our first means to process information. Affects are our primary process, that is, the first to arrive. They form a non-symbolic ‘vocabulary,’ they are our first language, our first way of knowing. As non-symbolic ‘vocabulary’ they simplify a vast complex of neurophysiologic data into relatively simple, easy-to understand signals.

Affects are also the language of motivation. Etymologically, motivation comes from the Latin movere, and its past participle motivere. Affects or emotions can be understood as something that moves us to action, as in e-motion. Affects serve as signal to the self and to others indicating under what motivation we are operating.

Jones defines affects as “the experiential representation of a non-symbolic information-processing system that can serve as the central control mechanism for all aspects of human behavior, including the control of physical movement, memory, and all interactions with the environment.” Say what…!? Terminological shock, indeed, but one that, hopefully, will stimulate our curiosity.

Implied in Jones’ formulations is the notion that human development can be conceptualized as taking place in two broad phases. The first phase occurs before the arrival of thought and is concerned with the progressive unfolding of pre-symbolic affect. The main developmental task during this period is to learn to use our body.

The second phase of development takes place after the arrival of thought and comprises the emergence of thought itself, the development of our intellectual functions, and the integration of thought and affect. The emergence of the capacity to use symbols leads to the fork in the road where we become a very different kind of animal.

Jones proposes that thought emerges through the differentiation of the positive and negative valence of affects to form the yes/no algorithm which is fundamental to the process of categorization. Language - the naming process - creates the categories with which we think; we then manipulate categories through the process of symbolic logic. Symbolic functioning, akin to a digital system, must be layered upon and eventually integrated into the analogic, pre-symbolic affective information processing of infancy. We see the manifestations of the initial integration of these two information processing systems in the rapprochement crisis, the ‘terrible twos.’

Piaget et al. have amply documented the development of our intellectual functions. The use of symbols, with spoken language being perhaps the best example of thought in action, gives rise to a new type of affects. These affects, which I have called ‘complex emotions,’ transcend their origins as biological signals because they are integrated with thought and thus have acquired meaning. Love, futility, hatred, compassion, serenity are but a few examples. They are what we most often associate with the term affect. Affective-symbolic integration is a progressively sophisticated process which evolves over the rest of our life span. The main developmental task here is to learn to use our mind, that is, to think with our heart.

Jones’s notion of affective-symbolic integration finds validation in recent neuroscientific work. In a review of the subject, Luiz Pessoa (2008) writes: “Historically, emotion and cognition have been viewed as separate entities… Research in the past two decades has shown that such view is deficient and that, if we are to understand how complex behaviours are carried out in the brain, an understanding of the interactions of the two is indispensable… Central to cognitive–emotional interactions are brain areas with a high degree of connectivity, called hubs, which are critical for regulating the flow and integration of information between regions… As stated by Gray and colleagues, “at some point of processing, functional specialization is lost, and emotion and cognition conjointly and equally contribute to the control of thought and behaviour.””

Jones (1995) has constructed an all-affect information-¬processing model of the mind in which thought emerges from affect, and behavior can be determined by affect and thought. In other words, Affect ➔ Thought ➔ Affect AND Thought➔ Action (behavior). His process theory clearly establishes the centrality of affect in psychological life as the subtitle of his book aptly indicates.

Ernesto Vasquez, MD
April 2, 2010

Jones, J.M. (1995), Affects as Process, An Inquiry into the Centrality of Affect in Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ, The Analytic Press.
Pessoa, L. (2008), On the relationship between emotion and cognition. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 9: 148-155.

Affect. A Trilogy. Part 1. The Conundrum

In his discussion of empathy during his (Feb. 2010) visit, Frank Lachmann examined affective communication in caretaker-infant interactions and said, in part, “The link between the perception of facial expression and brain activation patterns in the perceiver provides one way of coordinating the emotional state of caretaker and infant. These findings [from caretaker-infant studies] demonstrating how one person resonates with the affective state of the other are relevant to our investigation of the precursors of empathy. They are relevant to precursors of empathizing as well as feeling empathized with.”

It seems that to study empathy is to study affect and since emphatic understanding or psychoanalytic compassion (Orange, 2006) is one important way to help our patients develop new, benign forms of emotional experiencing, I would like to sketchily, for now, review the evolution of our psychoanalytic understanding of affect, that is, the conundrum of affect. What follows is a summary of the first essay in Joseph Jones’s 1995 book, Affects as Process.

Descartes (1641) held that humans differ from animals in a fundamental way. All animals have affects but only humans have the power to reason. We know his philosophy as rationalism. He was the first modern philosopher to propose that the mind comprises two fundamentally different processes: emotions and reason, a dualism known as the “divided mind”. For Descartes the mind (the res cogitans) derives from God, is central to human existence, and operates independently of and is fully different from the body. The emotions or “passions” belong to the body. The body is a kind of automaton, comparable to a machine. As bodily phenomena, the emotions belong to the material world (the res extensa). The relationship between the rational mind and the mechanical body is known as the “mind-body” problem.

Descartes assumed that thought and affects were primary. Action or behavior was derivative and the consequence of one of the other two. Descartes, therefore, constructed an affect-thought model of the mind: Affect OR Thought ➔ Action. Philosophically speaking, affect and thought have metaphysical sanction; action or behavior does not. In the language of systems theory, feeling and thinking are processes, that is, “an internally coherent, integrated way of receiving, processing, and communicating information.” Action or behavior is not a process but a derivative of the other two.

Responding to Descartes’s proud claim that humans were “different,” and influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Freud sought to restore “the bond of community between [humans] and the animal kingdom,” while simultaneously creating a set of grounding assumptions for a “scientific dualism.” Freud retained Descartes’s hypothesis of the divided mind but said that the critical dualism was not between affect and thought, but between two types of information processing – primary process and secondary process. Primary process is the concept with which Freud sought to maintain the “bond of community” with the animal kingdom.

Freud’s theorizing sequence was as follows. In his first formulation of psychoanalytic theory, Freud (1893) accorded pride of place to affect --patients became symptomatic because of repressed, affect-laden experiences (“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences”) and recovered when the affects were brought back to into consciousness; importantly, “[r]ecollection without affect almost invariably produces no result.”

By 1897, Freud had come to the conclusion that his patients’ memories of traumatizing infantile seduction were not reports of actual experiences but fantasies. Accordingly, Freud’s interest shifted from affect to the instinctual drives as the agent that created the fantasies. Freud’s metapsychology represents his attempt to establish a non-Cartesian dualism that could ultimately be derived from an “instinctual dualism” as the ground for his theory of mind. This theoretical shift from affect to drive stripped affects of their process role, and assigned it instead to action or behavior. In so doing Freud went on to articulate an action-thought model of the mind (Action OR Thought ➔ Affect) that turned Descartes upside down.

By 1915, Freud considered affect a “process of discharge,” arising only when the drive was not carried through to completion. He also considered affects as composites of some kind of “action impulse” and some mechanism that gives the action impulse its cognitive content. These new conceptualizations of affect, in turn, not only led to an unsuccessful and therefore seemingly unending search for some type of ‘primitive thought’ to explain the cognitive content of affect, but also became a significant hindrance in constructing a usable theory of affects. They made it impossible to consider affects for what they simply are: non-symbolic signals that, in and of themselves, convey information.

Unrecognized metaphysical assumptions subtly and unconsciously affect the way we think. Such is the case with Freud’s notion that “affects are composites.” It shows up more than 60 years later as the central tenets of the cognitive theory of emotion. This theory emphasizes knowledge, how we come to see the world, how knowledge organizes our internal world, and therefore how we then react to the world-out-there. Central to the theory is that some sort of cognitive-evaluative process accompanies emotion. Metaphysically speaking, the cognitive theory of emotion is a complicated working out of Freud’s action-thought model of the mind. Freud’s reformulation of affect as a mixture of drive discharge plus some cognitive component was by the 1980s still having the powerful effect of a controlling paradigm on affect theory development, not only in psychoanalysis but in psychology in general.

The roadblocks erected by the notion of affects as composites, helped create another major difficulty in theorizing about affect. The problem is the subtle shifts in the meaning attached to the word cognitive by the authors of the cognitive theory of emotion. The word cognitive derives from the Latin word cognoscere, to know. But, as used in the cognitive theory of emotions, the word cognitive has become a hidden synonym for thought. For example, in Theories of Emotions, Plutchik (1980) entitled his section Emotions and Cognitions. The simple word “and” has had a powerful effect. It subtly shifted the meaning of cognitive from a global term encompassing all types of mental activity to an academic synonym for thought. Plutchik’s use of the word “and” implies that emotions are not “cognitions.” This new vocabulary –cognitions for thought – will lead all but the most careful reader to believe that some progress has been made to resolve the longstanding affect-thought problem. This is not the case; it simply translated the unsolved philosophic problem into the language of cognitive science.


Nowhere have I found a more thorough effort to restate, appreciatively appraise, and respectfully and lovingly critique Freud’s theory of affects, than in Joseph Jones (1995) landmark contribution to the development of a contemporary psychoanalytic theory of affect.” Jones’s work significantly moves forward the effort to resolve the conundrum of affect. I will examine his contributions in a subsequent post.

Ernesto Vasquez, MD
March 30, 2010

Jones, J.M. (1995), Affects as Process, An Inquiry into the Centrality of Affect in Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ, The Analytic Press.
Orange, D. (2006), For Whom the Bell Tolls-Context, Complexity, and Compassion in Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 1 (1):5-21.